Upnishad

SR No.: 007670
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Max Muller
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1879
Total Pages: 1835
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 35 MB

Page 103

xciv
UPANISHADS.
quoted several times as Mahidåsa Aitareya in the Åranyaka itself, though not in the Brahmana. We also meet his name in the Khandogya-upanishad (III, 16, 7), where we are told that he lived to an age of 116 years? All this, however, would only prove that, at the time of the composition or collection of these Aranyakas and Upanishads, a sage was known of the name of Mahidasa Aitareya, descended possibly from Itara or Itara, and that one text of the Brahmanas and the Aranyakas of the Bahvrikas was handed down in the family of the Aitareyins.
Not content with this apparently very obvious explanation, later theologians tried to discover their own reasons for the name of Aitareya. Thus Såyana, in his introduction to the Aitareya-brahmana, tells us that there was once a Rishi who had many wives. One of them was called Itara, and she had a son called Mahidasa. His father preferred the sons of his other wives to Mahidasa, and once he insulted him in the sacrificial hall, by placing his other sons on his lap, but not Mahidasa. Mahidasa's mother, seeing her son with tears in his eyes, prayed to her tutelary goddess, the Earth (svîyakuladevatà Bhůmih), and the goddess in her heavenly form appeared in the midst of the assembly, placed Mahidasa on a throne, and on account of his learning, gave him the gift of knowing the Brâhmana, consisting of forty adhyâyas, and, as Sayana calls it, another Brahmana,'treating of the Aranyaka duties' (aranyakavratarūpam brahmanam).
Without attaching much value to the legend of Itara, we see at all events that Sâyana considered what we call the Aitareyaranyaka as a kind of Brahmana, not however the whole of it, but only the first, second, and third Åranyakas (atha mahâvratam îtyadikam akarya akarya ityantam). How easy it was for Hindu theologians to invent such legends we see from another account of Mahidása, given by Ånandatîrtha in his notes on the Aitareya-upani
" Not 1600 years, as I printed by mistake; for 24+44 +48 make 116 years. Rajendralal Mitra should not have corrected his right rendering 116 into 1600. Ait. År. Introduction, p. 3.
M.M., History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, p. 336.
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