वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

THE COWS' WALK, 217

indicate the existence of an ancient year approximately divided into seven months' sunshine, one month's dawn, one month's evening twilight and three months' long continuous night. There are other considerations which point out to the same conclusion. In the post-Vedic literature we have a persistent tradition that Indra alone of all gods is the master of a hundred sacrifices (shata-kratu), and that as this attribute formed, so to say, the very essence of Indraship, he always jealously watch- ed all possible encroachments against it. But European scholars relying upon the fact that even Sâyaṇa prefers, except in a few places (III, 51, 2), to interpret shata-kratu, as applied to Indra in the Ṛig-Veda, as meaning, not 'the master of a hundred sacri- fices,' but 'the lord of a hundred mights or powers,' have not only put aside the Purâṇic tradition, but declined to interpret the word kratu in the Ṛig-Veda except in the sense of 'power, energy, skill, wisdom, or, generally speaking, the power of body or mind'. But if the above explanation of the origin of the night-sacrifices is correct, we must retrace our steps, and acknowledge that the Purâṇic tradition or legend is, after all, not built upon a pure misunderstanding of the original meaning of the epithet shata- kratu as applied to Indra in the Vedic literature. I am aware of the fact that traditions in the post-Vedic literature are often found to have but a slender basis in the Vedas, but in the present case we have something more reliable and tangible to go upon. We have a group, an isolated group of a hundred nightly Soma sacrifices, and as long as it stands unexplained in the Vedic sacrificial literature it would be unreasonable to decline to con- nect it with the Purâṇic tradition of Indra's sole mastership of a hundred sacrifices, especially when in the light of the Arc- tic theory the two can be so well and intelligibly connected. The hundred sacrifices, which are regarded as constituting the essence of Indraship in the Purâṇas, are there said to be the Ashvamedha sacrifices; and it may, at the outset, be urged