लुब्धक Lubdhaka

The word is absent from the Bṛhat Saṃhitā itself; the verse quoted is the Kathāsaritsāgara's, which the citation names.

Lubdhaka ('the Hunter') = Sirius is standard in Sanskrit lexica (Monier-Williams, s.v. lubdhaka: 'the star Sirius', citing the Gaṇitādhyāya and Kathāsaritsāgara) — but the word does NOT occur in the Bṛhat Saṃhitā: a search of the complete GRETIL e-text (Yano–Sugita, Tripathi ed.) finds no lubdhaka and no mṛgavyādha as a star. Classical attestations verified online: (1) Sūrya-siddhānta 8.10 locates the star under its synonym Mṛgavyādha ('deer-hunter'): अशीतिभागैर् याम्यायाम् अगस्त्यो मिथुनान्तगः / विम्शे च मिथुनस्याम्शे मृगव्याधो व्यवस्थितः (https://sa.wikisource.org/wiki/सूर्यसिद्धान्त_भग्रहयुत्यधिकारः); Burgess: 'Mrgavyadha, deer-hunter — it is also called Lubdhaka, hunter — is α Canis Majoris, or Sirius, the brightest of the fixed stars' (pp. 245–246). (2) Kathāsaritsāgara 6.2.88 (= taraṅga 28.88) is MW's literary citation for lubdhaka = Sirius (Triśaṅku raised to the sky), but Tawney (1880, vol. 1 p. 251) translates 'Was not the Chandala Trisanku carried to heaven by Visvamitra?', taking lubdhaka as 'outcaste hunter' — so the star sense in KSS is a lexicographers' reading, not undisputed. No Kālidāsa attestation of Lubdhaka as Sirius was found online.

Bhāskara's mūla uses 'Lubdhaka' (the Hunter) in vv.7-8 and 'mṛgaripu' (enemy of the deer) in v.12 ('भाना मुनेर्मृगरिपोरुदयास्तलग्ने'); the name Mṛgavyādha for the same star appears on the same page only in Nṛsiṃha Daivajña's Vārttika quoting Sūrya Siddhānta 9.12 ('स्वात्यगस्त्यमृगव्याधचित्राज्येष्ठाः पुनर्वसुः', sa.wikisource page 347). Values: polar longitude 86° (ṣaḍ-aṣṭau), polar latitude 40° south (nabho'mbhodhi). Iṣṭanāḍīs 2 1/6 nāḍī = 13 kālāṃśas per the Vāsanābhāṣya ('तत्र त्रयोदशा १३ कालांशाः'). 1861 PD volume: 'Mrigavyādha (Sirius)' (p.63).

IMPORTANT NEGATIVE RESULT: the Amarakośa does NOT list Lubdhaka or Mṛgavyādha among stars. Its only entry for lubdhaka is in the Śūdra-varga, where it is one of four synonyms for 'hunter' (vyādha, mṛgavadhājīva, mṛgayu, lubdhaka). The classical thesaurus therefore supplies the lexical basis of the Sirius-name — hunter of the Deer — but does not itself attest the astronomical use, which comes instead from the siddhāntas.

Lubdhaka and Mṛgavyādha are strictly synonymous in Brahmagupta's tradition: the heading of the verse in this edition reads 'idānīṃ lubdhakasya dhruvaśarāṃśān āha' — 'now he states the polar longitude and latitude degrees OF LUBDHAKA' — introducing the verse whose subject-word is mṛgavyādhaḥ. Pṛthūdaka's gloss on the chapter-scope verse likewise lists 'the risings and settings of the asterisms, of a planet, of Lubdhaka, and of the sage Agastya'. Śrīpati's Siddhāntaśekhara also uses Lubdhaka. This is the astronomical attestation the Amarakośa conspicuously lacks.

Devanagari transcribed by the compiler from the page FACSIMILE (archive.org scan leaf n219 = printed p. 117) 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/n219.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.

★ SĀMANTA SETTLES THE LUBDHAKA/MṚGAVYĀDHA QUESTION BY OBSERVATION. XII.25 describes, south of Devamātṛ's asterism (no. 7, Punarvasu, whose deity is Aditi the mother of the gods), 'a star exceeding all stars' (sarva-tārādhikā) with an apparent disc of 20 vikalās, dhruva 77°, and śara 40° south of the ecliptic. XII.26 then says that by the Sūrya Siddhānta's wording this star is determined to be the one called Lubdhaka and also Muni. Reduced to Sāmanta's own sidereal zero the true 1870 values for SIRIUS are polar longitude 76°51' and polar latitude 39°41' S — his figures are right to 9' and 19'. This is the best coordinate ever given for Sirius in a Sanskrit siddhānta: the Sūrya Siddhānta has 80°/40° S, Brahmagupta and Bhāskara II have 86°/40° S, and Vaṭeśvara has 80°/40° S. The 20-vikalā disc is also the largest he assigns to any star, matching its being the brightest. NOTE that Sāmanta uses 'Muni' — Brahmagupta's absolute name for Canopus — as an alternative name for Sirius here, which is a real divergence from the Brahmagupta–Bhāskara usage recorded elsewhere in this database.