--- On Mon, 15/3/10, Srini RamaKrishnan <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: Srini RamaKrishnan <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [silk] Untold story Who Killed Gautama? > To: [email protected] > Date: Monday, 15 March, 2010, 22:05 > On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 4:27 PM, > Indrajit Gupta <[email protected]> > wrote: > > 5. The meal > > of > > of pork is well-known of course; this is the first > time I have read all the details. > > > > I am no expert, but there are theories on the Internet that > say that > Buddha ate "sukara maddava" i.e. Pig's Delight (i.e. > mushrooms). It > sounds altogether less menacing and suspicious to imagine > that the > Buddha died accidentally of poisonous mushrooms. > > One can only place so much faith in recorded history, there > are many > interpretations and the devil is in the details - so I'll > be taking > any theory on things ancient with a truck load of salt. > > Cheeni A possibility, no doubt, but the less sensational version of the pork theory was the pork had gone bad and was smelling 'off'; the Buddha sensed it, and not to offend or hurt the feelings of his host, had some of it, but kept the rest of his party from touching it, and advised his host to bury it. The simple explanation is that he sensed it was gone, and stopped any one else from touching it; an unprovable one is that he sensed that it was poisoned (perhaps from the smell of it) and did everything else that has been described. For it to have been poisoned is to assume that a chance meeting and a chance invitation was neither a chance meeting nor a chance invitation. We have no way of knowing today which it was.
