अभिजित् Abhijit

Burgess: 'The position assigned to its junction-star, which is described as the brightest... in a group of three, identifies it with α Lyrae or Vega, a star which is exceeded in brilliancy by only one or two others in the heavens' (triangle with ε and ζ Lyrae).

Included by Bhāskara among the 28 asterisms whose dhruvas he lists (Vāsanābhāṣya on vv.1-3: 'अष्टौ नखा इत्यादयोऽश्विन्यादीनां साभिजितां ध्रुवभागा वेदितव्याः' — the dhruvas of Aśvinī etc. together with Abhijit). Its śara is 62° north (largest in the list, per the Bhagrahayuti latitude table), matching Vega's ecliptic latitude of about +61.7°. Bhāskara's Vāsanābhāṣya on v.16 makes it circumpolar above latitude 52°. The 1861 PD volume identifies 'Abhijit (α Lyrae)' (pp.63, 68).

THREE stars, cow's-head-shaped (gośīrṣa-saṃsthāna), deity Brahmā, gotra Brahmāvatīya — and uniquely a SIX-muhūrta conjunction where every other asterism has 15, 30 or 45. The text singles this out again a page later: 'one alone, Abhijit, has a six-muhūrta conjunction'. Three stars in a cow's-head = α, ε, ζ Lyrae, matching Burgess's triangle. The anomalously small extent is precisely the peculiarity behind Abhijit's later expulsion from the 27-fold scheme — and the Jain canon independently makes Abhijit a class of its own with a 9 4/67-muhūrta conjunction (Thibaut 1880: 'There is no special name for the extent of Abhijit').

Named at SS 9.12 (13° class) and heading the SS 9.18 list of stars never obscured by the sun; also at SS 13.8 among the stars needing day-circles on the armillary sphere. Al-Bīrūnī's independent lists give al-Nasr al-Wāqiʿ (Vega) in both positions, and his nakshatra table assigns Abhijit polar longitude 265° and 62° north latitude.

See the ashvayuj entry for the three-witness collation of this sūtra.

Pāṇini names Abhijit in his own sūtra 4.3.36, grouped with Aśvayuj and Śatabhiṣaj under a rule about the affix meaning 'born under [an asterism]' — so for Pāṇini Abhijit is already a full member of the asterism system, not the anomalous 28th that later texts sometimes drop. This is a firmly datable pre-Mauryan attestation and, given the disputes about when Abhijit entered the list, an important one. Distinguish from 5.3.118 abhijid-vidabhṛt-… where abhijit is an ordinary word 'conquering' in a list of proper names; only 4.3.36 is astronomical. Abhijit does not occur in the surviving Mahābhāṣya, but that text lacks adhyāya 4 entirely, so nothing follows from its absence.

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) 256°30', śara (polar latitude) 62°00' 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 3 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 Lyr 255°16' / 61°55'. VAṬEŚVARA-SIDDHĀNTA VIII.2.1–2 (904 CE) puts the same junction star at Dhanus 27° (= 267°00' measured from the sidereal origin) with a śara of 64°00' north (VIII.2.5–6, direction by VIII.2.8). Sāmanta's 62° N is a correction of the inherited 60° and matches Vega's 61°53' to within 7'. Vaṭeśvara had already moved it to 64°. NOTE a probable printing problem: the dhruva figure printed for Abhijit (256°30') is identical to the one printed for Uttarāṣāḍhā, although the word-numerals differ (dalonādrīṣubāhavaḥ = 257 − ½ for Abhijit). The figures are reported here exactly as printed.

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. 22 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 Dhanus 27° — Vaṭeśvara states the dhruvakas as degrees WITHIN each zodiacal sign, not as absolute longitudes, so this is 267°00' from the sidereal origin — and its kṣepa (polar latitude, VIII.2.5–6) as 64°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: α Lyr 265°15' / 61°47'. For comparison Sāmanta (1869) gives 256°30' / 62°00' north. Vaṭeśvara's 64° is an increase on the Sūrya Siddhānta's 60° and is 2° over Vega's true 61°55'; Sāmanta's later 62° is exact.

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, T21.0405a13: 「牛宿三星，形如牛首，一時與月而共同行，不須祭祀，屬於梵天，姓於梵氏。」 | 舍頭諫太子二十八宿經 T21n1301, T21.0415c17: 「無容宿者，有三要星，其形所類如牛頭步，行六須臾而侍從矣，以風為食，主于梵天，姓梵所乘。」 | Yang Jingfeng's interlinear note in T21n1299 at T21.0390a16: 「景風曰：案天竺以牛宿為吉祥之宿，每日牛時直事，故天竺以牛時為吉祥之時也。瞿曇氏以歷經者，牛宿吉祥女圖術是也。今說牛星，又與中國亦別。案中國天文，牛宿六星，主開渠河，北方之宿也」

Chinese lunar lodge (xiu) 牛 Niu; T1301 renders the name semantically as 無容 ('Without Compare'). THE ANSWER TO THE 27-VS-28 QUESTION, AND THE BEST SINGLE CORROBORATION IN THIS SOURCE. T1301 reproduces the Śārdūlakarṇāvadāna's Abhijit entry point for point: three stars (tritāram), an OX'S-HEAD figure (牛頭 = gośīrṣa-saṃsthānam), BRAHMĀ as deity and Brahmā as gotra (brahma-daivataṃ brahmāvatīyaṃ gotreṇa), WIND as food (以風為食 = vāyu-āhāram — a bizarre datum that no translator would invent), and above all SIX MUHŪRTA (行六須臾), repeated in its summary exactly as the Sanskrit repeats it: 'that one asterism which travels six muhūrta is Abhijit' = eko 'bhijit ṣaṇ-muhūrta-yogaḥ. T1300 likewise singles it out as the only short one and the only one needing no offering. THE XIUYAO JING KEEPS THE ENTRY BUT DEMOTES IT: its Niu chapter is a stub with no day-quality section, and its zodiacal, conjunction and calendar chapters all count 二十七宿, twenty-seven, listing 6+12+9 lodges with Niu absent (T21.388b28–33). Yang Jingfeng's note at T21.394c17 states the reason outright: 唐用二十八宿，西國除牛宿，以其天主事之故 — 'The Tang uses twenty-eight lodges; the Western Country removes the Niu lodge, because the Lord of Heaven attends to it.' That is a dated 764 CE statement that India had already dropped Abhijit, with the reason given as its being reserved to the god. Chinese astronomy gives Niu six stars. One further detail: T1299 prints the deity as 風梵摩神也, with an unexplained 風 'wind' standing before 梵摩 Brahmā — very likely a survival of the same vāyu-āhāra ('food of wind') that T1301 preserves as a separate field, the two data having collapsed into one phrase in the Tang recension.

Verbatim from the BORI Critical Edition e-text, lines 03,219.008a–009c. GRETIL supplies this text only in IAST, not Devanagari. CE-vs-vulgate: the CE chapter is 3.219; Ganguli, translating the vulgate, prints it in Vana Parva Section CCXXIX. The commonly cited 'Vana 230.8-10' does not match either numbering exactly — Ganguli's Section CCXXX contains the Svāhā episode instead.

THE classic witness to Abhijit's expulsion from the nakṣatra list, and the earliest one. Abhijit is personified as Rohiṇī's YOUNGER SISTER (kanyasī svasā) who, envying her, desires jyeṣṭhatā ('seniority' — with an obvious pun on the nakṣatra Jyeṣṭhā) and goes to the forest for tapas; Indra then reports to Skanda that 'the asterism has fallen from the sky' (nakṣatraṃ gaganāc cyutam) and that he is at a loss about the reckoning of time. The verse says nothing about identity or position, so the Vega identification is imported from the Sūrya Siddhānta / Śārdūlakarṇāvadāna tradition already in the database; what the epic supplies is the mythic charter for a 27-member list. Note that the epic does NOT say Abhijit was dropped to keep the number at 27 — it says the reckoning had to be reconsidered and Kṛttikā was installed. CE 3.219 = Ganguli's Vana Parva Section CCXXIX; the passage is NOT in Ganguli's Section CCXXX, which the standard citation 'Vana 230.8-10' points to.