पुनर्वसु Punarvasu

Burgess: 'the two bright stars in the heads of the Twins, or α and β Geminorum, and the latter (1.2) is the junction-star' (the eastern, per v. 19).

TWO stars, foot-shaped (pada-saṃsthāna), deity Aditi, gotra Vāśiṣṭha. Two stars = Castor and Pollux, confirming both the dual name and the Aditi lordship of the Vedic lists on file.

Devanāgarī from Sanskrit Wikisource; GRETIL's Kāśikā-derived text reads 'chandasi punarvasvorekavacanam', the 'alt' text 'chandasi punarvasvor ekavacanam'. All three agree.

Pāṇini gives Punarvasu three whole sūtras of his own: 1.2.61 chandasi punarvasvor ekavacanam, 1.2.62 viśākhayoś ca, 1.2.63 tiṣya-punarvasvor nakṣatra-dvandve… The grammar preserves a real astronomical fact: Punarvasu is inherently DUAL for Pāṇini (a two-star asterism), and 1.2.61 records that in the Vedic language the dual could be replaced by a singular. Vasu's gloss makes the count explicit: 'There is one star called Tishya; and there are two stars called Punarvasu.' Patañjali on 1.2.61-62 discusses the same forms and on 1.2.63 uses tiṣya-punarvasavaḥ as a personal name to contrast with the star sense. This is by a wide margin the earliest DATABLE evidence in the database that Punarvasu is a pair and Tiṣya a single star.

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) 90°15', śara (polar latitude) 6°30' 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: β Gem 90°20' / 6°46'. VAṬEŚVARA-SIDDHĀNTA VIII.2.1–2 (904 CE) puts the same junction star at Kulīra (Cancer) 3° (= 93°00' measured from the sidereal origin) with a śara of 6°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. 7 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 Kulīra (Cancer) 3° — Vaṭeśvara states the dhruvakas as degrees WITHIN each zodiacal sign, not as absolute longitudes, so this is 93°00' from the sidereal origin — and its kṣepa (polar latitude, VIII.2.5–6) as 6°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: β Gem 93°50' / 6°37'. For comparison Sāmanta (1869) gives 90°15' / 6°30' 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, T21.0404c16: 「井有二星，形如人步，唯於一日與月而俱，祭必用蜜，屬乎歲星，亦姓安氏。」 | 舍頭諫太子二十八宿經 T21n1301, T21.0415b15: 「增財宿者，有三要星，其形對立，行四十五須臾而侍從矣，醍醐為食，主過去天，名為材出。」 | Yang Jingfeng's interlinear note in T21n1299 at T21.0389a11: 「景風曰：中國天文，井八星，主天門，南方之宿也」

Chinese lunar lodge (xiu) 井 Jing; T1301 renders the name semantically as 增財 ('Increase of Wealth'). TWO stars in T1299 and T1300, matching dvitāram; T1300's 形如人步 'shaped like a man's step' is an exact rendering of pada-saṃsthānam (the Sanskrit 'foot'). T1299's gotra 婆私瑟吒 = Vāsiṣṭha matches the Śārdūlakarṇāvadāna's vāśiṣṭhaṃ gotreṇa exactly. The 45-muhūrta value is confirmed by T1301 and by T1300's summary list of the six long asterisms (畢井氐翼斗壁). T1301's name 增財 'increase of wealth' shows that c. 300 CE Punarvasu was parsed punar + vasu 'wealth again' — the earliest datable gloss on the name. T1299's deity 日神 'sun-deity' is a rendering of Aditi (mother of the Ādityas), not a substitution. Chinese astronomy gives Jing eight stars.

CE references R_5,055.001 and R_5,055.002. Griffith's Sundara Kāṇḍa Canto LVI ('Mount Arishta') abridges the passage away entirely, so no Griffith rendering exists; Dutt's 1892 prose has it under Sundara Kāṇḍam Section CVII (the vulgate sarga numbering differs sharply from the CE here).

Punarvasu occurs exactly ONCE in the Critical Edition Rāmāyaṇa, and it is not where the tradition looks for it: at Sundara 5.55.2, in Hanumān's sky-as-lake simile, where 'Punarvasu is the great fish (mahāmīna)'. The figure is a systematic one — moon = white lotus, sun = duck, Tiṣya and Śravaṇa = kadamba flowers, clouds = moss, Punarvasu = the great fish, Mars = the great crocodile, Airāvata = the island, Svātī = the swan — and is the richest star-simile in either epic. It gives no position, but it does imply a large, conspicuous object, consistent with the Castor/Pollux pair. Rāma's birth under Punarvasu is a VULGATE reading only; see the aditidaivatya entry.

Devanagari from Sanskrit Wikisource; agrees word-for-word with GRETIL (tau videhanagarīnivāsināṃ gāṃ gatāv iva divaḥ punarvasū / manyate sma pibatāṃ vilocanaiḥ pakṣmapātam api vañcanāṃ manaḥ).

Star-sense certain: the word is in the DUAL (punarvasū, the two stars of the asterism) and is explicitly 'divaḥ ... gāṃ gatau', 'come down from heaven to earth'. Rama and Laksmana entering Mithila are the two stars. Apart from this, Kalidasa names only three of the 27 asterisms anywhere in the Raghuvamsa: Citra (1.46), Krttika (14.22) and Pusya (18.32).