for imagining that áyana in d contains any hidden reference to the solstice (in later astronomical language, ayana, by abbreviation for ayanānta 'end of a [northern or southern] progress of the sun') as occurring in Maghās.
3. Be the former Phalgunīs and Hasta here auspicious (púṇyam); be Chitrā propitious, and Svāti easy (sukhá) for me; be the two Viçākhās bestowal (rā́dhas), Anurādhā easy of invocation, Jyeshṭhā a good asterism, Mūla uninjured.
There are sundry difficulties in this verse, in part attempted to be removed by emendation in our edition. It is very strange to find in a the former Phalgunīs distinctly mentioned, and the latter (uttara) as distinctly left out; it would be easy to put the dvayā́ of 5 b in place of pū́rvā here;* or one wonders whether uttara is not somehow hidden in the awkwardly redundant átra. All the mss. (both saṁh. and pada) agree in the ungrammatical ⌊ending -tí of⌋ svātí, and SPP. accordingly admits svātí into his text: ours emends to svātís:svātī́ would have been equally acceptable, and is supported by two of SPP's çrotriyas ⌊V. and K.⌋ and by the comm. The masc. sukhás (p. su॰kháḥ) can hardly be tolerated; we ought to have sukhám, or else, with the comm., sukhā́. All the mss. read in crā́dhe, as if there were an adjective rā́dha; SPP. and the comm. read rā́dhe, the latter explaining it as another name for viçākhe (not a word defining the expected blessing!): this involves an anachronism,† and would be in the highest degree improbable even if it did not: rā́dho is a very easy and plausible improvement. Finally, all the mss. have in dáriṣṭa mū́lam ⌊cf. note to xviii. 2. 3⌋, which SPP. adopts, in spite of its utter ungrammaticalness; the comm., with his usual disregard of pada-text and accent, appears to understand ariṣṭamūlam, a compound.
*⌊Or rather to put dvayé? The comm. renders pū́rvā by pūrve, for which pū́rvā is a bad reading or a worse solecism. But the position of ca, too, is very suspicious.⌋ †⌊I suppose Whitney's implication is that rādhā, as a name for the 14th (or 16th) asterism viçākhā, is a later one, based on a misunderstanding of the name of the 15th (or 17th) asterism, anurādhā, which word simply means 'success' (cf. ánv eṣām arātsmé ’ti: tád anūrādhā́ḥ, TB. i. 5. 28), but was thought of as meaning the one 'after (anu) or following rādhā.'⌋
4. Let the former Ashāḍhās give me food; let the latter ones bring refreshment; let Abhijit give me what is auspicious; let Çravaṇa [and] the Çravishṭhās make good prosperity.
Here are more bad readings: in a, the mss. give pū́rvā rāsatām, and SPP. accepts the reading, as if rāsatām could be 3d du. act., which, in view of all the circumstances, is absurd; our emendation to -ntām is unavoidable.* In b, the mss. vary between dehy útt- ⌊all of Whitney's and most of SPP's⌋ and devy útt-, and SPP. adopts the latter, because the comm. has it; but then the comm. makes no difficulty of understanding it as = devyas; it is merely, in his opinion, a Vedic substitution of sing. for pl.; and it is to be hoped that no modern scholar would follow him in that. The emendation of our text to yé hy úttare,† considering that all our mss. (and all but two of SPP's authorities) have úttare (p. út॰tare), was a naturally suggested and easy one; but we need instead yā́ hy úttarā ā́, feminine words, like the pū́rvās ⌊the pada-mss. and the Anukr. read pū́rvā in a; SPP. reads úttarās, with the comm. and two of his reciters. The meter of d would be better if we had çróṇas for çrávaṇas; but the Anukr. acknowledges the redundancy of the verse.
