अगस्त्य Agastya

Burgess: 'Agastya is α Navis, or Canopus, a star of the first magnitude, and one of the most brilliant in the southern heavens' (his 'α Argūs/α Navis' = modern α Carinae); identification 'correctly pointed out by Colebrooke'.

Agastya = Canopus is universally accepted (Colebrooke, As. Res. IX; Burgess's Sūrya-siddhānta notes p. 245: 'Agastya is α Navis, or Canopus'). Bṛhat Saṃhitā ch. 12 (Agastyacārādhyāya) is devoted to its heliacal rising; Agastya is named in BS 12.7, 12.11, 12.12, 12.13, 12.19; BS 12.14 fixes its heliacal rising at Ujjayinī, and 12.21 its rising/setting against Hastā/Rohiṇī. Iyer translates the name throughout as 'Canopus'.

Universal identification in the Siddhanta tradition. Bhāskara gives polar longitude 87° (sapta-nāga), polar latitude 77° south (turaga-adri); his Vāsanābhāṣya on v.16 adds that Agastya is invisible where the terrestrial latitude exceeds 37° ('यस्मिन् देशे सप्तत्रिशदधिकाः पलांशास्तत्रागस्त्यो न दृश्यते'). Verse 12 calls it 'muni' (the sage). The 1861 public-domain volume (Sūrya Siddhānta portion, same tradition) prints 'Agastya (Canopus)' explicitly (p.63, 68). D. Arkasomayaji's translation of this very verse also glosses 'Agastya (Canopus)'.

Two new Purāṇic attestations with distinct content: (a) Bhāgavata 5.23.7 places Agasti on the UPPER JAW of the Śiśumāra — a body-part assignment; (b) Viṣṇu P. 2.8.85 and Vāyu 50.208 use Agastya as the SOUTHERN LATITUDE MARKER bounding the Pitṛyāṇa, which is astronomically apt for Canopus, the brightest star of the far south. Neither text states the Canopus equation; it rests on universal later tradition.

The lexicon groups Agastya immediately after Dhruva, i.e. it treats the two as the paired southern and northern markers. Colebrooke's footnote calls Agastya 'regent of the star Canopus' — the earliest public-domain English statement of the identification.

Listed among the stars needing only 13 kālāṃśas of distance from the sun to be visible — i.e. the brightest class. Burgess notes this class 'is, indeed, almost wholly composed of stars of the first magnitude'. Independently corroborated by al-Bīrūnī, who gives 13° for Suhail (Canopus) heading the identical list. THREE FURTHER WITNESSES with coordinates: Brahmagupta (Bhagrahayutyadhikāra 35–37) gives dhruva 27° Gemini = 87°, śara 77° S, arc 12° — far better than SS 8.11's 90°/80° S (true c. 85°04'/75°50' S); Varāhamihira's Pañcasiddhāntikā XIV.39–41 implies 75°30' S, which Thibaut reverse-engineered from the rule and which is the best ancient figure of all; and the Graha-Lāghava (1520) has 80°/76° S, correct in latitude but as wrong in longitude as the Sūrya Siddhānta, in the opposite direction. Burgess: 'The Siddhanta-Çiromani and (according to Colebrooke) the Brahma-Siddhanta give Agastya 87° of polar longitude, and 77° of latitude, which is a fair approximation to the truth.'

Transcribed from the Devanagari OCR of the printed edition at shloka_source_url (Achyuta Nand Jha ed., vol. 1) and checked word-for-word against two further independent scans of two different printed editions of the same commentary — Krishna Chandra Dvivedi's (https://archive.org/download/brihatsamhitawithbhattotpalavivrittipartidr.krishnachandradvivedi/Brihat%20Samhita%20%20with%20Bhattotpala%20Vivritti%20Part%20I%20-%20Dr.%20Krishna%20Chandra%20Dvivedi_djvu.txt) and A.V. Tripathi's (https://archive.org/download/JiUm_brihat-samhita-part-1-of-varaha-mihira-by-avadh-bihari-tripathi-saraswati-bhavan-granthamala/Brihat%20Samhita%20Part%201%20of%20Varaha%20Mihira%20by%20Avadh%20Bihari%20Tripathi%20-%20Saraswati%20Bhavan%20Granthamala_djvu.txt). Only glyph-level OCR artifacts that all three scans show to be artifacts (e.g. OCR रद्वव for रद्गव, श्व for श्च) have been normalised; every substantive reading is as scanned, and the two places where the scans genuinely differ are flagged in identification_notes.

Utpala's ch. 12 adds no new NAME for Canopus — the epithets Kumbhasambhava, Maitrāvaruṇi, Muni and Lopāmudrāvallabha already in the database do not occur there, and his one epithet-gloss is on Varāhamihira's own 'varuṇāṅgaruh' (BS 12.13), which he explains simply as 'the son of Varuṇa'. What he does add is two independent VISIBILITY data-points that corroborate the Canopus identification. (1) PARĀŚARA, quoted at the end of the chapter: 'hasta-sthe savitary udeti rohiṇī-saṃsthe praviśati' — Agastya rises when the Sun is in Hasta and disappears when the Sun is in Rohiṇī. (2) The SAMĀSA-SAṂHITĀ, Varāhamihira's own lost epitome, quoted on 12.14: Agastya becomes visible at Ujjayinī when the true Sun is seven degrees short of Virgo. Both fit a very bright star far to the south, and Utpala himself concedes at 12.21 that 'the computation does not agree' with the rule Varāhamihira took over from earlier śāstra — a rare admission that the traditional date had drifted, which is exactly what precession does to a star at Canopus's declination. Utpala also preserves Parāśara's colour-omens for the star (red-rough, tawny, smoky, madder, blue), evidence that it was observed low and reddened near the horizon.

Devanāgarī from Sanskrit Wikisource, which prints मत्स्याणां for मत्स्यानाम् (a typo) and de-sandhis the ending. Both GRETIL texts read 'sūrya-tiṣya-agastya-matsyānāṃ ya upadhāyāḥ' / 'sūrya-tiṣya-agastya-matsyā-n-āṃ y-aḥ upa-dhā-y-āḥ'. I quote the Devanāgarī as fetched and flag the error rather than emending.

READ THIS CAREFULLY — the dating claim here is weaker than it looks. Agastya occurs exactly ONCE in the Aṣṭādhyāyī, at 6.4.149 sūrya-tiṣya-agastya-matsyānāṃ ya upadhāyāḥ, a purely phonological rule eliding the penultimate y of sūrya, tiṣya, agastya and matsya before certain affixes (giving saura, taiṣa, āgasta, mātsa). The grouping with Sūrya and Tiṣya is suggestive — two of the four words in the list are unambiguously celestial — but the sūtra says nothing about a star, and both Kātyāyana's vārttikas on it (as reported by Vasu) and the Kāśikā treat tiṣya/puṣya as the asterism pair while treating agastya as an ordinary stem, with agastya listed elsewhere in the gargādi gaṇa on 4.1.105 as a gotra/ṛṣi name. So this attests the WORD Agastya at c. 500–350 BCE; it does not attest Agastya as a star name, and it must not be cited as if it did. The star sense is well attested from the Sūrya Siddhānta and elsewhere as the database already records.

Devanagari transcribed by the compiler from the page FACSIMILE (archive.org scan leaf n221 = printed p. 119) because the archive.org OCR of this volume is unusable for Devanagari; the page image itself was fetched in this session at https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.292705/page/n221.jpg . Every numeral was re-read at full scan resolution. Cross-checked against a second, independent scan of the same Ray edition at https://archive.org/download/siddhantadarpanachandrashekarsimha1897_252_Z/ , which agrees character for character on the figures. Round brackets and the figures in them are the PRINTED EDITION'S own: (n) is the serial number of the asterism/star, the figure after it the edition's decoding of the preceding bhūtasaṅkhyā word-numeral, so no numeral has been silently converted here. A handful of the compound word-forms in this worn 1899 type are uncertain and are marked in this database as read, not emended; the FIGURES, which carry the astronomy, were verified at high magnification in both scans.

★ THE BEST CANOPUS LATITUDE IN THE WHOLE SANSKRIT SERIES, AND AN EXPLICIT DISCUSSION OF WHY THE INHERITED FIGURES NO LONGER FIT. Sāmanta (XII.35) gives Agastya a dhruva of 85° and a śara of 75° SOUTH, with an apparent disc of 18 vikalās (XII.36), and adds that the dhruva must be corrected westward by the ayanāṃśa to be true. Canopus's real polar latitude in 1870 is 75°59' S: Sāmanta's 75° beats the Sūrya Siddhānta's 80°, Varāhamihira's implied c. 75°30' being the only comparable figure, and equals or betters Brahmagupta's, Bhāskara's and Vaṭeśvara's 77°. Vaṭeśvara (VIII.2.3, 9) gives dhruvaka 27° of Gemini = 87° with śara 77° south, i.e. exactly Brahmagupta's pair; the true polar longitude for 904 CE in Vaṭeśvara's own frame is 85°13', so his 87° is 1°47' high where the Sūrya Siddhānta's 90° is 4°47' high. Sāmanta's longitude is the weak point — the true polar longitude of Canopus in HIS frame in 1870 is only 72°38', 12° below his 85° — and he evidently knew there was a problem: XII.37–40 sets out the discrepancy explicitly. He notes that the Saura (Sūrya Siddhānta) formerly gave Agastya's dhruva as THREE SIGNS (90°), that the Siddhānta Śiromaṇi gives 87°, stated 'by the wise Bhāskara in the Kali year 4251' (= 1150 CE, the correct date of the Siddhānta Śiromaṇi), and that 718 years later a difference of 7°30' is now SEEN, with 11°30' arising from the ayanāṃśa. The observation is real: because the polar longitude of a far-southern star drifts against the sidereal frame as the equator precesses, Canopus's polar longitude actually fell by about 7°24' between 1150 and 1869 — almost exactly the 7°30' Sāmanta reports as observed. This is a nineteenth-century Indian astronomer catching, quantifying and dating a real secular change in an inherited coordinate.

THIS IS RAW OCR, QUOTED VERBATIM AND NOT SILENTLY EMENDED. The only machine-readable text of this volume is the Internet Archive's OCR of the 1957 Trivandrum Sanskrit Series scan, and it is corrupt at roughly one word in eight; the ellipsis marks c. 400 characters of intervening OCR omitted for length. The normalised reading, supplied editorially by the compiler and NOT verbatim from any e-text, is: 'ताराणां छायानयने उदयास्तमयकालानयने च सायनांशेभ्यः स्वयोगभागेभ्य एवापक्रमानयनम् अयनदर्शनसंस्कारो वेष्यते ... तेषां सर्वेषामपि योगभागाः स्वस्वविक्षेपाश्च ‘क्षितिरवियोगाद्’ इति वक्ष्यमाणप्रकारेणैवानेयाः । तेषाम् आदित्यासन्नानां चोदयास्तमयभागाश्च परीक्ष्यैव ज्ञेयाः । तत्राश्विन्यादीनां प्रसिद्धानाम् अगस्त्यादीनां च योगभागविक्षेपोदयास्तमयभागाश्च पठिताः । तथा च सूर्यसिद्धान्ते ॥ ४६ ॥'. On the critical word: the OCR string contains the sequence गस्त्य inside भरसिद्धानापगस्त्यादीनां, which reads प्रसिद्धानाम् अगस्त्यादीनाम् — the initial अ of अगस्त्य is absorbed into the preceding °नाम् by sandhi and is not separately visible, so the full form अगस्त्य is here an expansion of गस्त्य rather than a clean OCR hit. The reading is nonetheless secure, because the SAME volume prints अगस्त्य in full and uncorrupted twice in the passage under Golapāda 4.48 (see the following entry), and no other Sanskrit word ending °गस्त्यादीनाम् is plausible in this context. The verse being commented on is confirmed as Āryabhaṭīya 4.46 because the volume prints it in full ('प्रग्रहणान्ते धूम्रः, खण्डग्रहणे शशी भवति कृष्णः...॥४६॥') and follows this passage with 4.47 ('सूर्येन्दुपरिधियोगेऽर्कांशभागो भवत्यनादेश्यः...॥४७॥'), both matching the GRETIL mūla exactly. Nīlakaṇṭha's commentary on 4.46 runs to c. 33,000 characters; this star material sits at its very end.

Nīlakaṇṭha names Agastya in a technical context that fixes it as an extra-zodiacal star treated exactly like the 27 yogatārās: he is explaining how to compute the SHADOW (chāyā) and the times of heliacal RISING AND SETTING (udayāstamaya-kāla) of the tārās, and he groups 'the well-known [stars] beginning with Agastya' (prasiddhānām agastyādīnām) alongside 'those beginning with Aśvinī' (aśvinyādīnām, i.e. the nakṣatra junction-stars) as bodies for which polar longitude (yogabhāga), latitude (vikṣepa) and rising-setting degrees 'have been recited', citing the Sūrya Siddhānta. He supplies no coordinates himself, so this is an attestation of the NAME and of its status as a catalogued star, not an independent identification. That he says the rising and setting degrees of stars near the sun must be settled by observation (parīkṣyaiva jñeyāḥ) is notable, since Agastya is precisely such a star. Identification as Canopus is certain and follows the Sūrya Siddhānta tradition he is citing, not anything new in this passage.

RAW OCR, QUOTED VERBATIM AND NOT SILENTLY EMENDED, from the same Internet Archive scan as the previous entry. The normalised reading, supplied editorially by the compiler and NOT verbatim from any e-text, is: 'तस्मात् प्रसिद्धा एव अश्विन्यादयस्तारा अगस्त्यादयः सप्तर्ष्युदयश्च । अस्तु वा अश्विन्यादीनां वाजिमुखाद्याकृतिस्मरणाद् ज्योतिःशास्त्रोक्तलक्षणेनैव तन्निर्णयः । स्मर्यन्ते च ब्रह्मगर्गमयादिभिः स्वप्रणीतेषु ज्योतिषे सप्तविंशतिनक्षत्रारूढा ज्योतिश्चक्रप्रदेशविशेषाः, अगस्त्याद्यारूढाश्च । तेन ... तत्तद्विक्षेपयोगकलाद्वारेण शङ्कुयष्टिधनुश्चक्रादिभिर्यन्त्रैः प्रत्यक्षपरीक्षणेनैव तन्निर्णयः स्यात् ।'. IMPORTANT: अगस्त्य is clean in the OCR at both occurrences and is NOT reconstructed. By contrast सपष्योदय is corrupt; the compiler reads it as सप्तर्ष्युदय ('the rising of the Saptarṣi'), which is near-certain on sense and idiom but IS an emendation — a direct search for सप्तर्षि in this volume returns zero, so the Saptarṣi attestation should be treated as probable rather than verified. अचिन्यादय / वानिभादीनां are certainly अश्विन्यादयः / अश्विन्यादीनाम्. The passage's location under Golapāda 4.48 was fixed by verse-marker positions: it lies between the printed verse 'क्षितिरवियोगाद् दिनकृद् रवीन्दुयोगाद् प्रसाधितश्चेन्दुः । शशितारग्रहयोगाच् तथैव ताराग्रहाः सर्वे ॥ ४८ ॥' and the closing ॥४८॥ of its commentary. Page numbering in the OCR is unreliable.

A second, quite different attestation in the same work: here Agastya appears not in a computational rule but in an epistemological digression on HOW a star's name comes to denote that star. Commenting on Āryabhaṭīya 4.48 — the verse directing that the sun be determined from its conjunction with the earth, the moon from the sun, and the star-planets from the moon — Nīlakaṇṭha asks how the name–object relation (saṃjñā-saṃjñi-sambandha) for asterisms is known. An objector holds that it comes from Vedic sentences alone, citing 'ṣaṭ kṛttikā nakṣatram' (the Kṛttikās are six) and 'amī ye subhage divi vicṛtau nāma tārake' (those two stars in the sky, O fair one, named Vicṛtau). Nīlakaṇṭha replies that śruti cannot point with a finger, so the relation is learned from ordinary usage as with any common object, and concludes that the stars beginning with Aśvinī, those beginning with Agastya, and the rising of the Saptarṣi are simply prasiddha — well known. He then notes that Brahmā, Garga, Maya and others record particular regions of the star-circle as fixed upon the 27 nakṣatras 'and upon Agastya etc.', and that the identification is finally settled by direct observation with the gnomon (śaṅku), staff (yaṣṭi) and bow-instrument (dhanur-yantra) via each body's latitude and longitude in minutes. This passage is the single strongest evidence that the Āryabhaṭa tradition in Kerala knew and used extra-zodiacal star names; note nonetheless that Agastya is invoked as a stock example of a well-known star, and no coordinate for it is given anywhere in the work.

Devanagari from Sanskrit Wikisource; word-for-word identical with GRETIL.

Agastya here is a fixed point of the sky used to name a solstice: 'agastya-cihnād ayanāt', 'from the ayana (solar half-year / solstitial turning-point) MARKED BY Agastya'. Nandargikar glosses it 'from that side of the equator which is marked by Agastya, i.e. the South', and states elsewhere that 'Agastya, e.g., is identified with the principal star in the southern constellation of Canopus'. The passage describes the onset of summer heat as the sun turns north. This bears on the database's Vedic finding that the Rgvedic Agastya is always the SAGE: by Kalidasa the star-sense is standard poetic currency, and it is the sense he uses whenever the word does seasonal or directional work (also 4.44, 'the quarter traversed by Agastya' = the south), while in the Rama cantos (6.61, 13.36, 15.54, 16.72) the sage is meant.

IAST from GRETIL with the inline variant '(samavehi c ca samehi)' resolved to samavehi; the GRETIL 'alt' e-text reads 'saṃvardhayitrī samavehi devīmagastyajuṣṭāṃ diśamaprayātām'.

'the quarter frequented by Agastya' (agastyajuṣṭāṃ diśam) = the south = the realm of death; the queen has not gone there, i.e. is not yet dead. Recorded as DISPUTED because at this date the southern quarter is Agastya's on account of the SAGE's legendary journey south as much as on account of the star, and Asvaghosa supplies no observational marker - no rising, no season, no light. Contrast Raghuvamsa 4.21 and 16.44, where udayāt and ayanāt force the star-sense. This is the transitional usage the database's Rgveda finding predicts.