ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the death of the Buddha as recorded in the great Maha Parinibbana Sutta as a counter-response to the European scholars who, spurred by the spirit of their Enlightenment, have seen Buddhism through a ‘Euro-rational’ lens that in turn tended to downplay the ‘feeling for myth’. It suggests that the Buddha dying – irrespective of whether he ate pork or mushrooms – cannot be considered apart from the mythic persona of the Buddha as he is depicted in Buddhist texts. Unlike Mahayana, the interpretation of ‘pig’s flesh’ has been a problematic one for Theravada and has produced a debate in that great tradition that is inherently unresolvable, because the position one takes is predetermined by one’s conception of the Buddha nature. Both the intellectualist and the contemporary bourgeois interpretations of the death of the Buddha must be taken seriously; they too are part of a historical debate on the nature of the Buddha.
