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

THE COWS' WALK. 221 5, 3-4; and if deva-puraḥ means 'days,' the puraḥ (cities, for- tresses) of Shambara may well be taken to mean 'nights.' This view is confirmed by the statement in the Aitareya Brāh- maṇa, previously quoted, which says that the Asuras found shelter with the night, or, in other words, the darkness of the night was, so to say, their fortress. Indra's destroying a hundred forts of Shambara is, therefore, equivalent to his fighting with the enemy for a hundred continuous nights, a period during which the ancient sacrificers offered him Soma libations in order that he may be better prepared for the struggle with Vala. The destruction of 99 or 100 forts of the enemy, a group of a hundred nightly sacrifices, the nine and ninety rivers (sravantīḥ) which Indra is described as crossing during his fight with Ahi (I, 32, 14), and a hundred leather straps with which Kutsa is said to have bound down Indra to his sacrifice in the Tāṇḍya Brāhmaṇa IX, 2, 22, and from which he is invoked to free himself in Ṛig. X, 38, 5, are but so many different kaleidoscopic views of the same idea which makes Indra and Indra alone the lord of a hundred sacrifices; and if we take all these together they undoubtedly point out to the existence of a hundred conti- nuous nights in the ancient home of the ancestors of the Vedic people. In V, 48, 3, 'a hundred,' moving in the abode of Indra, are said to turn on and turn off the course of ordinary days when Indra strikes Vṛitra with his bolt ;* and I think we have here a distinct allusion either to a hundred sacrifices performed or to a hundred continuous nights required for securing a complete victory over the powers of darkness in the nether world, and which nights (or rather one long night of hundred days) may well be described as breaking off and bringing back the succession of ordinary days and nights, inasmuch as the long night immediately follows and precedes the period of sunshine in the Arctic regions.

• Ṛig. V, 48, 3,—आ ग्रावभिरहन्येभिरर्किभिर्वरिहं वज्रमा जिघर्ति मायिनि । शतं वा यस्य प्रचरन्त्स्वे दमे संवर्तयन्तो वि च वर्तयन्नहा ॥