Questions

What is this?

A place to read Vedic texts without losing anything in the handing over. Every text arrives in four registers at once: the Devanagari, scholarly transliteration, a line-by-line English translation, and a word-by-word opening in which each word comes apart into the roots it was built from.

Why word-by-word? Isn’t a translation enough?

A translation tells you what a verse means. It does not tell you how it means it. निर्वाणरूपं is usually rendered “whose form is liberation,” which is accurate and hides everything interesting: nirvāṇa is literally blown out, extinguished, and the verse is calling a god the shape of a flame going out. You cannot get that from the English line, and you should not have to learn Sanskrit to see it.

Where do the translations come from?

They are prepared for Saunskruti from the Sanskrit, and every text records its own provenance under Source at the foot of its page, including which readings are disputed and how they were settled. Translations are copyrighted scholarship, so nothing here is lifted from another edition.

Where the scholarship is genuinely contested, the page says so rather than picking a side quietly. The Rudrāṣṭakam notes three readings settled by the metre, and declines to affirm a traditional ascription the text does not support.

How do I read the transliteration?

It is IAST, the scholarly standard. The diacritics are not decoration: each one is a different sound, and dropping them merges words that are not the same word.

ā ī ū

held twice as long as a, i, u

ṛ

a vowel, roughly the ri in rich

ś

sh, formed at the palate

ṣ

sh, formed further back, tongue curled

ṭ ḍ ṇ

tongue curled back to the roof of the mouth

ṃ

the preceding vowel is nasalised

ḥ

a soft echo of the preceding vowel

ñ ṅ

as in canyon, and as in sing

You do not need any of this to search. Typing shiva, śiva or शिव finds the same texts.

Why is the Devanagari larger than the English?

Because it is the text and the English is a note about it. On a page here the Sanskrit is the largest, most confident thing on screen, and the translation serves it rather than replacing it.

Why are there five colour schemes?

Two of them are the two halves of a pilgrimage: कैलास the mountain, and मानस the lake, which is also the page. The other three come from pigments this literature was physically written in: red lead, Indian yellow, and the patina of a copper-plate grant. Reading happens in different light at different hours, so the ground is yours to choose and it is remembered.

How do I quote a verse?

Hover or focus any verse and a cite control appears beside its number. It copies the text, the verse, the transliteration, a canonical reference and a link that returns you to exactly that verse.

The canonical reference looks like urn:cts:saunskruti:shaiva.rudrashtakam:3. It names the passage rather than the web page, so it keeps working if this site moves or its addresses change. You can resolve one here.

What do you collect about me?

Nothing. There are no accounts, no analytics and no cookies of our own. The one exception is the recitation player: it loads only if you press play, and it is served from YouTube’s privacy-enhanced host, which sets no tracking cookies. The full account is on the privacy page.

Why does the recitation come from YouTube?

Because that is where the recordings are, and they belong to the reciters who made them. Embedding the official player keeps the audio with its source and credits the reciter by name. Each text names its own.

Can I use these texts elsewhere?

The Sanskrit is not anyone’s to own. The translations and the word-by-word glosses are this project’s work, so if you want to reuse them, ask, and cite what you use. Licensing terms are on the terms page.

How much is here?

3 texts at the moment, each fully opened rather than merely posted. One text done properly is worth more than forty done adequately, and the corpus grows in that order. You can browse everything published.

Is this a religious site?

It is a scholarly one about religious literature. Texts are translated faithfully, including the claims they make about themselves, and those claims are attributed to the text rather than asserted in our own voice. Nothing here tells you what to believe.