116 



G. TLibaut — On the Suri/aprajnapti. 



[No. 3, 



would not justify the conclusion o£ the author of the work having been 

 acquainted with twenty-seven nakshatras only. Nay, even the author of a 

 treatise like the Vedanga who throughout speaks of 27 nakshatras only 

 may have done this simply because he meant his work to be an elementary 

 one, unencumbered by the assumption of 28 nakshatras of unequal extent. 

 In the second place the distinct statement that the old writers on astronomy 

 made use of Abhijit solely when greater accuracy was aimed at, and that 

 they then made its extent to correspond to the excess of a sidereal month 

 above twenty-seven days, certainly seems to point to the conclusion that 

 the introduction of Abhijit into the circle of the nakshatras was an after- 

 thought, consequent on the improved knowledge of the length of the moon's 

 periodical revolution. With regard to the books in which, according to 

 Bhaskara and Brahmagupta, the division of the sphere into 28 nakshatras 

 of unequal extent was taught in addition to the simpler division into 27 

 equal nakshatras, we have to remark that the Siirya-siddhanta known to us 

 contains no such statement ; the Saura-siddhanta of Brahmagupta may 

 have been a different work. "VVe are unable to control the statement with 

 regard to the Eomaka, Paulisa, Vasishtha-Siddhantas. Of Garga, how- 

 ever, we know from quotations several passages bearing on the point in 

 question: in the first place, the passage quoted by Bhattotpala (in his com- 

 mentary an Varaha Mihira's Brihatsamhita, IV, 7 ; see Weber, Nakshatras, 

 I, p. 309), which corroborates Bhaskara's statement regarding the different 

 extent of the Nakshatras, is, however, silent about Abhijit. As the passage 

 stands, it would lead us to infer that Garga divided the whole circle into 

 twenty-seven parts, the extent of fifteen of which is equal to one, of six to 

 one half and of six to one and a half. The quotation may, however, be 

 incomplete, and at any rate we have Brahmagupta's and Bhaskara's word 

 for Abhijit having been acknowledged by Garga too. However this may 

 be, that Garga, as a rule, introduced into his calculations neither Abhijit 

 nor the inequality of the extent of the twenty-seven nakshatras, appears 

 from the places which he assigns to the sun at the two solstices, viz., at 

 the beginning of Dhanishtha and the middle of Aslesha ; for if we calculate 

 the place of the summer solstice by starting from the beginning of Dha- 

 nishtha and making use of the unequal extent of the nakshatras, we obtain 

 as place of the summer solstice not the middle of Aslesha but rather the 

 end of it or the beginning of Magha. 



To return. The special difficulty by which we are met when attempting 

 to compare the places assigned to the solstices in the Suryaprajnapti with 

 the places which they occupy according to Garga and the Vedanga on one 

 hand and the Siddhantas on the other hand, lies in the circumstance of our 

 not knowing exactly how the two divisions of the sphere — the one into 27 

 nakshatras of equal extent, the other into 28 of unequal extent — were made 



