Why did the elder blindly drink the wine without discerning it?

Question: The Elder Sāgata drank without looking at what he was drinking; the wine entered his mouth without his distinguishing the taste. Was this because the Elder was no longer attached to the feeling of taste, or because he was in meditative concentration (samādhi), so that drinking wine and drinking water were the same to him? Does "without looking" in the sūtra mean that he no longer discriminated tastes?

Answer: The Elder trusted this female lay devotee completely and never imagined that she would give him wine to drink, so he drank whatever was given to him, without any vigilance. When drinking, perhaps the Elder had no experience with alcohol and the like and could not distinguish it; moreover, because the Elder possessed great supernatural powers and had great self-confidence, he was unconcerned about anything, so it made no difference to him what he drank. In fact, one who possesses the meditative concentration of the fourth dhyāna and great supernatural powers, having passed beyond the domain of the aggregate of form and the domain of the aggregate of feeling, will have a physical body that is not affected by material form. In the Buddha's time, in order to make it convenient for the Buddha to establish the precepts, some of the disciples cooperated with the Buddha in liberating sentient beings, acting out roles alongside the Buddha. The evil people of that time were not truly evil; they only pretended to be evil. If there had been no evil people committing evil deeds, how could so many sūtras have been handed down, and how could those precepts have been handed down?