When you read the rest of the sutta, you will see that the Buddha explained to Ven. Ananda, the following:
- Outward appearances cannot be used to determine rebirths. Furthermore, it depends on many factors, and thus, only a Buddha can be certain about a person’s place of rebirth.
- If the magga phala of a person is known (which another person cannot do), then we can roughly predict certain limits of rebirths. A Sotapanna is excluded from rebirths in an apaya; a Sakadagami will be reborn in a Deva realm; An Anagami will be reborn in a Brahma realm reserved for them; an Arahant will not be reborn.
- In that specific sutta, the Buddha declared that laywoman Migasālā’s father and uncle were both Sakadagamis. So, they must be reborn in a Deva realm. She tried to differentiate between them by noticing that her father was celibate and her uncle lived with his wife. Even though his father lived a celibate life, he had not removed kama raga samyojana and, thus, was not an Anagami.
- We don’t know the specific reasons for them to be reborn in the same Deva realm. Only a Buddha can discern such details.
