With Rohitassa (2nd)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The same teaching as AN 4.45, given the next morning to a human audience, and preserved as a separate discourse because the audience is what changed.

What is actually on the page

Then, when the night had passed, the Buddha addressed the mendicants: ‘Tonight, the glorious godling Rohitassa, lighting up the entire Jeta’s Grove, came to me, bowed, stood to one side, and said to me…’ And there the text stops. The rest is marked as identical to AN 4.45.

This is a more extreme abbreviation than AN 4.40’s. There, at least the framing exchange and the verses were written out. Here everything after the opening question is a pointer, and Sujato’s translation marks it as such rather than silently expanding it.

The text on this page is therefore short by design and not by damage, and this guide gives the substance a page of its own rather than repeating AN 4.45. Anyone reading these in order should have AN 4.45 open alongside.

Why the retelling was kept

The obvious question is why a verbatim repetition with a different audience is preserved as its own numbered discourse. Three answers are worth giving, and they are not exclusive.

First, provenance. AN 4.45 records a conversation with nobody else present. Without AN 4.46 there is no account of how the community came to know about it. The retelling is the chain of transmission written into the canon.

Second, audience. A teaching given to a god and a teaching given to mendicants are different events even when the words are identical, and the Aṅguttara consistently treats the recipient as part of what a discourse is.

Third, recitation. A discourse that exists mainly as a pointer still occupies a slot in the sequence, and the slot is how a reciter keeps count. The Fours are organized in chapters of ten, and every chapter of this nipāta has exactly ten.

The night visitor as a form

Visits from gods late at night, lighting up the grove, are a standard scene in the canon — the whole of the Devatāsaṁyutta is built from them. The pattern is consistent: the visitor arrives after dark, asks one question, receives a short answer, and departs.

The form is efficient. It allows a single sharp question to be posed without the social apparatus of an approach, a greeting, and a discussion, and it allows the question to come from outside the human community entirely. Rohitassa’s question — can one walk out of birth and death? — is exactly the sort a being with psychic powers and a long memory would ask, and no human questioner in the canon is placed to ask it with the same authority.

A reader who does not take the gods literally loses nothing here. The scene functions as a way of putting the strongest possible version of a question, from the one being who has actually tested it.

What the mendicants receive

The morning retelling delivers to a human audience the two things that make AN 4.45 matter: that a being of extraordinary power tried the method and it failed, and that the end of the world is nonetheless required and is located in this body.

Delivered to mendicants, the emphasis shifts slightly. Rohitassa needed to be told that his approach was wrong. The mendicants are being told, in effect, that the work they are already doing is the only method there is — and that no amount of anything else, including the psychic attainments the tradition acknowledges as real, substitutes for it.

That is a common function of the god-visit scene: the visitor’s failure is the human audience’s encouragement.

Reading it honestly

It would be easy to write this page as though AN 4.46 contained new material. It does not, and a study guide that pretended otherwise would be teaching a reader to see content where there is a bookmark.

What it does contain is evidence about how the collection works: how it records provenance, how it treats audience, and how it manages its own repetitions. That is worth one short page, and this is it.

Key terms