Page 115 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

102 SAMAGRA TILAit- 2 • 111E ORION

mean eating, aQ.d as th~ Agray~e~·~i.t in later works like Manu
( iv. 27) were described as 'New-harvest sacrifices,' all commenta-
tors have adopted this explanation of the word. But it appears
to me to be evidently of latter origin and invented to account for
the nature of the sacrifice when owing to the falling back of
seasons the' Agraya'.'eih~is came to be performed not at the beginn-
ing of each ayana as they should have been, but at wrong times.
The necessity of such an explanation must have been still more
keenly felt, when instead of two half-yearly sacrifices, the Agra-
YOI'JO·i~,h~is were performed thrice a year. AshvalAyana, it is ·
true, gives only two, one in Vasanta and the other in Sharad,
the old beginnings of the Devaylna and the Pitriyana and the real
commencement of the two ayanas. But he has mentioned tl;lret
kinds of grain that may be used, vrthi, shyamaka and yava ( i. 2.
9. 1.) and his commentator Gargya Narayat:~a observes that
yava and shyamdka are to be used simultaneously in Sharad
( i. 2. 9. 13 ). it appears, however, that the fact, that three kinds
of grain were sanctioned for use, soon gave rise to three Agraya,_,a-
ifh(is-one in Vasanta with vrthi, the second in Varsha with
shyamdka, and the third in Sharad with yava. But that it is a pra-
ctice of later origin is ~vident from a passage in the Taittirtya
SaQlhitA ( v. 1. 7. 3. ) which states that ' twice is grain cooked
for the year,' clearly meaning thereby that there were only two
..igray~-ifh(is in a year when the new harvest was first offered
to gods. I am therefore of opinion that originally there were only
two half-yearly sacrifices at the commencement of each ayana
and as vrthi was used, on the OCCclsion of the first of these ilh(is,
the word ayana or hdyana 11aturally came to denote the grain so
used, and that 'ayana in Agraya'.'a originally meant not eating as
tpe later writers have imagined, but a half-year as the word usually
denotes. This way of deriving and explaining the word is not a
new invention. For notwithstanding the fact that AgrayatJa and
Agrahdyana are explained by Taran&tha as referring to the sacri-
fice of grain and eating, yet he derives Agrayana, a word of the
same group, from agra + ayana and explains it to mean that ' the
Uttariyapa was in its front. •• Even native scholars thus appear to
be aware of the fact that igraya,_,a could be or was derived from
ayana meaning the Uttariyal).a,. Indeed, we cannort otherwise
• See Vachaspatya s. v. AgrM'mza.