Khādaniya and bhojaniya

Before replying, I need to be clearer about the list I was referring to here

I was referring to some of the foods listed by Ajahn Thanissaro as khādanīya.

I quote, from p.372, from, according to Ajahn Thanissaro, the commentary to Pc 37:

…flour and confections made of flour (cakes, bread and pasta made without eggs…)…roots, tubers…lotus roots, sprouts, stems, bark, leaves, flowers, fruits, nuts, seed-meal, seeds, and resins tha are made into food.

The only things on the above list that I would want to eat raw might be a root (like a carrot), a sprout, a leaf, a flower, fruit, nut and seed; all of which can be cooked in a number of ways.

So is there a lot of evidence to suggest that such foods were not cooked?

I reckon cooking or not cooking was probably incidental. Sometimes you’d eat a nut raw but at other times you could cook it. It’s a product that’s easily storable in its raw state. A fruit, like a tomato, could be stored fresh, especially if it was still mostly unripe and also turned into something else that was storable - preserve or sun dried; but could also be cooked into something that had to be eaten soonish.

I don’t think storability or rawness is the point. I think it’s foods that aren’t all that important in terms of “keeping you going” and abating feelings of hunger.

Also, khādanīya was probably more seasonal - harder to come by. i.e. not stuff that would be ready to hand. It may have involved a certain amount of foraging (eg. lotus roots, leaves, flowers), instead of organised cultivation, keeping in mind they didn’t have access to modern fertilisers and pesticides. Perhaps some people had the spare time to give the odd mango orchard a bit of time and attention, but they would’ve been the wealthy (like Ven Ambapali, prior to her ordination), most ordinary folks would have probably stripped wild trees of their fruit (like that story of the soldiers following behind the king - even the king wanted the fruit from that wild tree - perhaps even he, with all his wealth didn’t have his own orchard and had to go back to get the mangos from a random tree.)

Whereas the stuff listed in the group of five (bhojanīya) would be readily available (though perhaps dependent on harvest, climate and migratory patterns to some degree - you can’t have everything, it was the ancient world) and easily kept for long periods (even meat and fish - salted and dried properly can be kept for ages). And perhaps they practised things like crop rotation to ensure that they had constant supplies of different grain - different crops being planted in different seasons.

Basically, I reckon, bhojanīya were the foods these agrarian societies depended upon to stave off hunger. Khādanīya were delicacies and wild foods - of course you’d try and store them up if you could!

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That is also my understanding. There were haricot (vidala) or mung bean sūpas, but also, in the occasional commentary, meat, fish, and bamboo sūpas. It would seem that the crucial factor was a more watery quality—soup!

I don’t get why some translators render sūpa as ‘curry’ and byañjana as ‘condiment’. I might write something in the future about this all-important issue.

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