हस्त Hasta

Five stars of Corvus. Burgess: v. 17's special description is 'quite hard to understand and apply: we regard it as most probable... that γ (3) is the star intended: the defined position... would point rather to δ (3)'. Colebrooke gave 'γ or δ Corvi'.

FIVE stars, hand-shaped (hasta-saṃsthāna), deity Sūrya, gotra Kāśyapa — the clearest possible confirmation of the Corvus identification and of the name's literal sense, and it settles that the asterism is the whole five-star figure whatever the yogatārā. The Amarakośa's Nānārtha-varga separately records that hasta has exactly two senses, 'hand' and 'the asterism'.

See the bahula entry for the three-witness collation of this sūtra.

Named by Pāṇini himself in the ten-asterism list at 4.3.34. No positional information is given, so the disputed identification is unaffected. Note that hasta also occurs many times in the Aṣṭādhyāyī and the Mahābhāṣya in its ordinary sense 'hand' (e.g. 3.3.40 hasta-ādāne); only 4.3.34 is the asterism.

Devanagari transcribed by the compiler from the page FACSIMILE of the Ray edition (Calcutta 1899), scan leaf n216 = printed p. 114–115: https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.292705/page/n216.jpg . The archive.org OCR of this volume is unusable for Devanagari, so no verse here is taken from the OCR text; every figure was re-read at full scan resolution and cross-checked against a second independent scan of the same edition (https://archive.org/download/siddhantadarpanachandrashekarsimha1897_252_Z/page/n217.jpg). Round brackets and the figures in them are the PRINTED EDITION'S own: (n) is the serial number of the asterism/star and the figure following it is the edition's decoding of the bhūtasaṅkhyā word-numeral that precedes it. These are the two printed segments of the dhruva list (vv. 2–6) and the śara list (vv. 7–10) that carry this asterism's own figures; the complete verses are given under db_id 'yogatara-catalog'.

SIDDHĀNTA DARPAṆA XII (Sāmanta, 1869): dhruva (polar longitude) 165°00', śara (polar latitude) 11°00' south. The direction comes from XII.11, which makes the śara southern for the asterisms numbered 4, 5, 6, 9, 13, 14, 16–21 and 24 and northern for all the rest; XII.12–13 give the asterism 5 star(s). TRUE VALUES for 1870 CE, reduced to Sāmanta's OWN sidereal zero (his Citrā = 179°, i.e. Spica; implied ayanāṃśa 22°12'), as polar longitude / polar latitude: δ Crv 164°06' / -13°17'; γ Crv 160°17' / -15°50'. VAṬEŚVARA-SIDDHĀNTA VIII.2.1–2 (904 CE) puts the same junction star at the 6th sign 20° (= 170°00' measured from the sidereal origin) with a śara of 11°00' south (VIII.2.5–6, direction by VIII.2.8). Sāmanta's 165° / 11° S is closer to δ Corvi (164°06' / 13°17' S) than to γ Corvi (160°17' / 15°50' S), which is nearly 5° away in longitude. His figure therefore favours δ Corvi over the γ Corvi of many modern lists. XII.20 makes the yogatārā the MIDDLE star of the five-star group.

This is the printed segment of the continuous dhruvaka list (VIII.2.1–2) that carries this star's own figure; the star's kṣepa is item no. 13 of the unbroken numeral run of VIII.2.5–6, which cannot be split, so the whole passage is also given verbatim under db_id 'yogatara-catalog'. Devanagari transcribed by the compiler from the page FACSIMILE of K. S. Shukla's INSA edition of the Sanskrit text, scan leaf n317 = printed p. 293: https://archive.org/download/VatesvaraSiddhantaSanskritText/page/n317.jpg . The archive.org OCR is unusable for Devanagari. The SQUARE brackets and the figures inside them are the EDITION'S own decoding of the bhūtasaṅkhyā word-numerals, reproduced here so that no numeral is silently converted. Shukla's English translation and notes are in copyright: they are neither quoted nor relied on here — only the constituted mūla text and the edition's numeric glosses.

VAṬEŚVARA-SIDDHĀNTA VIII.2 (904 CE) gives the junction star's dhruvaka (polar longitude) as the 6th sign 20° — Vaṭeśvara states the dhruvakas as degrees WITHIN each zodiacal sign, not as absolute longitudes, so this is 170°00' from the sidereal origin — and its kṣepa (polar latitude, VIII.2.5–6) as 11°00', south by the rule of VIII.2.8 (a verse the edition notes is identical with Brahmagupta's Khaṇḍakhādyaka I.9.13). TRUE VALUES for 904 CE reduced to Vaṭeśvara's own sidereal zero (his Citrā = 3° of Libra = 183°), as polar longitude / polar latitude: δ Crv 168°12' / -13°12'; γ Crv 164°28' / -15°46'. For comparison Sāmanta (1869) gives 165°00' / 11°00' south. Vaṭeśvara's list is essentially the inherited Sūrya-Siddhānta/Brahmagupta set: it is a fourth independent witness to those values rather than a fresh observation.

Verbatim parallels from the two earlier Chinese versions of the same Śārdūlakarṇāvadāna material, and the Tang commentator's note on the Chinese star-count: 摩登伽經 (Mātaṅga-sūtra) T21n1300, T21.0404c27: 「軫宿五星，形如人手，一日一夜共月俱行，稗穀祭之，姓奢摩延，屬咀吒神。」 | 舍頭諫太子二十八宿經 T21n1301, T21.0415b28: 「其象宿者，有五要星，其形類象，行三十須臾而侍從矣，韮子為食，主臥寐天，姓曰迦葉。」 | Yang Jingfeng's interlinear note in T21n1299 at T21.0389b21: 「景風曰：中國天文，軫四星，主車乘騎，南方之宿也」

Chinese lunar lodge (xiu) 軫 Zhen; T1301 renders the name semantically as 象 ('Elephant'). FIVE stars and a HAND-figure in both T1299 (形如手) and T1300 (形如人手), an exact match for the Śārdūlakarṇāvadāna's pañca-tāraṃ hasta-saṃsthānam and the clearest possible corroboration of the Corvus identification. T1301's gotra 迦葉 = Kāśyapa matches kāśyapaṃ gotreṇa exactly; T1299's 毘婆怛利 is a solar name (Vivasvat/Savitṛ) answering to sūrya-daivatam. THE VARIANT WORTH RECORDING is T1301, which alone calls the asterism 象 'Elephant' and gives it an elephant-figure — Dharmarakṣa read the name as hastin 'elephant' rather than hasta 'hand', c. 307 CE. Chinese astronomy gives Zhen four stars.