[INDOLOGY] Resumption of 'In an oil vat'.

[Artur Karp]

Dear List Members,

    The Buddha's last  sermon (of unknown content) took place in
Pāvā. Its recipient
was the local blacksmith. His name, *Cunda*, does not sound Indo–Aryan. The
text calls him *kammāra*-. Although generally related to the Skt. *karmāra
- *'blacksmith'*, * the etymology of this term is uncertain. In his *A
Comparative Dictionary of Indo**–**Aryan Languages * (2898) Turner allows
for the possibility of it being a borrowing from the Dravidian (<<cf. Tam.
*karumā, *'smith, smelter', whence meaning 'smith' was transferred also to
KARMAKĀRA->>).

     The Buddha and Cunda: a meeting, it seems, of the representatives of
two differing traditions. *Sūkaramaddava*, the term describing the dish
offered by Cunda to the Buddha, sounds Middle Indo-Aryan. Nevertheless, its
meaning is not clear, it has acquired a number of unconvincing
interpretations.

     If so - could this term have also  originally come from the local
non-Indo-Aryan dialect? Was it, in its Pali form, an ad hoc created
vocabulary item? Have there been attempts to find its equivalent in the
local smiths’ professional terminology? In the local Dalits' kitchen
vocabulary?

    I am not aware of any.


Regards,



śr., 12 gru 2018 o 22:00 Artur Karp <karp at uw.edu.pl> napisał(a):

> Dear List Members,
>
>
> A short fragment of the MPSutta (84–85, 90), the one that describes the
> last meal of the Buddha and his fatal illness, mentions one person 23 times
> – by name and professional designation: *cundo kammāraputto*, Cunda, the
> blacksmith.
>
> Is the number of these references not significant? Some translators,
> perhaps not wanting to strain the readers’ patience, tend to reduce the
> phrase to the personal name only, as if the fact that the Buddha’s host was
> a *smith* was an unimportant detail. *Cunda the blacksmith* becomes
> *Cunda*.
>
> Oskar von Hinüber is more radical. In his widely read and already
> classical paper (*Cremated like a King: The Funeral of the Buddha within
> the Ancient Indian Cultural Context*, ICPBS 2009) he does not mention
> Cunda, not even once. He refers there to what he calls *‘a vessel made of
> iron and filled with sesame oil’;* a type of vat which, according to
> tradition, was used for cremating the bodies of anointed kings – and, later
> on, of the Buddha himself. However, he does not link the material from
> which such vessels were made with the person of a smith, of an iron–maker
> appearing so conspicuously in the text. The majority of the specialists
> (among them John Strong) write rather about *‘an iron oil vessel/tub/vat’*.
> But this is beyond the point. Von Hinüber’s attention is directed at *oil*,
> not at *iron*.
>
> Apart from iron, the text does not mention any other economically
> important metal - neither copper nor bronze.
>
> In this sense we may say that the MPSutta is dominated by iron – and
> steel.
>
> Could it be that the narrative relating the marvelous transformation of
> the Buddha’s human body into the everlasting relics was based on the
> procedures of iron smelting and hardening, the latter giving it, finally,
> the potential to create everlasting forms? Could the fact that the burning
> out of the Buddha’s body is stopped by cold water be devoid of any meaning?
>
> These are questions that – to my mind – demand answers. They may lead to
> an entirely new approach to research on the world of the MPSutta.
>


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20181217/a3804476/attachment.htm>