History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v6.c82.181

v6.c82.181

One more observation must be made here. The Vedāṅga-Jyotiṣa⁷⁴⁵ says 'The sun and the moon start towards the north in the month of Māgha at the beginning of Śravisthā (i. e. Dhanisṭhā) and the Sun starts towards the south in the middle of Āśleṣā in the month of Śrāvaṇa' i e. winter solstice was in the beginning of Dhaniṣṭhā In the Bṛhatsaṃhitā Varāhamihira tells us that in his day the two *ayanas* of the Sun took place at the beginning of Karkaṭaka and of Makara respectively, that indeed at some time in the past *Uttarāyaṇa* began at the beginning of Dhaniṣṭhā and *dakṣiṇāyana* commenced in the middle of Āśleṣā and that therefore it was so declared in former śāstras. This shows that, between about 505 A D. when Varāha planned and probably wrote his Pañca-siddhāntikā and the observation contained in the Vedāṅga-Jyotiṣa, the commencement of Dakṣiṇāyana had shifted from the middle of Āśleṣā to the last quarter of Punarvasu i e in all about 23 degrees and 20 minutes. Varāhamihira makes no effort to explain this. It is therefore quite reasonable to argue that he was probably not aware of the theory of the precession of the equinoxes. Authorities are not in complete agreement as to the yearly extent of precession. Taking it at 50 2 seconds per year, the total number of years between Varāha and the date of the observation in Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa would be about 1673 and deducting 505 years (the time of Varāha's epoch for a siddhānta calculation) the observation would refer itself to about 1168 B. C. If Varāha and his predecessors had borrowed scientific astronomy directly from the Greeks, they should have been quite aware of the precession of equinoxes, since precession is said to have been discovered by Hipparchus, and was adopted by Ptolemy.745a