Sāriputta's Refusal
Sāriputta, doubled over with stomach pain, is finally brought the one food that would ease it — porridge his friend Moggallāna secured through a chain of events neither of them fully understood. Tracing that chain back to a deity's meddling, Sāriputta refuses it outright, at the cost of forty-five more years of the same illness. This reading's first excerpt is the ordinary dialogue that sets the story up; the second is the refusal itself.
Excerpt 1: Bringing the Porridge
Mahāmoggallānatthero pātova āgantvā "āvuso, yāva ahaṃ piṇḍāya caritvā āgacchāmi, tāva idheva hohī"ti vatvā gāmaṃ pāvisi. Te manussā paccuggantvā therassa pattaṃ gahetvā vuttappakārassa pāyāsassa pūretvā adaṃsu. Thero gamanākāraṃ dassesi. Te "bhuñjatha, bhante, tumhe, aparampi dassāmā"ti theraṃ bhojetvā puna pattapūraṃ adaṃsu. Thero gantvā "handāvuso sāriputta, paribhuñjā"ti upanāmesi.
The Elder Mahāmoggallāna, coming early in the morning, said, "Friend, stay right here until I go on almsround and return," and entered the village. Those people, coming out to meet him, took his bowl, filled it with the porridge of the kind mentioned, and gave it to him. The elder made as if to leave. They said, "Please eat too, venerable sir — we will give more besides," fed him, and gave him another bowlful. The elder, going back, offered it, saying, "Here, friend Sāriputta, partake of this."
Excerpt 2: The Refusal
Theropi taṃ disvā "atimanāpo pāyāso, kathaṃ nu kho uppanno"ti cintento tassa uppattimūlaṃ disvā āha — "āvuso moggallāna, aparibhogāraho piṇḍapāto"ti.
"Vacīviññattivipphārā, uppannaṃ madhupāyasaṃ;
sace bhutto bhaveyyāhaṃ, sājīvo garahito mama.
That elder, too, seeing it and thinking, "This porridge is exceedingly delightful — how did it come about, I wonder?", perceived the root of its origin and said, "Friend Moggallāna, this almsfood is not fit to be eaten."
"This sweet porridge, arisen from the spreading effect of a verbal intimation — if I had eaten it, my livelihood would deserve blame.
Bhaveyyāhaṃ is worth slowing down on: bhaveyyaṃ ends in niggahīta, ahaṃ begins with a vowel, and the two don't simply elide the way Reading 5's sace+ahaṃ did — the niggahīta drops and the two adjacent short a-vowels merge into one long ā, giving bhaveyya+ahaṃ → bhaveyyāhaṃ. This is a third sandhi outcome alongside Lesson 15's elision and Reading 5's reverse-direction elision: sometimes, instead of one vowel simply disappearing, two short vowels fuse into a single long one. The underlying instinct is the same throughout — Pāli does not tolerate two vowels sitting side by side across a word boundary — but the specific repair varies with which sounds are actually in contact.
This is also the reading track's first sace + optative combining with a 1st-person subject rather than the 3rd-person examples in Readings 4 and 5 — proof that the pattern generalizes across all persons, not just "he/she/it."
Continuing From Here
Future readings will keep drawing new passages from Sīlaniddesa, and later from Chapter 2 as that translation develops.