Artic Home of the Aryans by Lokamanya Bal ... - Mandhata Global

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showed to him “the path of Mazda,” evidently meaning that the
Devayâna, or “the path of Mazda,” was the portion of the year when
the sun was above the horizon after being confined for some time by
the powers of darkness.
But the correspondence between the Indian and the Parsi
scriptures does not stop here. There is a strong prejudice, connected
with the Pitṛiyâna, found in the later Indian literature, and even this
has its parallel in the Parsi scriptures. The Hindus consider it
inauspicious for a man to die during the Pitṛiyâna, and the great
Mahâbhârata warrior, Bhishma, is said to have waited on his deathbed
until the sun passed through the winter solstice, as the
Dâkshinayana, which is synonymous with the Pitṛiyâna, was then
understood to mean the time required by the sun to travel from the
summer to the winter solstice.” A number of passages scattered over
the whole Upanishad literature support the same view, by describing
the course of the soul of a man according as he dies during the
Devayâna or the Pitṛiyâna, and exhibiting a marked preference for the
fate of the soul of a man dying during the path of the Gods, or the
Devayâna. All these passages will be found collected in
Shankarâchârya’s Bhâshya on Brahma-Sûtras, IV, 2, 18-21, wherein
Bâdarâyana,† anxious to reconcile all these passages with the
practical difficulty sure to be experienced if death during the night of
the Gods were held to be absolutely unmeritorious from a religious
point of view, has recorded his opinion that we must not interpret
these texts as predicating an uncomfortable future life for every man
dying during the Dâkshinayana or the night of the Gods. As an
alternative Bâdarâyana, therefore, adds that these passages may be
taken to refer to the Yogins who desire to attain to a particular kind of
heaven after death. Whatever we may think of this
* For the text and discussion thereon, see Orion, p. 38. (Ed. 1955)
† See also Orion, pp. 24-26. (Ed. 1955)