मघा Maghā

Burgess: of the Sickle group, 'the star α Leonis, or Regulus, the most brilliant of the group, is the junction-star, and its position is defined with unusual precision'.

FIVE stars, shaped like a river-bend (nadī-kubja-saṃsthāna), deity Pitṛ (the Fathers), gotra Piṅgalāyanīya. Five stars in a curve = the Sickle of Leo (α, η, γ, ζ, μ Leonis). The Pitṛ deity confirms the Aghā/Maghā-of-the-Fathers association on file.

IAST verbatim from the GRETIL Mahābhāṣya plaintext (text in pausā). The sūtra commented on is २.३.४५ नक्षत्रे च लुपि (Sanskrit Wikisource; GRETIL: 'nakṣatre ca lupi'). The 3.1.26 passage reads '(p_3,1.26.6) ka_ii,34.14-36.21 {26/80} puṣyayogam jānāti puṣyeṇa yojayati . {27/80} maghābhiḥ yojayati .'

IMPORTANT DISTINCTION: Maghā is NOT in Pāṇini. The Aṣṭādhyāyī's only magh- forms are maghavan 'bounteous/Indra' at 6.4.128 and 6.4.133, which are unrelated. The attestation is entirely PATAÑJALI's, and it is a lived-calendar one: commenting on 2.3.45 nakṣatre ca lupi he cites the two model sentences 'adya puṣyaḥ' and 'adya maghā iti' — 'today is Puṣya', 'today is Maghā' — as examples of the nominative standing for a locative when the time-affix is elided; and on 3.1.26 he gives 'maghābhiḥ yojayati' ('he joins [the moon] with the Maghās') beside 'puṣya-yogam jānāti'. Note the plural instrumental maghābhiḥ: for Patañjali Maghā is a GROUP of stars, which fits the traditional five-star Maghā (α, η, γ, ζ, μ Leonis) rather than Regulus alone. Datable c. 150 BCE.

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) 126°00', śara (polar latitude) 0°25' 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 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: α Leo 125°59' / 0°29'. VAṬEŚVARA-SIDDHĀNTA VIII.2.1–2 (904 CE) puts the same junction star at Siṃha (Leo) 8° (= 128°00' measured from the sidereal origin) with a śara of 0°00' south (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. 10 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 Siṃha (Leo) 8° — Vaṭeśvara states the dhruvakas as degrees WITHIN each zodiacal sign, not as absolute longitudes, so this is 128°00' from the sidereal origin — and its kṣepa (polar latitude, VIII.2.5–6) as 0°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: α Leo 130°02' / 0°26'. For comparison Sāmanta (1869) gives 126°00' / 0°25' 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, T21.0404c22: 「其七星者，五則顯現、二星隱沒。形如河曲，一日及月，胡麻祭之，屬於鬼神，姓賓伽羅。」 | 舍頭諫太子二十八宿經 T21n1301, T21.0415b22: 「土地宿者，有五要星，其形之類，猶如曲河，行三十須臾而侍從矣，食油粳米，主于父天，姓號邊垂。」 | Yang Jingfeng's interlinear note in T21n1299 at T21.0389b04: 「景風曰：中國天文，星七星，主衣服，南方之宿也」

Chinese lunar lodge (xiu) 星 Xing; T1301 renders the name semantically as 土地 ('Earth'). The single most elegant reconciliation in the whole comparison. The Śārdūlakarṇāvadāna gives Maghā pañca-tāraṃ nadī-kubja-saṃsthānaṃ … pitṛdaivataṃ … piṅgalāyanīyaṃ gotreṇa — five stars in a river-bend, deity the Fathers, gotra Piṅgalāyana. T1301 matches all of it (五要星, 猶如曲河, 主于父天). T1300 matches it AND explains the discrepancy with the Chinese lodge, which has seven: 'five are manifest and two stars are hidden' (五則顯現、二星隱沒) — an explicit 3rd-century statement that only five of the seven are counted. The river-bend is the Sickle of Leo. T1300's 賓伽羅 = Piṅgala is an exact phonetic match for the gotra. T1299 alone gives the deity as 薄伽 Bhaga instead of the Fathers, and six stars; its figure-word 猛 is defective as printed.