Sūrya Siddhānta
अशीतिभागैर् याम्यायाम् अगस्त्यो मिथुनान्तगः / विम्शे च मिथुनस्याम्शे मृगव्याधो व्यवस्थितः // विक्षेपो दक्षिणे भागैः खार्णवैः स्वाद् अपक्रमात् / हुतभुग्ब्रह्महृदयौ वृषे द्वाविम्शभागगौ //
10. Agastya is at the end of Gemini, and eighty degrees south; and Mrgavyadha is situated in the twentieth degree of Gemini; 11. His latitude (vikshepa), reckoned from his point of declination (apakrama), is forty degrees south: — E. Burgess (1860)
Burgess: 'Mrgavyadha, "deer-hunter" — it is also called Lubdhaka, "hunter" — is α Canis Majoris, or Sirius, the brightest of the fixed stars'.
Vedic corpus
तमभ्यायत्याविध्यत्स विद्ध ऊर्ध्व उदप्रपतत्तमेतं मृग इत्याचक्षते य उ एव मृगव्याधः स उ एव स या रोहित्सा रोहिणी यो एवेषुस्त्रिकाण्डा सो एवेषुस्त्रिकाण्डा।
Having aimed at him he pierced him; being pierced he flew upwards; him they call 'the deer'. The piercer of the deer is he of that name. The female deer is Rohini; the three-pointed arrow is the three-pointed arrow. — A.B. Keith, Rigveda Brahmanas, HOS 25 (1920), pp. 185-186
The piercer is the dread archer-god (Rudra/Bhūtapati). Identification with Sirius - the brilliant star 'aiming' along the line of Orion's belt - is the standard scholarly and later Indian tradition (Sirius = Lubdhaka 'the hunter' in classical astronomy); the AB itself does not name the star, hence 'likely'.
Later siddhāntas & al-Bīrūnī · SS core c. 400–600 CE; BSS 628 CE
षड्विंशे मिथुनांशेंऽशकचत्वारिंशच्छरदाता मृगव्याधः । तत्क्रान्तेर्दक्षिणतो विक्षिप्तोऽगस्त्यवच्छेषम् ॥ ४० ॥
No public-domain translation of this chapter exists — Colebrooke (1817) rendered only BSS chs. 12 and 18, both purely mathematical. Sense: 'Mṛgavyādha stands in the twenty-sixth degree of Gemini, displaced forty degrees to the south of the declination-circle there; the rest (the finding of the suns of his rising and setting) is as for Agastya.' — Paraphrase by the compiler; Sanskrit normalised from the OCR of Ram Swarup Sharma's edition
Same 13° visibility class as Agastya at SS 9.12. Brahmagupta (Bhagrahayutyadhikāra 40) gives dhruva 26° Gemini = 86°, śara 40° S, arc 13°; his commentary notes the latitude matches the Sūrya Siddhānta's but the longitude differs (SS: 80°) 'and that difference is directly visible to the eye' — i.e. Brahmagupta corrected it by observation. Burgess agrees: 'while all authorities agree with the correct determination of the latitude of Sirius presented by our text, the Siddhanta-Çiromani etc. greatly reduce its error of longitude, by giving the star 86°, instead of 80°.' Al-Bīrūnī's quotation of Brahmagupta's Uttara-Khaṇḍakhādyaka matches exactly: '26° Orion, its southern latitude 40 parts... 13' for the heliacal-rising arc.
Sūrya Siddhānta 9.12; Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta, Bhagrahayutyadhikāra 40 ·
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translationVaṭeśvara & Sāmanta · composed 1869 CE (Śaka 1791); edited by Joges Chandra Ray, Calcutta 1899
केचिदाहुर्मृगव्याधनामा मुनिः
सोमभाद्(५)याम्यगस्तद्ध्रुवोऽङ्केषवः५६ ।
याम्यबाणो रदाः३२ खापमादंशका
दिग्(१०)विलिप्ताश्च तन्मण्डलस्यायतिः ॥ २७ ॥
Devanagari transcribed by the compiler from the page FACSIMILE (archive.org scan leaf n220 = printed p. 118) because the archive.org OCR of this volume is unusable for Devanagari; the page image itself was fetched in this session at https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.292705/page/n220.jpg . Every numeral was re-read at full scan resolution. Cross-checked against a second, independent scan of the same Ray edition at https://archive.org/download/siddhantadarpanachandrashekarsimha1897_252_Z/ , which agrees character for character on the figures. Round brackets and the figures in them are the PRINTED EDITION'S own: (n) is the serial number of the asterism/star, the figure after it the edition's decoding of the preceding bhūtasaṅkhyā word-numeral, so no numeral has been silently converted here. A handful of the compound word-forms in this worn 1899 type are uncertain and are marked in this database as read, not emended; the FIGURES, which carry the astronomy, were verified at high magnification in both scans.
(27) 'Some say the Muni is named Mṛgavyādha, [and is] the one gone south of Soma's asterism (5); its dhruva is fifty-six; its southern arrow [latitude] is thirty-two degrees from the ecliptic; and the extent of its disc is ten vikalās.' — Literal rendering by the compiler
★ AN EXPLICIT DISAGREEMENT ABOUT IDENTIFICATION, RECORDED BY SĀMANTA HIMSELF. XII.27: 'Some say the Muni is named Mṛgavyādha [and is] the one lying south of Soma's asterism (no. 5, Mṛgaśiras)', and he gives that star's coordinates: dhruva 56°, śara 32° south of the ecliptic, disc 10 vikalās. In Sāmanta's own sidereal frame that is RIGEL (β Orionis: 55°55' / 31°17' S) to within 5' of longitude and 43' of latitude — not Sirius. Sāmanta does not accept this: at XII.25–26 he identifies Lubdhaka/Muni with the brightest star of all, south of Punarvasu (Sirius, 77°/40° S), and at XII.33 he assigns the star south of Mṛgaśiras to PRAJĀPATI instead. So the nineteenth-century Odia tradition preserved a live dispute over whether Mṛgavyādha was Sirius or the bright star at Orion's foot, and Sāmanta comes down on the side of Sirius. Compare Brahmagupta, who gave Mṛgavyādha 86°/40° S and whose commentary says the Sūrya Siddhānta's longitude is wrong 'and that difference is directly visible to the eye'.
Siddhānta Darpaṇa of Candraśekhara Sāmanta, Grahagaṇita, Tripraśnādhikāra, 12th prakāśa (Bhagrahayogavarṇana) 27 (with 25–26, 33) ·
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