I think I may have made a mistake on this one. I wonder if anyone knows more about this? The name mahī just means “great one” or perhaps “great mother” so it could easily have been used for multiple rivers.
Mahissati is to the west and a little south. There is a modern river named Mahi there:
I had assumed this was where the Dhaniyasutta was set. But this doesn’t fit with the Mahī described in the Suttas (sn45.96:1.1):
“Mendicants, all the great rivers—that is, the Ganges, Yamunā, Aciravatī, Sarabhū, and Mahī—slant, slope, and incline towards the east.
I just noticed, Ven Bodhi distinguishes the two, in note 1502 to the translation of the Selasutta commentary:
Gaṅgāya pana yā uttarena āpo, tāsaṃ avidūrattā uttarāpo ti pi vuccati. Though Pj II uses the
word gaṅgā, the river intended, as will be seen, is not the Ganges but another of the five great
rivers. This river is also distinct from the Mahī River that originates in Madhya Pradesh and
flows into the Arabian Sea.
Thus the commentary says that Anguttarapana was north of the Mahī, which would mean it must be the modern Kosi:
This would fit with the context of the Dhaniyasutta, where the environs are threatening and dangerous. The Kosi is called “the sorrow of Bihar” for its capricious and dangerous nature.
But the descriptions of these rivers does not seem to be internally consistent? Or am I just floating hapless on a raft, grasping at straws? And mincing metaphors?
On the one hand, they flow into the ocean:
When the great rivers—the Ganges, the Yamunā, the Aciravatī, the Sarabhū, or the Mahī—reach the ocean, they lose their former names and become known simply as the ocean.
On the other hand, they converge with each other:
Mendicants, there are places where the great rivers—the Ganges, Yamuna, Aciravatī, Sarabhū, and Mahī—come together and converge.
The Yamunā, Sarabhū and Aciravatī do indeed flow into the Ganges, and likely the Mahī too. But how can they both converge with the Ganges and flow into the ocean??? 