[Buddha-l] A question for Jewish Buddhists

[L.S. Cousins]

Dan,

>> If you have read about it, can you give references, please ? I have not.
>>     
>
> Wish I could. It was so long ago I have no idea where I read it; just filed
> it away as another one of those peculiar "facts." Again, if there are any
> Theravadin monks reading this, perhaps they can shed some light.
>
>   
Well, if no-one comes up with any  references, we will have to assume 
that your memory is at fault.

At the least, you are clearly talking about a  situation where food is 
not being eaten in the bowl.

>> I think eggs are a special case.
>>     
>
> How so?
>   

There is an issue about when they 'die'.

> It wasn't pork, it was a mushroom,
> goes one alibi.
>   
>> Utter rubbish. Neither you nor anyone else has any idea what the
>> expression sūkaramaddava means. That's precisely why the ancient sources
>> give a number of possibilities. It could be pork. It could equally be
>> something that was a delicacy for pigs. Or, a fungus. Or something else.
>>     
>
> And there is a parallel debate in modern sources as to whether the symptoms
> Buddha displayed after eating the mystery meal were or were not consistent
> with trichonosis. For some reason, some people seem very uncomfortable with
> the idea that Buddha may have died from some bad pork. Not very elegant, I
> guess. Despite those attempts at denial, pork seems to be the reasonable
> choice, consistent with the facts as recounted in the texts.
>   

If they had wanted to say sūkaramaṃsa or even just sūkara, they could 
have said that. The fact that they didn't suggests it was probably not pork.

The symptoms of the final illness are far too general and so consistent 
with not only trichonosis but with all sorts of other possibilities.

In his translation of the Pali commentary, Yang-gyu An (p. 123 n. 2) states:
"None of the Chinese versions mentions the Buddha's illness as caused by 
the food which Cunda had prepared, except one version (Fa 197a3), which 
says that the Buddha praised Cunda with verses for his meal and then 
fell ill. All the other versions instead contain an episode of a bad 
monk's stealing a precious bowl while Cunda was serving."

Would you agree with this, Dan ?

> Scholarly fantasy. If you read the text carefully, there is nothing
> there to indicate that.
>   
>
> Well, I have read the texts, and I think they do suggest that. Without going
> into a long discussion of the "evidence," what it boils down to is this, I
> think. The canon clearly went through redactions.
The Canon is another matter, but as far as the four main Nikāyas are 
concerned, I don't believe they did go through redactions - at least not 
in the usual meaning of the term. We are dealing with an already varied 
oral literature which is collected variously from different sources.
>  When sifting through
> redactional strata, there are the elements one would expect a redactor to
> add, such as things that idealize or smooth over uncomfortable elements. On
> the other hand, when something incongruous with a redactor's agenda appear,
> which, in fact, have little reason to be there, except that something of the
> sort must have happened, then it is unlikely someone at a later point
> interpolated it, but that, for some reason of preservation, it remained in
> the record. 

Various scholars have argued this. The problem is that if you start off 
looking for this kind of thing, you are likely to find it.

> Buddha's bad meal is such a story. That some effort was made
> redactionally to minimize the meal as causal (blaming Ananda instead, etc.)
> indicates that while the story could not be dispensed with entirely, since
> it happened, it had to be recontextualized, since this was not a respectable
> death for a Buddha.

I don't think they were concerned with this at all. The issue for them 
was about the myth (which may or not have been also factual) of the 
wondrous dāna carried out by Sujāta (or whoever) to provide the physical 
basis for the Sambodhi and the wondrous meal provided by Cunda to 
provide the physical basis for the Mahāparinibbāna. Hence the wondrous 
potency of the food that only a Buddha could digest.

I don't believe that you can take such a myth and eliminate the 
supernatural elements so as to obtain history. Such a method is long 
discredited among historians.

>  In other words, precisely because it is an incongruous
> story, I would see it as more probable as an actual historic occurrence than
> probably most of the other events recorded about Buddha's final days.
>
> Perhaps there is some myth or local legend it draws from that we no longer
> know anything about (and the commentaries and other Indian literature don't
> disclose anything of the sort of which I am aware), in which case it could
> be a redactional rather than historical element. But that is not probable,
> given what we (don't) know.
>
>
>   
>> It is clear that there was great interest in the precise process of
>> enlightenment and over such issues as  whether there are exceptional
>> cases where an arahat or stream-enterer can fall back. Debates on such
>> questions are quite old. But stories that try to relate this to the
>> failings of individuals are only attested from many centuries later and
>> have no historical reliability.
>>     
>
> I didn't specify a century. It certainly heated up within a century or two
> of Buddha's time 

It did not. The old sources are the early parts of the Kathāvatthu and 
Vijñānakāya which contain nothing of this sort. They are simply 
doctrinal debates. I would see them as the same kind of thing that we 
see nowadays among Gelugpa monks and indeed which we (both?) saw 
recently in Atlanta.

> (and the one's of his time, including some involving him,
> or Ananda, etc., are presented as false accusations against innocents; even
> so, the vinaya suggests Ananda may have been a little too close to the
> womenfolk, which can imply many things [feminists today see him as being
> punished for being a sympathizer to their cause, but there are other ways to
> understand his predicament and the displeasure of the other sangha
> leaders])

An entirely different topic.

>  -- but the controversies on Arhats were focused on matters
> practical and basic, not just theoretical speculations about how many arhats
> you can fit on the usnisa of a pin. The language is harsh and dismissive -- 
> wanting to distance themselves from scandalous Arhats, and, when looked at
> clearly, basically come down to a few opposing positions: 1. Those who
> wanted to maintain the sanctity of Arhathood; 2. Those who wanted to
> redefine Arhats in a way that lowered expectations, increasing the distance
> between an Arhat's condition and the condition of a Buddha (arhathood only
> means x, not Buddha's PQR); 3. Those who felt the whole institution of
> arhathood was a sham, and wanted nothing more to do with it. Theravada
> tended toward the first position, tempered by a bit of the second. Many of
> the other schools tended toward the second mixed with the third. The third
> position eventually is embraced by Mahayana.
>   

I would see this rather as a bye-product of a historical process in 
which the Buddha becomes more and more divinized.

But there are no texts of this kind which can be proven to be earlier 
than the third century A.D. And some of them (e.g. the expanded version 
of the Mahāvibhāṣā translated by Hsuan-tsang) may be as late as the 
seventh century A.D. That is rather more than ' within a century or two 
of Buddha's time'.

Lance