[Buddha-l] A question for Jewish Buddhists

[Dan Lusthaus]

Lance,

> Well, if no-one comes up with any  references, we will have to assume
> that your memory is at fault.

One of the ways old bones creak. Could be faulty memory, but I don't think
so (and don't remember mis-remembering this).

> 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.

Who is the "they"? Redactors?

> 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."

I suppose you mean Yang-gyu An's PTS translation of Buddhaghosa's comm. on
the Pali Mahanibbana-sutta? I haven't gotten around to reading that yet. The
Fa version would appear to be the translation of the Mahayana
Mahaparinirvana sutra by Faxian (Fa-hsien). It's nice of the Mahayana
redactors to avoid turning Cunda into a Buddhist Judas.

I haven't gone through all the accounts of Cunda preserved in Chinese
sources, though this would be an interesting study. In Pure Land texts,
e.g., he becomes Maha-Cunda (a name used for him in the Chinese
Madhyama-agama, e.g., 427c27), an important disciple of the Buddha, not the
smith who served up a fatal meal. Cunda makes numerous appearances in the
Chinese versions of the Dirgha- and Madhyama-Agamas (sectarian affiliations
of those versions still an issue). At Dirgha 18a23seq Cunda does seem to
serve a meal, Cunda also queries Buddha in verse, and food is one of the
topics discussed.

Cunda, food, and Buddha's imminent death after suffering bloody diarrhea,
etc. seem to be consistent elements, though the degree to which Cunda is
held responsible fluctuates -- in my opinion, not haphazardly, but in
various attempts to explain away such an ignoble form of death. That the
elements are reworked, but not dropped completely strongly suggests that
there is some historical basis to them.

> >  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.

But one needn't look for it. It leaps out at you. And watching the
subsequent tradition squirm and dissimulate because of it reinforces that
impression.

> > 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.

This strikes me more like a christological excuse for the crucifixion
(Christians also had to squirm to explain why God could be executed in such
a horrible way -- which they did over time with ideas of resurrection,
second coming, dying for others' sins, etc., quite successfully as we can
tell today). What you describe is just what we would expect from redactors.

> 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.

I don't think I suggested that. What I did suggest is that the most
incongruous element(s), the ones that keep later commentators and redactors
working overtime, are the ones most likely to have a historical basis, and
for that reason were not added for mythical reasons, but retained from a
group memory of a public event.

That is one of the reasons I find the Pali nikayas much more interesting and
illuminating than their Mahayana counterparts... one catches snatches of
real life, real human conflicts and troubles, and a Buddha who is still
fully human. His Mahayana alter ego can't even open his mouth to say
something without zapping the universes in infinite directions with laser
beams first. There's plenty of supernatural trim (Anguttara nikaya esp.),
but much of it seems to be offered with a wink. Certainly over time the wink
was replaced by veneration and lionization.

> 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.

Lamotte, in History of Indian Buddhism, largely confines his discussion of
the issue to the pa~ncavastu, or five theses on Arhats, which appear not
only in the Mahavibhasa, but in Vasumitra, and, as for earliness, Lamotte
comments (p. 274; Fr. ed. p. 300):

"At an early period, which we will try to specify, five propositions
prejudicial to the dignity and prerogatives of the Arhat were debated in the
communities. They are described in both the Pali Abhdhamma and the
Sarvastivadin Abhidharma (Kathavatthu, II, 1-5, pp. 163-203; Jnanaprasthana,
T 1543, ch. 10, p. 819b; T 1544, ch. 7, p. 956b); they are repeated and
discussed in the Vibhasa (T 1545, ch. 99, p. 510c), the Kosa (I, p. 2), the
_Glosses of Paramartha_ and the _Treatise on the Sects_ by Chi-tsang
(Demieville, _Sectes_, pp. 30-40)."

Because he organizes his discussion around the problem of identifying these
theses with the name Mahadeva, rather than tracing their impact on other
literature (including in forms other than as the five theses), this barely
scratches the surface. The arhat issue, particularly from the
social-institutional perspective, would be a good, rich topic for a
dissertation.

The speculative issues about what an arhat achieves when he becomes as arhat
(whether in contradistinction to a Buddha, for instance) are a separate set
of issues, a separate discussion, though there is some overlap. The
discourse I am referring to is one that demeaningly demotes Arhats.

> > (and the one's of his time, including some involving him,
> > or Ananda, etc., [...]
>
> An entirely different topic.

But related, so not "entirely."

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

That's a parallel and related development.

> But there are no texts of this kind which can be proven to be earlier
> than the third century A.D.

See the quote from Lamotte, above.

Dan