the precise properties of this mushroom, its etymology as cog- 

 nate with "putrid" is clarified.' and its strong Hnk with Soma is a 

 good explanation for the Santal belief that it is generated by the 

 di\ine lightningbolt. 



Up to this point we ha\e concentrated on only one source — 

 the canonical Pali Text of the Divha Nikava for our details 

 about the life of Buddha. It is the Holy Scripture of the Thera- 

 \adin branch of Buddhism with its headquarters in SrF Lanka. 

 There are, in addition, five other master recensions of his life, 

 four in Chinese and one in Sanskrit. All five mention the stop in 

 Pa\a and name Cunda as the host there, but none of them 

 mentions sukara-nuukiava. An abvious explanation for this 

 omission is that the Chinese are natural mycophiles: they eat 

 with relish all kinds of edible mushrooms and the\' know their 

 mushrooms. They would not understand why the Buddha 

 honored the Putika. saying he alone could digest it. For the 

 Chinese all this would have been incomprehensible. 



The Buddha and his followers were mostly Hindus of the 

 upper castes who had withdrawn from obedience to the Hindu 

 religion. When the Theras assembled at Rajagrja, they were 

 inevitably, even if they were rebels, heirs to the infinite complex- 

 ity of habits, practices, subtle ways of thinking and feeling of the 

 Brahmanic religion. When Buddhism became a world religion, it 

 liberated itself from the Brahmanic religion and this included the 

 mightl_\ tradition of Soma and the Vedic hymns, and of course 

 from the less powerful hold of the Putika. In the early days of 

 Christianity, before it became a world religion, the pull of Jew- 

 ish ways such as circumcision and the ban on pig-meat exerted 

 influence on Jewish converts to Christianity, and the early 

 Church faced a parallel conflict. 



IV 



THE BUDDHA'S LAST MEAL 



The episode at Pava lends itself to various explanations; the 

 written record contains a number of anomalies. If we were to 

 offer the solution that we think is most likely, here it is. 



238 



