Page 275 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

62 SAMAGRA TILAK - 2 THE ARCTIC HOME
through the oppression of the Drevas (Vedic Asuras, or the demons
of darkness ), " before the Fravashis showed ' the path of Mazda, '
to these two luminaries.* This shows that ' the path of Mazda '
commenced, like the Devayana road, when the sun was set free
from the clutches of the demons of darkness. In other words, it
represented the period of the year when the sun was above the
horizon at the place where the ancestors of the Indo-Iranian lived
in ancient days. We have seen that the Devayana, or the path of
the Gods, is the way along which Surya, Agni and other matutinal
deities are said to travel in the ~ig-Veda; and the Parsi scriptures
supplement this information by telling us that the sun stood still
before the Fravashis showed to him 'the path of Mazda', evidently
meaning that the Devayil.na, or ' the path of Mazda ', was the
portion of the year when the sun was above the horizon after being
confined for some time by the powers of darkness.
But the correspondence between the Indian and the Parsi scrip-
tures does not stop here. There is a strong prejudice, connected
with the Pitriyana, found in the later Indian literature, and even
thi has its parallel in the Parsi scriptures. The Hindus consider
it inauspicious for a man to die during the Pitriyana, and the
great Mahabharata warrior, Bhieyhma, is said to have waited on Iris
death-bed until the sun passed through the winter solstice, as the
Dakshipiyana, which is synonymous with the Pitriyil.na, was then
understood to mean the time required by the sun to travel from
the summer to the winter solstice.t A number of passages scattered
over the whole Upani~had literature support the same view, by
describing the course of the soul of a man according as he dies
during the Devayana or the Pit#yil.na, and exhibiting a marked
preference for the fate of the soul of a man dying during the path
of the Gods, or the Devayana. All these passages will be found
collected in Shankanl.charya's Bhaeyhya on Brahma-Sutras, IV,
2, 18-21, wherein Badarayal}a,:): anxious to reconcile all these
passages with the practical difficulty sure to be experienced if death
during the night of the Gods were held to be absolutely unmeri-

" See Sacred Books of the East Series, Vol. XXIII, pp. 193-19~.
t For the text and discussion, see Orion, P. 38. (Ed. 1955)
t The Sutras are - ~RI 1 ~c 1 firfu irfu ~~. &oflci~
'1~'l1rffi9T~I~ "!' I ~ <1, I aTO-Il:Uli~Srt G:~ I ~ o I liffirir; llfcf :q ~tt
~~~I ~o I See also Orion, pp. 24-26 (Ed. 1955)