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843 When King Pasenadi returned to the place where he had left Dı̄gha Kārāya˚a, he found only a servant woman who reported the news to him. He then hurried on to Rājagaha to enlist the aid of his nephew, King Ajātasattu. But since he arrived late, he found the city gates closed. Exhausted by the journey, he lay down in a hall outside the city and died during the night.

844 MA: “Monuments to the Dhamma” means words expressing reverence to the Dhamma. Whenever reverence is shown towards any of the Three Jewels, it is also shown to the others.

SUTTA 90

845 MA: These two sisters are the king’s wives (not his sisters!).

846 MA: There is no one who can know and see all—past, present, and future—with one act of mental adverting, with one act of consciousness; thus this problem is discussed in terms of a single act of consciousness (ekacitta). On the question of the kind of omniscience the Theravāda tradition attributes to the Buddha, see n.714.

847 That is, he is not inquiring about their social status but about their prospects for spiritual progress and attainment.

848 As at MN 85.58.

849 MA explains coming back and not coming back as referring to rebirth, thus suggesting that gods who do not come back are non-returners, while those who do come back are still “worldlings.” The same distinction would apply to the discussion on Brahmās in §15. The two key terms that here distinguish the two types of gods appear in the PTS ed. as savyāpajjhā and abyāpajjhā, “subject to ill will” and “free from ill will,” respectively; in SBJ, as sabyāpajjhā and abyāpajjhā (which is effectively the same in meaning): in BBS, they appear as sabyābajjhā and abyābajjhā, “subject to affliction” and “not subject to affliction.” The latter reading has the support of MA, which explains the distinction by way of mental suffering. In earlier editions of this translation I translated in accordance with the BBS reading, but the PTS-SBJ reading now seems to me more probable. After all, it seems more likely that a prince would be concerned with the malevolence of the gods than with their experiences of suffering. Note that the word itthatta, which in the stock declaration of arahantship signifies any state of manifest existence, is here glossed by MA as manussaloka, the human world.

K.R. Norman, in an interesting paper, has proposed a radical re-editing of this portion of the sutta, which would entail important differences in translation, but as his proposals are not supported by any editions I hesitate to follow him. See Norman, Collected Papers, 2:162–71.

SUTTA 91

850 This is a stock description of a learned brahmin. According to MA, the Three Vedas are the Iru, Yaju, and Sāma (= Rig, Yajur, and Sāman). The fourth Veda, the Atharva, is not mentioned, but MA says its existence is implied when the histories (Itihāsa) are called “the fifth,” i.e., of the works regarded as authoritative by the brahmins. It is more likely, however, that the histories are called “the fifth” in connection with the four branches of study auxiliary to the Vedas that precede them in the description. The translation of technical terms here follows MA, with the help of Monier-William’s Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Oxford, 1899). On the marks of a Great Man, MA says that this was a science based on 12,000 works explaining the characteristics of great men, such as Buddhas, paccekabuddhas, chief disciples, great disciples, Wheel-turning Monarchs, etc. These works included 16,000 verses called “The Buddha Mantra.”

851 The thirty-two marks, enumerated in §9 below, are the subject of an entire sutta in the Dı̄gha Nikāya, DN 30, Lakkhaṇa Sutta. There each of the marks is explained as the kammic consequence of a particular virtue perfected by the Buddha during his earlier existences as a bodhisatta.

852 The seven treasures are discussed in MN 129.34–41. The acquisition of the wheel-treasure explains why he is called a “Wheel-turning Monarch.”

853 Loke vivattacchaddo. For hypotheses about the original form and meaning of this expression,