The Last Meal of the Buddha

Abstract

UPWARDS OF A DOZEN SCHOLARS' in the past century have commented on what the Buddha ate at his Last Meal, ca. B.c. 483, and the puzzling mystifications in the evidence. The meal was served to him and his suite of monks by his host the metal-worker Cunda at Pava, a village that lay near Kusinara where the Mahaparinirvana-the Great Decease as the Davidses translated it-was scheduled to take place some hours later. The canonical Pali Text says that Cunda served his august guest siikara-maddax'a, a hapax in Pali. Walpola Rahula, the Buddhist monk and scholar residing in the West, has assembled in a memorandum for us the relevant Pali texts with his translations and notes, and this document is appended to our paper. The first part of that compound word, sukara-, is simple: pertaining to swine, sukbeing cognate with Latin sus. The second element is generally thought to mean tidbits, dainties, but whether as a specially delicate part of the pig's meat or as a food of which swine were specially fond, whether a subjective or objective genitive, no one can say. Davids. noticing that in Bihar there was a common edible underground fungus, translated sukara-maddava by truffles.2 This was a successful pitch, considering that by he meant an underground fungus common thereabouts, although no truffle (Tuber) has been discovered so far in Bihar. His underground fungus was a Scleroderma, a little snow-white ball that is gathered just as soon as it appears on the surface. There are a number of genera of underground fungi of which truffles are one, and each genus has many species. The two canonical Pali Commentaries discuss but do not agree on the meaning to give to sukaramaddava. One of them is the canonical Pali Commentary on the Dfgha NikadVa, Sumnahgalavildsini, and the other, the Paramattha/otikd, the canonical Commentary on the Uddna. These Commentaries took their ' 1896 and earlier. Karl Eugen Neumann: Die Reden Gotamo Buddho's aus des Mittleren Sammiung Mal/himanikdvo des Pali-Kanons, Leipsig, 1896, pp. xix-xxii. Neumann cites earlier writers: Friedrich Zimmermann, who in turn refers to an article in the Journal of the Maha-Bodhi SocietlY, Vol. 1, No. viii, pp. 2-3, Calcutta, 1892, wherein the editor of this Journal reproduces statements by Rhys Davids, Bigandet, Rockhill, and Colonel Olcott, laying stress on the proper meaning of sakara-maddaava. We have seen none of these earlier discussions. 1910. T. W. and C. A. F. Davids, and later editions. I)ialogues of the Buddha: Part I. Translated from the Pali of the Dlgha Nikdaa by T. W. and C. A. F. Davids. One of the series of the Sacred Books of the Buddhists. Published for the Pdli Text Society by Luzac, London. (All of our quotations from the DTgha Nikdl a are from the 1959 edition.)