कृत्तिका Kṛttikā

Burgess: if 'southern' (v. 18) were strict it would be Atlas (27 Tau) or Merope (23 Tau), but 'the defined position agrees best with Alcyone, nor can we hesitate to regard this as actually the junction-star'.

Heads the oldest nakshatra list; deity Agni. Universally identified with the Pleiades. Eggeling and Whitney both gloss Krittikas = Pleiades. Also attested TB 1.5.1.1 ('agneḥ kṛttikāḥ'), TB 3.1.1.1, ŚB 2.1.2.1-5, AV 19.7.2.

The famous archaeoastronomical passage: the Krittikas 'do not swerve from the eastern quarter'. The Pleiades rose due east (on the celestial equator) c. 3000-2500 BCE, which S.B. Dikshit (1895) used to date the ŚB; the dating argument (not the star identification) is disputed, since 'not swerving from the east' may be an approximation. ŚB 2.1.2.2 also notes they are the most numerous asterism (other nakshatras have 1-4 stars).

SIX stars, razor-shaped (kṣura-saṃsthāna), deity Agni, gotra Vaiśyāyanīya. The count of six bears directly on the seven individually-named Kṛttikās already on file: the Buddhist tradition counts six visible Pleiades, matching the widespread 'lost Pleiad' motif. The verse recension of the same chapter repeats it: ṣaṭtārāṃ kṛttikāṃ vidyāt.

IAST verbatim from the GRETIL Mahābhāṣya plaintext (text in pausā). Pāṇini's indirect witness reads ४.२.२३ विभाषा फाल्गुनीस्रवणाकार्त्तिकीचैत्रीभ्यः (Sanskrit Wikisource; GRETIL 'alt': 'vibhāṣā phālgunī-sravaṇā-kārttikī-caitrī-bhyaḥ'). The gaṇapāṭha line reads 'अंशु। जन। राजन्। उष्ट्र। खेटक। अजिर। आर्द्रा। श्रवण। कृत्तिका। अर्ध। पुर। अंश्वादिः।'

IMPORTANT DISTINCTION, and the most interesting negative in this source. The name Kṛttikā does NOT occur in Pāṇini's sūtra text; his word for this asterism is Bahulā (4.3.34, see that entry). Pāṇini does however derive the full-moon name Kārttikī at 4.2.23, which presupposes a base kṛttikā, so the name existed in his language even though he never uses it directly for the asterism. Kṛttikā appears explicitly in (a) the gaṇapāṭha, aṃśvādi gaṇa on 6.2.193, and (b) Patañjali, who cites kṛttikā-rohiṇyaḥ twice (on 1.2.63 and in Kātyāyana's vārttika on 2.2.34). Patañjali's use, and Kātyāyana's before him, is the datable attestation: c. 150 BCE and c. 3rd c. BCE respectively. The vārttika on 2.2.34 puts Kṛttikā first in the pair by natural sequence, consistent with the Kṛttikā-headed nakṣatra list.

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) 35°15', śara (polar latitude) 4°15' north. 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 6 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: η Tau 35°02' / 4°09'. VAṬEŚVARA-SIDDHĀNTA VIII.2.1–2 (904 CE) puts the same junction star at Go (Taurus) 7½° (= 37°30' measured from the sidereal origin) with a śara of 5°00' north (VIII.2.5–6, direction by VIII.2.8).

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. 3 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 Go (Taurus) 7½° — Vaṭeśvara states the dhruvakas as degrees WITHIN each zodiacal sign, not as absolute longitudes, so this is 37°30' from the sidereal origin — and its kṣepa (polar latitude, VIII.2.5–6) as 5°00', north 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: η Tau 38°45' / 4°08'. For comparison Sāmanta (1869) gives 35°15' / 4°15' north. 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, T21.0404c10: 「昴有六星，形如散花，於十二時與月俱行，祭則用酪，火神主之，姓毘舍延。」 | 舍頭諫太子二十八宿經 T21n1301, T21.0415b06: 「厥名稱宿，有六要星，其形像加，晝夜周行，三十須臾而侍從矣，以酪為食，主乎火天，姓號居火。」 | Yang Jingfeng's interlinear note in T21n1299 at T21.0388c13: 「景風曰：中國天文，昴七星，主胡兵，西方之宿也。然今案經文，說星多不與中國相符，覽者遽生疑惑，今請依中國天文二圖，其星於脚下發，讀之者高明則心無所昧矣」

Chinese lunar lodge (xiu) 昴 Mao; T1301 renders the name semantically as 名稱 ('Renown'). SIX stars and a RAZOR-figure, agreeing exactly with the Śārdūlakarṇāvadāna's ṣaṭtāraṃ kṣura-saṃsthānaṃ … agnidaivataṃ vaiśyāyanīyaṃ gotreṇa … dadhy-āhāram already in the database. All three Chinese witnesses give six, i.e. six visible Pleiades, not seven; T1300 renders the gotra phonetically as 毘舍延 = Vaiśyāyana, an exact match for vaiśyāyanīya. T1299's own Tang commentator flags the clash: 'In Chinese astronomy Mao has seven stars.' The razor-figure survives only in T1299; T1300 has 'scattered flowers'. T1299's gotra 某尼裴苦 is corrupt in the Taishō (某 marks a defective graph).

CE lines 03,219.011a/011c and 06,003.026a/026c, quoted here as one composite; they are from two different parvans. The śakaṭākāra reading is the Critical Edition's; Ganguli's vulgate has a seven-headed Kṛttikā instead.

Two independent epic data. (a) At the end of the Abhijit episode the Kṛttikās go to the third heaven and 'that asterism, whose deity is Fire, shines CART-SHAPED (śakaṭākāra)'. Śakaṭa is the standard later shape-word for Rohiṇī, not for Kṛttikā, so the CE reading is an anomalous and potentially archaic datum; Ganguli's vulgate instead reads that it 'shines as if with seven heads', i.e. the ordinary seven-Pleiad description. The deity Agni is standard. (b) At Bhīṣma 6.3.26 Kṛttikā is called 'nakṣatra prathama', THE FIRST ASTERISM — the Kṛttikā-ādi list, corroborating the Taittirīya/Atharvan order rather than the Dhaniṣṭhā-ādi order named three chapters' worth of text earlier in the Vana Parva.

The Krttikas here are the foster-mothers whose breasts Sadanana (six-faced Skanda) drank at once - the myth that makes the Pleiades six or seven women. Rama showed no partiality among his stepmothers, 'like the leader of the armies among the Krttikas'. This is the mythological personification rather than a naked star-observation, but the referent is the asterism.