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

VEDIC MYTHS—THE MATUTINAL DEITIES. 325 to invent a new meaning for dasha and make Indra bite his enemy on the battle-field. If we compare the phrase dasha- prapitve with ahnaḥ prapitve occurring in IV, 16, 12, and bear in mind the fact that both are used in connection with the legendary fight with Shuṣhṇa, we are naturally led to suppose that dasha-prapitve denotes, in all probability, the time of the contest, as ahnaḥ prapitve does in the other passage, and that dasha prapitve must be taken as equivalent to dashânâm prapitve and translated to mean “On the completion of the ten,” which can be done only by taking dasha-prapitve as a compound word. The grammatical construction being thus determined, the only question that remains is to decide whether dasha (ten) means ten days or ten months. A comparison with ahnaḥ prapitve may suggest “days,” but the fight with Shuṣhṇa cannot be regarded to have been fought every ten days. It is either annual or daily; and we are thus led to interpret dasha in the compound dasha- prapitve (or dashânâm when the compound is dissolved) as equivalent to ten months in the same way as the numeral dvâdashasya is interpreted to mean “of the twelfth month,” or dvâdashasya mâsasya in VII, 103, 9. The passage thus denotes the exact time when the wheel of the sun, or the solar orb, was stolen by Indra and utilized as a weapon of attack to demolish the demons of darkness. This was done at the end of ten months, or at the end of the old Roman year, or at the close of the sacrificial session of the Dashagvas who with Indra are said to have found the sun dwelling in darkness. The construction of the passage proposed above is not only natural and simple, but the sense it gives is in harmony with the mean- ing of similar other passages relating to the fight of Shuṣhṇa, and is far more rational than the current meaning which makes Indra bite his enemy in a rustic and unpre- cedented manner. It is the Pada text that is responsible for the present unnatural meaning; for if it had not split