Page 434 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

VEDIC MYTHS-THE CAPTIVE WATERS 215
Thus in Ill, 53, 5, we read, " 0 Maghavan ! 0 brother Indra !
go beyond (para ) and come hither ( a) you are wanted in both
places ( ubhayatra ) ... " The passages, where Savitri is described as
going, round the night on both sides is already referred to above.
With these passages before us, we cannot reasonably hold
that the Vedic bards were ignorant of the lower celes6al
hemisphere, as supposed by Wallis, and some other scholars.
Nor is the hypothesis a priori probable, for I have shown elsewhere
that the Vedic bards knew enough of astronomy to calculate the
movements of the sun and the moon tolerably correct for all
practical purposes; and the people, who could do this, could
not be supposed to be so ignorant as to believe that the sky was
nailed down to the earth at the celestial horizon, and that
when the sun was not seen during the night, he must be taken to
have disappeared somewhere in the upper regions of the heaven.
The passage from the Aitareya Bnlhmapa (III, 44) which is quoted
by Wallis, and which tells us that the sun, having reached the end
of the day, turns round as it were, and makes night where there
was day before and day on the other side, and vice versa, is very
vague and does not prove that the sun was believed to return by
night through a region, which is somewhere in the upper heaven.
The words used in the original are avastat and parastat; and Dr.
Haug correctly translates parastat by ' what is on the other side. ',
Muir and others, however, interpret parastat to mean 'upper',
thus giving rise to the hypothesis that the sun returns during night
by a passage through the upper region of the heaven. But in
the face of the express passages in which regions below and above
all the three earths are unmistakably mentioned, we Ca.nnot accept
a hypothesis based upon a doubtful translation of a single word.
It is a hypothesis that has its origin either in the preconceived
notion regarding the primitive man, or in a desire to import
into the Vedas the speculations of the Homeric cosmography.
The knowledge of the Vedic bards regarding the nether world
may not have been as exact as that of the modern astronomers,
and we, therefore, meet with such questions in the ~ig-Veda
(I, 35, 7) as "Where is St1rya now (after sunset) and which
celestial region his rays now illumine ? " But there is enough
explicit evidence to prove that the Vedic people knew of the
existence of a region below the earth and if some of their notions