Dear SuttaCentral community,
Bhante Dhammika asked me to post this essay of his here on his behalf. Here it is, with links added where appropriate:
In Bhante @Sujato’s very readable translation of the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta he offers a new take on the difficult Pāli term sūkaramaddava. He suggests that maddava, the second part of the compound, may mean overripe or withered, and that the Buddha’s last meal was aged pork, not tender pork as is more widely assumed. He explains that ‘it is a common practice to allow meat to sit for a while to become tender and “high” for extra flavor when cooked. But this can lead to a proliferation of dangerous bacteria unless properly cooked, and such seems to be the case here’. This interesting idea is worth exploring further.
Meat is sometimes hung for four or five days, or sometimes up to two weeks, for the reasons Bhante gives, a practice called aging in English. However, that such meat caused the Buddha’s demise has a few problems. It is true that aging ‘is a common practice’ at least in England and France, but was it so in 5th/4th century BCE India? It is unsafe to assume that European practices are done in other cultures. I am unaware of any evidence that aging was known or done in ancient India. The opposite may be the case. Lawmakers such as Āpastamba and Gautama stipulate that sour (śuktāni) meat must not be eaten (1.17.17; 17.14). The Sanskrit word probably includes fermented, stale, off or aged. It could be argued that such rules were only stipulated for the three highest castes and would not have applied to Cunda who was low caste. But widespread concern about ‘pure’ food in Indian culture likely means that all castes would have shunned meat that was not freshly slaughtered. In Europe, the cooler climate and the ability to keep flies off the aging meat, means that the chances of consuming unsafe meat are minimal. Country houses used to have (some may still have), cellars where they could keep the temperature below 40°F to prevent the growth of bacteria. Sujato calculates that the Buddha died sometime between December and January when daytime temperatures in Bihar range from 70°to 73°F, which would be very unsuitable for aging meat safely, if his calculations are correct. If the traditional month is accepted the temperatures would have made the meat putrid by the second day.
Would Cunda have known about aging meat? Being a low caste metal worker would he have cared about the niceties of tenderness and flavor? Would he have had a fly-proof place with a suitable temperature where he could keep the pork for a few days? I doubt it. India’s climate makes it probable that meat kept for even a day in such heat would start to smell, become fly-blown and be considered unfit for consumption. For all these reasons I think Bhante Sujato’s suggestion that aged pork caused the Buddha’s demise is unlikely.
In my Footprints in the Dust, I give another possible explanation of what may have killed the Buddha. Shifting attention from the meaning of sūkaramaddava I focus instead on the Buddha’s symptoms. That the Buddha’s main symptoms were exudative diarrhoea (lohita pakkhandika) and sharp pain (pabāḷha vedanā), probably in the abdomen, suggests that he suffered from bacterial gastroenteritis. It usually takes at least twenty-four, sometimes forty-eight or even seventy-two hours for gastroenteritis symptoms to become apparent, which is why people mistakenly attribute the last thing they ate to any stomach or bowel problem they have. Thus, it may not have been sūkaramaddava that was responsible for the Buddha’s sickness but something he ate the day before or even several days before arriving in Pāvā. Further, there is no reason to assume that food was the problem. The Buddha would have been regularly rehydrating, and thus it is not at all improbable that he had drunk contaminated water before he arrived in Pāvā. Given that the Buddha had been sick while staying in Vesālī, that he had mentioned the only time he had a degree of physical comfort was when he went into deep meditation, and that he was eighty, it seems most likely that his death was due to a continuation of this earlier sickness, whatever it was, and gastroenteritis exacerbated by exhaustion and old age, rather than being due to the last thing he ate.
~ Bhante Dhammika
