The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

The Seven-Headed Thought, Swar and the Dashagwas 175
the Truth and as singing the hymn to Indra. According as the
Navagwas are seven or nine, Ayasya will be the eighth or the
tenth Rishi.
Tradition asserts the separate existence of two classes of Angiras
Rishis, the one Navagwas who sacrificed for nine months,
the other Dashagwas whose sessions of sacrifice endured for
ten. According to this interpretation we must take Navagwa
and Dashagwa as “nine-cowed” and “ten-cowed”, each cow
representing collectively the thirty Dawns which constitute one
month of the sacrificial year. But there is at least one passage
of the Rig Veda which on its surface is in direct conflict with
the traditional interpretation. For in the seventh verse of V.45
and again in the eleventh we are told that it was the Navagwas,
not the Dashagwas, who sacrificed or chanted the hymn for ten
months. This seventh verse runs, Anūnod atra hastayato adrir,
ārcan yena da´sa māso navagvāh. ;r.ta ˙m yatī saramā gā avindad,
vi´svāni satyā a˙ngirā´s cakāra, “Here cried (or, moved) the stone
impelled by the hand, whereby the Navagwas chanted for ten
months the hymn; Sarama travelling to the Truth found the
cows; all things the Angiras made true.” And in verse 11 we
have the assertion repeated; Dhiya ˙m vo apsu dadhis.e svars. ā ˙m,
yayātaran da´sa māso navagvāh. ;ayādhiyāsyāma devagopā, ayā
dhiyā tuturyāma ati a ˙mhah. . “I hold for you in the waters (i.e.
the seven Rivers) the thought that wins possession of heaven 2
(this is once more the seven-headed thought born from the Truth
and found by Ayasya), by which the Navagwas passed through
the ten months; by this thought may we have the gods for protectors,
by this thought may we pass through beyond the evil.”
The statement is explicit. Sayana indeed makes a faint-hearted
attempt to take da´sa māso in v. 7, ten months, as if it were an
epithet da´samāso, the ten-month ones i.e. the Dashagwas; but
he offers this improbable rendering only as an alternative and
abandons it in the eleventh rik.
2 Sayana takes it to mean, “I recite the hymn for water” i.e. in order to get rain; the
case however is the locative plural, and dadhis.e means “I place or hold” or, with the
psychological sense, “think” or “hold in thought, meditate”. Dhis.an. ā like dhī means
thought; dhiya ˙m dadhis.e would thus mean “I think or meditate the thought.”