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

224 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS, time " signifies the time during which the battle is fought and at the termination of which Tishtrya comes to the faithful ; and the passage, therefore, means (1) that the "appointed time," when Tishtrya was to appear before man after fighting with Apaosha, varied from one night to a hundred nights, and (2) that Tishtrya required to be strengthened during the period by Haoma sacri- fices in which he was to be invoked by his own name. We have seen above that a hundred nightly Soma sacrifices were offered to Indra by the ancient Vedic sacrificers to enable him to secure a victory over Vṛitra, and that Indra was the only deity to whom the libations were offered in these sacrifices. The legend of Tishtrya and Apaosha is, therefore, an exact reproduction of Indra's fight with Vṛitra or Vala ; and with this correspondence before us, we should feel no hesitation in accepting the view stated above regarding the origin of the Shata-râtra sacrifice. Neither Darmesteter nor Spiegel explains why the appointed time for the appearance of Tishtrya is described as " one night, or two nights, or fifty, or a hundred nights," though both trans- late the original in the same way. The legend also forms the subject of chapter VII of the Bundahish, but there, too, we find no explanation as to why the appointed time is described as varying from one to a hundred nights. It is, however, suggested by some that the appointed time may refer to the season of rains. But rains cannot be said to come after "one night, two nights, or fifty, or a hundred nights," and the latter expression would, therefore, be utterly inappropriate in their case ; nor, as stated above, does Tishtrya's fight with Apaosha represent only a struggle for rain, since we know that it is a struggle for light as well. We have also seen that the existence of night-sacrifices in the Vedic literature, extending over one, two, three, or ten, or a hundred nights, indi- cates the long darkness during which Indra fought with Vala ; and the coincidence between this fact and the 'appointed time,'