There are not many things in heaven that can be represented as a pair,
coursing across the sky, looking down upon the sea, and having other
related properties. My readers will make a shrewd guess, but I prefer to
let the texts themselves unfold the transparent mystery. The Veda of the
_Katha_ school (xxxvii. 14) says: "These two dogs of Yama, verily, are
day and night," and the Br[=a]hmana of the _K[=a]ush[=i]takins_ (ii. 9)
argues in Talmudic strain: "At eve, when the sun has gone down, before
darkness has set in, one should sacrifice the _agnihotra_-sacrifice; in
the morning before sunrise, when darkness is dispelled, at that time,
one should sacrifice the _agnihotra_-sacrifice; at that time the gods
arrive. Therefore (the two dogs of Yama) Çy[=a]ma and Çabala (the dark
and the spotted) tear to pieces the _agnihotra_ of him that sacrifices
otherwise. Çabala is the day; Çy[=a]ma is the night. He who sacrifices
in the night, his _agnihotra_ Çy[=a]ma tears asunder; he who sacrifices
in broad daylight, his _agnihotra_ Çabala tears asunder." Even more
drily the two dogs of Yama are correlated with the time-markers of
heaven in a passage of the _T[=a]ittir[=i]ya-Veda_ (v. 7. 19); here
sundry parts of the sacrificial horse are assigned to four cosmic
phenomena in the following order: 1. Sun and moon. 2. Çy[=a]ma and
Çabala (the two dogs of Yama). 3. Dawn. 4. Evening twilight. So that the
dogs of Yama are sandwiched in between sun and moon on the one side,
dawn and evening twilight on the other. Obviously they are here, either
as a special designation of day and night, or their physical
equivalents, sun and moon. And now the _Çatapatha-Br[=a]hmana_ says
explicitly: "The moon verily is the divine dog; he looks down upon the
cattle of the sacrificer." And again a passage in the Kashmir version of
the _Atharva-Veda_ says: "The four-eyed dog (the moon) surveys by night
the sphere of the night."