Page:Atharva-Veda samhita volume 2.djvu/503

959

1. Let the heavenly rescuing kúṣṭha come hither from off the snowy [mountain]; do thou make vanish all takmán and all the sorceresses.

2. Three names are thine, O kúṣṭha: by-no-means-killing, by-no-means-harming:—by no means may this man take harm, for whom I bespeak (pari-brū) thee, at evening and in the morning, likewise by day.

In a, part of the mss. accent kúṣṭha. In b, c, SPP. reads nadyamāró nadyā́riṣaḥ: nádyā ’yám etc. There is hardly any ms. that distinguishes dya and gha in such a manner that confidence can be placed in its testimony as between the two; so that, although SPP. reports nadya- from all his mss., it is really of no account. But the comm. shows that he reads nadya- by his explanation: nadya, he says, means "being in a stream (nadī)," and by "stream" is meant the waters (udakāni) in a stream; and the virtual sense is "diseases that originate in faults of water": or else, he sagely adds (betraying that his expositions are, as usual, the merest guesses of a skilless etymologist), nadya means nadanīya or çabdanīya: i.e., atyantaduṣpariharatvena çabdyamāna; and the two epithets mean "killing" or "harming" such nadyas; while the third name is nadya simply, since a killer (māraka) of nadyas is himself called nadya. We had the second of the two epithets above, at viii. 2. 6 and 7. 6, and in the former passage the comm. explained (falsely) and read nagha-. It seems hardly doubtful that our readings. ⌊with gh, not dy⌋ and the translation founded on them are the true ones here, though that implies that the comm. worked from mss. only, and not from oral representatives of the text ⌊Weber, Sb. 1896, p. 681, discusses na gha.⌋ Ppp. agrees precisely with our text in b and c (in d it has asmāi and in e divaḥ). In b, all the mss. read (assuming, here and later, that the character is dya, and not gha) nadyá mā́ro (p. nadyá: mā́raḥ); nearly all follow it with nadyā́yuṣo or -ṣaḥ (p. nadyá: ā́yuṣaḥ); but two of SPP's, and two others p.m., give nadyā́riṣo ⌊the comm. nadyariṣo⌋. In c the general reading is nadyā́yámpúruṣoriṣat, but one or two fail to accent ’yam, and a few have -ṣo rṣat (all the pada-mss. ṛṣat). The comm. treats nadya in c as a vocative, and SPP. accordingly changes the accent to nádyā ’yám; in b he alters the pada-text to nadya॰māráḥ: nadyá॰riṣaḥ. The Anukr. pronounces this verse, as well as the two following, tryavasāna, but nearly all the mss. omit here the sign of interpunction before na ghā ’yam puruṣo riṣat, although they introduce it both times later; in this verse, our edition