Thanks for this, it’s always a pleasure to revisit my translation and look more closely at the Pali. I think you’re right.
Just checking Ven Bodhi’s rendering, he uses “without finding it troublesome”, a wording he has stuck with in MN, SN, and AN. And in the various sets of notes by different scholars I can’t find any discussion of this point. You mention a translation that renders it in the way you suggest: can you let me know which one it is?
I made a note on the idiom when translating it, in which I suggested “without making a problem out of it” as a possible meaning, but I thought it sounded too passive-aggressive!
There is a closely related idiom sace te agaru, which clearly must mean “It is is no trouble for you”. I guess Ven Bodhi and myself assumed that the idiom agaruṃ katvā (also spelled agaruṃ karitvā) was more or less a variation on that.
But the context is always in this specific kind of instance: the monks ask for an explanation, only to be put off by the senior monk. So it seems they’re saying to him, “don’t make it difficult”. It’s a bit tricky to translate this in a way that’s idiomatic English, without sounding rude.
Here is the commentary on MN 18, which appears to be the only place where this idiom is commented. I give a quick and dirty translation:
Agaruṃ katvāti punappunaṃ āyācāpentopi hi garuṃ karoti nāma, attano sāvakapāramīñāṇe ṭhatvā sinerūpādato vālukaṃ uddharamāno viya dubbiññeyyaṃ katvā kathentopi garuṃ karotiyeva nāma. Evaṃ akatvā amhe punappunaṃ ayācāpetvā suviññeyyampi no katvā kathehīti vuttaṃ hoti.
“Not making a problem out of it” means: “Making [us] ask again and again is making a problem out of it. Or relying on your own knowledge born of a disciple’s perfections, teaching in a way that makes it hard to understand, like extracting a grain of sand from the base of Mount Sineru, is also making a problem out of it. Without doing this, without making us ask again and again, please speak in a way that makes it easy for us to understand.” That’s what was said.
I actually think the first explanation here sounds more reasonable. I think the monks are saying, “don’t put obstacles in our way, don’t put us off any further.” I suspect that if the sense was “make it easy to understand”, a different idiom would be used.
I will change this, but I’m still not 100% sure what the best idiom is for it. I’ll give it some thought.