Page 161 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

146 SAMAGRA TILAK - 2 • THE ORION

would come to ( our ) house, where would that great sinner Mriga
be ? Where he, who misleads people, would go ? lndra, etc. "Now
YAska, in whose days all traces of Canis being once a star in the
heavens were lost, eould not understand what to make of the
. statement " where would that great sinner M riga be ? ;• It means
that Mriga would not be seen, would not be visible, when Vri~ha.­
kapl""goes to the house of Indra; but Yaska did not perceive what
was intended by such a statement. He could not conceive that the
constellation of Mrigashiras would be invisible, when the sun in
his upward march would be there at the beginning of the Devayina
that is, whe.n he comes to the house of lndra, and the:refore he
proposed to interpret M riga in the sense of " the suft '·' ( Nirukta
13. 3 ). Mriga, says he, is derived. from mrij to go," and means
'' going ", " one who goes and goes and never stops, " in other
words, "the sun." Now, says his commentator, when a person
goes into a house he cannot be seen by the outsider. So Vti!lhakapi
when he goes to the house, cannot be seen by the people on the
earth! I do not think that I need point out the highly artificial and
inconsistent character of this explanation. The word Mriga, so
far as I know, is no where used in the~igveda in this sense. Again,
if the word Mriga in the third verse of this is to be understood as
meaning an .antelope, is it not natural enough to suppose that the
same Mriga is referred to in this verse ? Then, again, how can the
sun be said to become invisible to the people when he is in the
house of gods? Nor can he be invisible to lndra whose house he
enters. What can, in such a case, be the propriety of the word
udancha or " rising upwards " ? If Mriga means the sun according
to Yaska, we shall have to suppose that the rising sun was invi-
sible, a clear contradiction in terms. I am sure Yaska, here, tried
to explain away the difficulty in the same way as he has done in
the case of V rika. But, in the present instance, the solution he has
proposed is, on the face of it, highly inconsistent so much so that
even Sayapa, does not follow it. Sayai].a, however, has nothing else
to propose, and he quietly leaves the word Mriga as it is and un-
explained in his commentary. In short, both Sayai].a and Yaska
have found the verse too difficult to explain. The meaning I have
proposed explains the verse in a natural and a simple manner,
and further corroborates the statement in the ~igveda previously
referred to viz., " Canis awakened the ~ibhus at the end of the
year." In the Taittinya Brahmat~a i. 5. 2. l, we are told that the