Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/358

 ence book {e. g. Sankhya-Karikas) or fix the Sanskrit definition of Hindu Epics. This subtlety of intellect enabled him to emend and correctly interpret all the verses of that knotty little book — the Vedanga-Jyotish.

The clarity of his ideas and the rapidity with which he transmitted them to paper were really wonderful. The Arctic Home contains references to nearly 500 learned volumes, and the Gita-Rahasya to nearly twice that number. He spent days, months and years in collecting and analyzing materials for his treatises. But once the materials were fully digested and the skeleton-notes prepared, he took very little time to write or dictate the book. Thus he worked at the Orion for nearly four years, at the Arctic Home for nearly nine, and at the Gita-Rahasya for more than twenty years. But the time he actually took to write these books was incredibly small. The Orion was finished in less than one month and the Arctic Home (about 450 Pages) in about two months. His magnum opus, t^e Gita" Rahasya required only five months. It was written in the winter of 1910-11 at Mandalay.

The Mahabharat (and especially the Gita) and the Rig'veda were Mr. Tilak's favourite books. While reading the Gita in 1889, it occurred to hun " that impor- tant conclusions may be deduced from the statement of Krishna that ' he was Margashirsha of the months'." This led him to inquire into the primitive Vedic Calen- dar and in 1892 Mr. Tilak sent an essay on this subject to the Ninth Oriental Congress held in London and in the next year (1893) he published in book-form the results of his four years' researches. In this book, Mr. Tilak abandoned the purely linguistic method of research of