Sukara Maddava – The last meal of Buddha

In the remote edges of the trails in Brindnagar, Dialek and Jumla, when the spring sun shone through the wooded edges, on the slopes of the Himalyan valley, in the midst of moist air, Dr Jayasinghe saw the locals tie their hogs on leashes and hunt for mushrooms. 

These hogs, like dogs have a very strong sense of smell and detects the mushrooms that are beneath the soil digging through with the aid of their snout and their hind legs. The mushrooms harvested with the assistance of pigs were called “Sukara Maddava” in the early Kahrostrian and Magda Pali languages, which literally meant “dug by pigs” .These mushrooms have a very high medicinal value compared to any other vegetable known to mankind. 

It is a fitting act by Chunda Karmara Putta to have offered this variety of mushrooms to the ailing Buddha who was 80 years of age, with the intent of giving some solace to a prevailing health condition he was suffering from. 

Sukara Maddawa” could be interpreted as tender pork. But it could also have a different meaning as food that pig loves, known as “truffle,” a kind of mushroom that grows underground that pigs are drawn to by its fragrance and would dig up with its snout to eat. 

It has been scientifically discovered that truffle makes pheromone, an androgen-analog substance, with its fragrant smell, attracting pigs to hunt for it and luring it with the sex hormone to dig with its snout for food, and spread its spore around in the process. In fact, pigs have been trained for truffle hunting. The only problem is that those mushroom hunters have to compete with the pigs for the truffles which could be eaten instantaneously by the pigs whenever it was found.

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