[Buddha-l] Non attached & mindful culinary triumphalism?

[Dan Lusthaus]

Artur,

> I have always wondered about Mahakassapa's [...]
> eating almsfood obtained from a leper and containing his fallen off
> rotten finger, [...] feeling
> no disgust, "neither while eating it, nor having eaten [it]".

This is a theme that receives expanded treatment in later tantra (eating, 
etc., in graveyards, practicing 'neutrality' with a host of disgusting 
items, from skulls, to body wastes, etc.).

The key factor in Mahakassapa's case is the fact that he is laboring under 
the absolute and inviolate rule that a monk must eat whatever is placed in 
his begging bowl, with no preference or favorites. That still seems to be 
the case in Theravadin countries and is the cause of more than one western 
novice monastic deciding that Taiwan or Korea might be a better place to 
pursue the Dharma than Thailand, e.g., since the insect larvae and other 
non-appetizing things that too often find their way into the begging bowls 
will not happen to Taiwanese or Korean monastics, who are strict vegetarians 
(the Koreans generally even stricter than the Taiwanese or Chinese) and 
treated as such by the populace.

The issue, as a practitioner working under that rule, is how to overcome the 
natural revulsion at such things, and abide by the rule that one must 
consume whatever is in one's bowl. Whether Mahakassapa could have 
adjudicated the situation by determining that the finger is human flesh and 
thus forbidden (assuming his leper encounter occurred AFTER Buddha made the 
no-human-flesh rule), and thus refusing to eat it, or whether he simply 
decided to eat it as a type of practice of upekkha (neutrality), is for the 
reader (or commentary) to pontificate on.

Since one assumes the leper finger fell off unintentionally, it was not 
'slaughtered' esp. for mahakassapa, and thus the usual meat prohibition 
against eating anything specially killed for one did not apply. Perhaps 
discarded leper fingers are not considered '(living) human body' and instead 
would be classified as discarded human waste, like urine or excrement. That 
it is clearly diseased flesh would make a normal person gag and be repulsed. 
That he ate it with equinimity is meant to display his advanced stage of 
practice. If he would start frequenting leper colonies looking for food (and 
more occasional fingers) as a result. THAT would be a problem.

Dan