Rude Awakenings - Forest Sangha Publications

^0 F R I E N D S H I P 06last meal. Somehow we had ascertained it lay down the side road besidethe resthouse—a stroke of luck, that. We walked about a kilometre withrising uncertainty—no sign of anything special. After a while we turnedback and wandered down the road looking around us. Nothing but fieldsand trees. Then a magical stranger came along who pieced together ourmysterious presence and garb, and my inquiries about “Buddha Bhagwan,”and pointed vigorously at a nearby patch of land—it was uncultivatedwith a few cows meandering around, and the outskirts of avillage on its far side. But he kept pointing vigorously ... there was aregular-shaped white block on the far side, but nothing that you couldcall a shrine. Still, having come this far, we felt obliged to investigate.The land on the edges of villages is of course the most convenientplace for the villagers to defecate in; so apart from the cow dung, therewere liberal scatterings of human excrement to be mindful of as wepicked our way over to the mysterious white block. Next to it stood thenow familiar blue enamelled notice of the Archaeological Survey ofIndia, whose white lettering informed the reader that this was an ancientmonument and defacing it would render the culprit subject to a fine of5,000 rupees or three months’ imprisonment. That was all. The whiteblock was rectangular, about the size of a small desk, concrete andunadorned. Apart from the notice, only a few remains of incense sticksconfirmed that, yes, this indeed must be the spot commemorating theplace where Cunda the smith offered the Buddha the fatal meal of “pig’sdelight.”The story goes that the Buddha had felt that the mysterious dish—perhaps pork, or perhaps something that pigs feed on, like truffles, oreven as totally unrelated to pigs as “toad in the hole” is to toads—wasbad to eat. Still he hadn’t wanted to disappoint the humble smith byrejecting his offering, so he took some himself, while telling Cunda toditch whatever remained of that dish and not to give it to any of theother monks. However, his own stamina was now considerably reducedby age and a recent severe illness, and soon the bad food brought on a1 0 3