Page 710 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

62 SAMAGRA TILAK -- 2 • VEDANG JYOTI~HA
professedly devoted only to the preparation of a five years
( Yuga) calender ( R. 32; Y. 5 ). In other words, it did not fall
within the scope of the Vedanga Jyoti~ha and there is nothing sur-
prising if Vedanga gives us no rule on the point. Not so with the
Moon. The Vedanga lunar month ( of two lunar pakshas ) contains
1
:;o or 29.5161290 .. days; whereas the average length thereof,.
according to modern research, is = 29.5305887.. . . days. The
Vedanga month is thus shorter than the more accurate modern
mean by .0144597 .. of a day, which is equal to 20.82 minutes,.
= 8.719 .... ( Vedanga) ka/as or= 1.793 .... amshas of a
day, (a day being made of 124 amshas as in the Vedanga ). The
error for a parvan or a paksha would be half of this; and at this:
rate it would amount to a day after 138 pakshas ( 69 lunar
months ), or about 53.8 ( or in round numbers 54 ) ghatis.
( n.idi-kas) in a Vedanga Yuga of 124 pakshas. In a calendar
prepared according to the Vedanga rules, the calculated full and
new Moons would, therefore, fall behind the actual nearly by a
day towards the end of Yuga; and the Yajnikas, .for whom the
V edanga rules were intended, could not have failed to mark it as.
they must have carefully watched the full and the new moon, as
actual celestial phenomena, owing to their sacrificial importance.
Here was an error which the Vedanga calender was bound to
notice; for otherwise all the calculated full Moons for the rest
of the Yuga would go wrong, thus rendering the calendar
entirely useless. All the students of the Vedanga are, therefore, of
opinion that this error must have been somehow or other provided
for, though they have not been able to discover the specific way.
As the error amounts to about 54 ghatis, that is, six ghatis less
than a day, per Yuga Kri~Jhl).ashastri Go~bole thought that one
more day was added to the second intercalary month of a Yuga,
and that this correction was omitted at the end of every tenth
Yuga to compensate for the excess of 6 ghatis included therein,
( See page 32 of his pamphlet on The Antiquity of the Vedas,
1882 ). He went even so far as to predict that his suggestion about
these corrections ' would be found to be true as the careful study
of the Vaidik and the post-Vaidik works would advance' .. The
late Mr. Shankar Ba~kri~hv.a Dikshit, writing on the same subject
in his History of Indian Astronomy ( p. 92 ), has further observed
that though the Vedanga Yuga was made to consist only of.1830
days for facility of arithmetical calculations, yet the full Moon