BoTANKAi MrsHiM Lhaflets ^f^' • 29. No. 3 



SlMMHR 1983 



THE LAST MEAL OF THE BUDDHA 



R. Gordon Wasson 



I 

 WHAT WAS SUKARA-MADDAVA? 



Upwards of a dozen scholars' in the past century have com- 

 mented on what the Buddha ate at his Last Meal, ca. B.C. 483, 

 and the pu/zling mystifications in the evidence. The meal was 

 served to him and his suite of monks by his host t_he metal- 

 worker Cunda at Pava, a village that lay near Kusinara where 

 the Mahaparinirvana — the "Great Decease" as the Rhys 

 Davidses translated it — was scheduled to take place some hours 

 later. The canonical Pali Text says tha^Cunda served his august 

 guest sukara-madciava, 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 transla- 

 tions and notes, and his document is appended to our paper. 



The first part of that compound word, sukara-, is simple: 

 "pertaining to swine," su- being 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. Rhys Davids, noticing that in 

 Bihar there was a common edible underground fungus, trans- 

 lated sukara-nmddava by "truffles."- This was a successful pitch, 

 considering that by "truffles" he meant an underground fungus 

 common thereabouts, although no truffle (^Tuher) has been 

 discovered so far in Bihar. His underground fungus was a Scle- 

 roderma, 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. 



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