The Great Commentary cites hearsay ("They say. . . ") as the 

 reason that Cunda served those particular mushrooms on that 

 day. The hearsay may be right, but if indeed Cunda feU the dish 

 of Punka would extend the hfe of the Buddha, he must have 

 confused the properties of Soma and of the Puiika. The Putika 

 enjoyed a unique status as the exahed surrogate for Soma, but, 

 whereas Soma was consumed, the Putika, as Kramrisch quotes 

 the sources,'' were mixed with the clay and then fired ritually in 

 the making of the MahavTra pot and there is no reason to think 

 that the Hindus of the three upper castes or even the Brahman 

 hierarchs ate these fungi. Does no the text of the Great Com- 

 mentary permit another interpretation: Cunda, a 'sudra accus- 

 tomed to eating the Puiika, served them because it was the 

 season of the rains (which had started when the Buddha and his 

 suite were in Vai'sali) and the mushrooms, which he had known 

 all his life, were fresh from picking? If so, it was the Buddha who 

 at once recognized them because of their role in the Hindu reli- 

 gion and stopped Cunda from serving them to the others. The 

 Buddha was certainly not accustomed to eating mushrooms of 

 any kind, and here he was being invited to eat those slimy 

 mucoid excrescences, as the twice-born Hindus with loathing 

 would view them. May not this, combined with the emotional 

 tension of his imminent extinction, have provoked a recrudes- 

 cence of his intermittent attacks of dysentery? 



I now interrupt our account of the Buddha's progress on his 

 last day to set forth certain discoveries bearing on sukara- 

 maddava. 



W 



THE SANTAL AND THE PVTKA 



By an accident of fortune the Santal people living now in 

 western Bihar and Orissa have preserved foi^us, as though in a 

 time capsule, the identity of the Sanskrit Putika, a plant until 

 recently unidentified, an ingredient in the clay of the MahavFra 

 vessel that was fired in the course of the Pravargya sacrifice. The 

 Putika is known as having been the surrogate for Soma,^ though 

 probably today by no Santal, and it figures conspicuously in the 



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