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आग्रहायणी Āgrahāyaṇī

Meissa · λ Orionis · Orion

nakshatra aliasidentification certainattestations 2 Meissa λ OriHIP 26207mag 3.39

Attestations

Lexicons, Nirukta & Buddhist · c. 6th century CE
मृगशीर्षं मृगशिरस्तस्मिन्नेवाग्रहायणी ॥ १.३.२२१ ॥
'Orion.' — H.T. Colebrooke (1808)

Third name of Mṛgaśiras, 'she who begins the year' — a fossil of the era when the year opened at the Mṛgaśiras full moon, and so a chronological datum in its own right. Amarakośa's tasminn eva ('in that very asterism') makes the equation explicit. Source of the month-name Mārgaśīrṣa/Agrahāyaṇa.

Amarakośa 1.3.221 (Dig-varga) · text · translation
Pāṇini & Patañjali · c. 500–350 BCE (sūtra); c. 150 BCE (Mahābhāṣya)
४.२.२२ आग्रहायणी अश्वत्थात् ठक् ।

Devanāgarī from Sanskrit Wikisource; GRETIL: 'āgrahāyaṇy-aśvatthāṭ ṭhak'. Patañjali's lines read '(p_2,3.28) ka_i,455.4-456. 5 {15/44} kārtikyāḥ āgrahāyaṇī māse .' and '{37/44} kārttikyāḥ prabhṛti āgrahāyaṇī māsa iti .'

22. The affix [ṭhak] comes in the sense of the locative case after the words 'agrahayani' and 'asvattha' … being the name of a full-moon night. … Thus [āgrahāyaṇikaḥ] 'the month called Agrahayanika, i.e. in which the moon is full in the asterism of Agrahayana.' — Śrīśa Chandra Vasu (1896)

Another entry pushed back from the Amarakośa to Pāṇini. Three sūtras of Pāṇini's own: 4.2.22 āgrahāyaṇy-aśvatthāṭ ṭhak (expressly under the heading 'name of a full-moon night', 4.2.21), 4.3.50 saṃvatsara-āgrahāyaṇībhyāṃ ṭhañ ca, and 5.4.110 nadī-paurṇamāsy-āgrahāyaṇībhyaḥ. Patañjali uses it repeatedly as a live calendar term — on 2.3.28 'kārtikyāḥ āgrahāyaṇī māse' ('Āgrahāyaṇī is a month away from Kārttikī'), which fixes the interval between the two full moons and thus indirectly the position of the asterism; and on 1.1.23 he quotes the 5.4.110 phrase. Āgrahāyaṇī also appears in the gaurādi gaṇa on 4.1.41. Note that the underlying asterism, Mṛgaśīrṣa, is NEVER named in the Aṣṭādhyāyī — Pāṇini has only the derived full-moon name.

Aṣṭādhyāyī 4.2.22; Patañjali, Mahābhāṣya on 2.3.28 (Kielhorn i.455.4-456.5) · text · translation

See also

Mṛgaśīrṣa, Ilvalāḥ