The Giver of Life - Hillāja, Hīlāj, the Hyleg, and Primary Directions in the Tājika tradition

A PhD takes you to places you do not expect. When I began mine, I expected long days with books and open screens. It took me across western India to a manuscript library, to obtain a Sanskrit text that few people alive have read. For about two months I set other work aside, and the trip and the manuscripts cost me money and several things I gave up at the time. The doctorate is now near submission. Writing this essay is a break from the final polishing of the thesis, and it clears my mind.

The ancient world carried astrological techniques from one region to another. Primary directions is among the oldest of these techniques. I could not see why it would have failed to reach India. While searching, I found the word hillāja. I already knew the words hyleg and hīlāj. That word sent me to Jodhpur.

Modern Indian astrologers treat hillāja as the name of a person, an ācārya of the distant past whose teaching survives in a few tables. Hillāja is not a person. Hillāja is not a Sanskrit word. The idea the word carries, the giver of life, is not known to Indian astrologers, because they do not read the Greek and Perso-Arabic sources, and without that idea the surviving tables cannot be read. This essay sets out what the word is, where it comes from, and what the tables attached to it record.

Tracing the word

The idea the word names is older than India's contact with Persia. Greek astrology had a technical term, aphétēs, "the releaser." It named a point in the birth chart that stood for the vitality of the native and the length of the life. From this point an astrologer measured how long a person would live and when the dangerous times would fall. Latin Europe later called the same point the hyleg. The word is still used.

Persian astronomers who took over the Greek material made their own word for the releaser, hīlag. Arabic astrology borrowed it as haylāj or hīlāj. From Arabic the word travelled two ways. Westward, through the translation movement in medieval Spain, it entered Latin as hylech and English as hyleg. Eastward, in the stream of Perso-Arabic astrology that Sanskrit authors called Tājika, it entered Sanskrit as hillāja. Hyleg and hillāja are the same word in two languages.

Martin Gansten, in his study of how Tājika astrology reached India, records that two technical terms in the whole imported vocabulary are of Persian origin, and that both were read as personal names. One is hillāja, from Persian hīlag. The other is khattakhutta, from Persian kadkhudā, "master of the house," the planet that rules the giver of life and fixes the number of years it grants. Kadkhudā renders the Greek oikodespotēs. The two terms entered Sanskrit together.

A dīpikā is a lamp, a standard word for an explanatory handbook. The Hillājadīpikā is a handbook on the hillāja. Its author was Nṛsiṃha, a 16th century astrologer of the Nandigrāma family of astronomers. He wrote a handbook on an imported technique.

Tracing the linguistic roots of the word

In understanding if the word was really borrowed or not, we need to dive deeper into the roots of the word.

The first test is the root. Sanskrit words derive from roots, the dhātus. Rāja, "king," derives from the root rāj, "to shine, to rule." Jalaja, "lotus," derives from "water" and "born." Almost every Sanskrit word traces back to a root and a recognised suffix. Hillāja has no such root. There is no root hil or hillaj. The word cannot be built within Sanskrit.

The second test is the ending. The -ja resembles the element meaning "born of," as in jalaja, "water-born." That reading needs a stem hillā. There is no such word in Sanskrit. 

The third test is where the word appears. It appears only in the Tājika texts, the literature of Perso-Arabic astrology. It is absent from the Vedas, from classical epics, and from the grammarians' word-lists. The 19th century dictionaries, the Monier-Williams and the St Petersburg dictionary of Böhtlingk and Roth, record it as "the name of an astronomer" in the Tājika works. They had no other explanation for it.

The fourth test is cognates. A Sanskrit word has cognates across the related languages, Greek, Latin, Avestan, linked by regular sound changes. Hillāja has none. Its only matches are the same word in Persian, Arabic, and Latin. This is the pattern of a borrowing.

The fifth test is the native word. Sanskrit already had a word for the giver of life, āyurdāya, "the giving of life-span." A language does not coin a second, unanalysable word for something it can already name. Āyurdāya is native. Hillāja is borrowed.

The sixth test is the name. Sanskrit readers could not analyse the word, and they made it the name of a person. This happens with words that cannot be analysed. No one imagined an Ācārya Āyurdāya, because āyurdāya has a meaning. Ācārya Hillāja appeared because hillāja had none.

Each test points the same way, and together they agree with the historical record, which traces the word to Persian hīlag. Hillāja is a Persian word. Hyleg is the same word in English.

The Giver of Life and its Release

Hillāja is the giver of life. The tables attached to it record a timing technique. The technique runs as follows. The astrologer identifies the giver of life, which may be the Sun, the Moon, the Ascendant, or one of a small set of points. The astrologer then releases it. Release is the meaning of the Greek word aphesis, from which the giver of life takes its name. The significator is carried forward by the daily turning of the sky until it reaches the points and the rays of the malefics that mark the crises of the life. The West calls this technique primary directions. The giver of life is the point that is released. The release gives the year.

The 15th year and the 15th degree

When hillāja reached India, the method did not travel into modern practice with it. The complete treatise, Nṛsiṃha's Hillājadīpikā, survives in Sanskrit but untranslated. It has not been translated into English, and there is no known contemporary astrologer who has actually read it. What circulates among modern astrologers is a set of fragments: verses of Hillāja quoted inside two other works, Balabhadra's Horāratna and Puñjarāja's Śambhu Horā Prakāśa. R. Santhanam translated both works into English, and these translations are the source through which modern astrologers know Hillāja.

The fragments are tables. Each entry places a planet in a house and gives an age. The Sun in the 1st house gives misfortune in the 15th year. The Sun in the 4th house gives grief in the 14th year. The Sun in the 7th house gives danger to the spouse in the 34th year. The list runs through the planets and houses. The tables give ages and no reason. Nothing in them states why the 15th year.

Sarajit Poddar, a scholar of Indian astrology and the author of more than thirty books, uses these tables in his work Other Timing Methods. He works from the fragments. He proposes that the 15th year corresponds to the 3rd house, since 15 is 12 plus 3, and he applies the principle of the Sudarśana Cakra. He states that the principle behind the ages is lost. The ages are directional arcs. The 15th year is the 15th degree.

A year corresponds to a degree in this way. The earth rotates, and the sky turns past the horizon and the meridian at about one degree every four minutes. The convention of the technique is that one degree of this turning stands for one year of life. Ptolemy used one degree for one year. Valentine Naibod, in the 16th century, set the rate at about 3 minutes and 56 seconds of time for one year. The rate varies between authorities.

The timing of an event is measured as an angle. The astrologer takes the significator and counts the degrees the sky must turn before that point reaches the place concerned: the horizon, the meridian, or the ray of a malefic. The number of degrees is the number of years. 15° of turning gives the 15th year. 34° gives the 34th year. The ages in the Hillāja tables are these arcs recorded as ages. "The Sun in the 1st house gives evil in the 15th year" states that the Sun, carried by the turning sky through about 15° to a point of affliction, marks trouble at about the age of 15.

The tables record a further detail. They pair the ages with sunrise, sunset, noon, and midnight. These four moments are the four turning points of the daily sky: the Ascendant, the Descendant, the Midheaven, and the point beneath the earth. They are the four angles of the chart. The tables record the angles used in primary directions.

Misunderstanding of a concept being perceived as a person

Balabhadra, in the 17th century Horāratna, cites Hillāja as an authority. Puñjarāja quotes him in the Śambhu Horā Prakāśa. Both writers received the word as a name. R. Santhanam translated both works into English. His translation of the Horāratna states that Hillāja was an astronomer of the remote past whose period is unknown. Santhanam passed on the identification the tradition had already made. In his time the Greek and Persian sources that would have corrected it were not available to a Sanskrit scholar. What he transmitted was a quotation. Modern astrology has worked from the quotation, and from the fragments, and not from Nṛsiṃha's complete treatise.

Martin Gansten, in his study of the Karmaprakāśa of Samarasiṃha, notes that the earliest Sanskrit Tājika text explains how the giver of life is selected and gives no method for directing it. The mathematics of directing depends on spherical astronomy, and that mathematics did not travel into the Sanskrit material that circulated.

The technique is absent from modern Indian practice. The text is not the reason. The complete Hillājadīpikā survives in Sanskrit. The reason is that the idea of the giver of life, the hyleg, is not known to Indian translators and astrologers. They do not read Greek or Perso-Arabic astrology, and the concept has no place in their training. A reader without the concept meets the tables as a list of ages and has no means to see the directions behind them.

What circulates among modern astrologers is the fragments: the tables of ages, quoted through Santhanam. The complete Hillājadīpikā likely contains the full technique, the selection of the giver of life and the method of directing it. This can be confirmed only by translating the whole text. No translation exists, and the text is largely unknown. I intend to publish a full translation of Nṛsiṃha's Hillājadīpikā in 2027, and the translation will show how much of the technique the treatise preserves.

The doctorate took me to a library I did not expect to visit, to copy a text few people have read, and to return a borrowed word to its meaning. It cost me something at the time. I would make the same choice again.

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Notes

This essay works from the Sanskrit manuscript, read against the Greek and Perso-Arabic sources. The manuscript is the Hillājadīpikā of Nṛsiṃha. On Nṛsiṃha of Nandigrāma and his family; son of Rāma, grandson of Keśava, pupil of Gaṇeśa Daivajña, born 1548 - see David Pingree, Census of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit. The etymology (Middle Persian hīlag, "releaser," a calque of Greek aphétēs; Arabic haylāj / hīlāj; Sanskrit hillāja; Latin hylech; English hyleg) follows the standard philological account; see the entry "hyleg" in Wiktionary. That hillāja and khattakhutta (from Persian kadkhudā, the Greek oikodespotēs) are the two Tājika terms of Persian origin, read as personal names, and that Samarasiṃha's Karmaprakāśa selects the giver of life without giving a method for directing it, are set out in Martin Gansten, "Samarasiṃha and the Early Transmission of Tājika Astrology" (Journal of South Asian Intellectual History 1.1, 2018). The 19th century dictionaries (Monier-Williams; Böhtlingk and Roth) enter hillāja as "the name of an astronomer" in the Tājika context; the native Sanskrit term for the concept is āyurdāya. Hillāja is quoted in Balabhadra's Horāratna and Puñjarāja's Śambhu Horā Prakāśa; R. Santhanam translated both into English, and these translations are the source through which the tables of ages reached modern astrology, including Sarajit Poddar's Other Timing Methods. The mechanics of primary directions; 1° of the sky's rotation for one year of life, with Naibod's rate of about 3.93 minutes per year  follow the standard tradition.

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