Zend Avesta Part 03

SR No.: 007673
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: L H Mills
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1887
Total Pages: 2618
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 49 MB

Page 835

NOTES. I, 166, 12.
241
bounty does not answer all purposes. In VII, 56, 21, mã vah dâtrất marutah nih arâma, is surely best translated by,
let us not fall away from your bounty,' and in our own passage the same meaning should be assigned to dátrá. The idea of dâtrá, bounty, is by no means incompatible with vratá, realm, dominion, sway, if we consider that the sphere within which the bounty of a king or a god is exercised and accepted, is in one sense his realm. What the poet therefore says in our passage is simply this, that the bounty of the Maruts extends as far as the realm of Aditi, i.e. is endless, or extends everywhere, Aditi being in its original conception the deity of the unbounded world beyond, the earliest attempt at expressing the Infinite.
As to dátra occurring once with the accent on the first syllable in the sense of sickle, see M. M., Über eine Stelle in Yaska's Commentar zum Naighantuka,' Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 1853, vol. vii, P. 375.
VIII, 78, 10. táva ít indra ahám å-sáså háste dåtram kaná å dade.
Trusting in thee alone, O Indra, I take the sickle in my hand. This dầtra, sickle, is derived from do, to cut.
Aditi, the Infinite. Note 4. Aditi, an ancient god or goddess, is in reality the earliest name invented to express the Infinite; not the Infinite as the result of a long process of abstract reasoning, but the visible Infinite, visible, as it were, to the naked eye, the endless expanse beyond the earth, beyond the clouds, beyond the sky. That was called A-diti, the un-bound, the un-bounded; one might almost say, but for fear of misunderstandings, the Absolute, for it is derived from diti, bond, and the negative particle, and meant therefore originally what is free from bonds of any kind, whether of space or time, free from physical weakness, free from moral guilt. Such a conception became of necessity a being, a person, a god. To us such a name and such a conception seem decidedly modern, and to find in the Veda Aditi, the
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