[Buddha-l] A question for Jewish Buddhists

[L.S. Cousins]

Dan Lusthaus wrote:
> 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?
>   

Whenever the evidence is against you, you try to eliminate it with 
redactors. If the term sūkaramaddava is introduced by redactors, then we 
have no evidence as to what the Buddha ate at his last meal.

> 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.

This must be just an unhistorical confusion. Mahācunda was a major monk 
disciple who could hardly be identical with the smith Cunda who served 
the last meal.

>  Cunda makes numerous appearances in the
> Chinese versions of the Dirgha- and Madhyama-Agamas (sectarian affiliations
> of those versions still an issue).

Surely not in the second case. It is clearly a product of the same 
school which produced the so-called Mūlasarvāstivādin Vinaya. That is 
now clear from the new Sanskrit Dīrgha materials. Even in the first case 
it must be Dharmaguptaka or a closely related school.

>  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 --

According to An they are precisely not consistent elements in the 
different recensions of the non-Mahāyāna Mahāparinibbānasutta. And these 
are the only sources likely to be early.

>  in my opinion, not haphazardly, but in
> various attempts to explain away such an ignoble form of death. 

This may be true for texts of the Mahāyāna period. But for early 
Buddhists there was no need to explain away what for them was a highly 
noble death.

> That the
> elements are reworked, but not dropped completely strongly suggests that
> there is some historical basis to them.
>
>   

You have first to prove that there was reworking. Idon't believe that 
there was.

>>>  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.
>   

It leaps out at you because you (and others) are looking for it. And why 
introduce loaded terms such as 'smear and dissimulate' unless your 
intention is to prejudice the reader.

>> 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).

Maybe this is why you want to see the Buddha's death in these terms. 
There is nothing ignoble about dying of old age after an extremely hard 
physical life. And in fact there would be nothing ignoble about dying of 
food poisoning, if that were so. And I don't believe that early 
Buddhists would have thought there was.

>  What you describe is just what we would expect from redactors.
>   

Rather scholars are often not sympathetic to the idea of dāna. So they 
rationalize and interpret the potency of the food as due to bad food, 
when in fact the story is clearly based precisely on the myth. It is due 
to the statement that no one else could digest the food that people get 
the idea that there was something wrong with the food. But in fact that 
statement is derived from the myth and wouldn't be there without it.

>> 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.
>   

If they had found the story of the Buddha's last meal objectionable in 
any way, they would certainly have left it out.

> 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.
>   

The Mahāyāna literature is doing something different. But I agree in 
general about this. I just think that the Buddha's last meal is a bad 
example.



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