The Arctic Home in the Vedas c10.30

c10.30

The statement in the myth or legend, which is most important for our purpose, is contained in I, 158, 6. The verse may be literally translated as follows:—"Dîrghatamas, the son of Mamatâ, having grown decrepit in the tenth yuga, becomes a Brahman charioteer of the waters wending to their goal."¹ The only expressions which require elucidation in this verse are "in the tenth yuga" and "waters wending to their goal." Otherwise the story is plain enough. Dîrghatamas grows old in the tenth yuga, and riding on waters, as the Mahâbhârata story has it, goes along with them to the place which is the goal of these waters. But scholars are not agreed as to what yuga means. Some take it to mean a cycle of years, presumably five as in the Vedânga-Jyotisha, and invest Dîrghatamas with infirmity at the age of fifty. The Petersburg Lexicon would interpret yuga, wherever it occurs in the Rig-Veda, to mean not 'a period of time,' but 'a generation,' or 'the relation of descent from a common stock'; and it is followed by Grassmann in this respect. According to these scholars the phrase "in the tenth yuga" in the above verse would, therefore, signify "in the tenth generation" whatever that may mean. Indeed, there seems to be a kind of prejudice against interpreting yuga as meaning 'a period of time' in the Rig-Veda, and it is, therefore, necessary to examine the point at some length in this place. That the word *yuga* by itself means ‘a period of time,’ or that, at any rate, it is one of its meanings goes without saying. Even the Petersburg Lexicon assigns this meaning to *yuga* in the Atharva Veda VIII, 2, 21; but so far as the Rig-Veda is concerned *yuga*, according to it, must mean ‘descent,’ or ‘generation,’ or something like it, but never ‘a period of time.’ This is especially the case with the phrase *Mânuṣhâ yugâ*, or *Ma-nuṣhyâ yugâni*, which occurs several times in the Rig-Veda. Western scholars would everywhere translate it to mean ‘generations of men,’ while native scholars, like Sâyaṇa and Mahîdhara, take it to refer to ‘mortal ages’ in a majority of places. In some cases (I, 124, 2; I, 144, 4) Sâyaṇa, however, suggests, as an alternative, that the phrase may be understood to mean ‘conjunction’ or ‘couples (*yuga*) of men’; and this has probably given rise to the interpretation put upon the phrase by Western scholars. Etymologically the word *yuga* may mean ‘conjunction’ or ‘a couple,’ denoting either (1) ‘a couple of day and night,’ or (2) ‘a couple of months,’ *i. e.* ‘a season,’ or (3) ‘a couple of fortnights,’ or ‘the time of the conjunction of the moon and the sun,’ *i. e.* ‘a month.’ Thus at the beginning of the Kali-Yuga the planets and the sun were, it is supposed, in conjunction and hence it is said to be called a *yuga*. It is also possible that the word may mean ‘a conjunction, or a couple, or even a generation of men.’ Etymology, therefore, does not help us in determining which of these meanings should be assigned to the word *yuga*, or the phrase *Mânuṣhâ yugâ* in the Rig-Veda, and we must find out some other means for determining it. The prejudice we have referred to, appears to be mainly due to the disinclination of the Western scholars to import the later Yuga theory into the Rig-Veda. But it seems to me that the caution has been carried too far, so far as almost to amount to a sort of prejudice.