Sacred Texts
The primary texts the site draws on — 96 in all. Filter by canon or by tradition.
A Rigvedic Upanishad; source of the great saying prajnanam brahma, 'consciousness is Brahman.'
A classical commentary on the Nityashodashikarnava attributed to Vidyananda, read alongside the Rjuvimarsini in the Sri Vidya tradition.
Panini's grammar of Sanskrit in roughly four thousand sutras, the supreme work of vyakarana and one of the earliest formal generative systems.
A radical non-dual dialogue of about 298 verses between the sage Ashtavakra and King Janaka, teaching that the Self is the ever-free witness and that
The fourth Veda, of spells, healing and household life, recognised as Veda later than the other three; home of the Mundaka, Prashna and Mandukya Upani
Krishna's 700-verse teaching to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, set within the Mahabharata; the most read of all Hindu scriptures.
The Srimad Bhagavatam, in twelve books. Scripture to the Gaudiya, Vallabha, Madhva and Nimbarka traditions, and a text whose own last chapter gives it
A Shakta Upanishad that maps the Sri Chakra onto the worshipper's own body and mind, the charter text of internal (antaryaga) worship.
Badarayana's aphorisms systematizing the Upanishads; one of the three foundations of Vedanta, with Shankara's commentary.
A short garland of verses on the knowledge of Brahman, attributed to Shankara, carrying one of the most quoted lines in Advaita.
Also called the Picumata, the earliest surviving witness to the fourfold classification of the Bhairava canon, and the text that places the Svacchanda
The oldest and largest Upanishad, the 'great forest text' closing the White Yajurveda; home of Yajnavalkya, Maitreyi and Gargi, of neti neti and aham
Varahamihira's sixth-century encyclopedia, whose chapters on architecture preserve an early codified form of the vastu-purusha-mandala.
A great early Upanishad of the Samaveda; source of tat tvam asi in Uddalaka's teaching to Shvetaketu, of the udgitha meditation on OM, and of Satyakam
Ten verses of Advaita in hymn form, on the teacher whose teaching is silence. Its colophon calls it an ashtaka, eight, and nobody explains why.
A major Shakta scripture exalting the Goddess as supreme; it gives one of the largest lists of the Shakti Peethas, numbering them at 108.
The 'Glory of the Goddess', a 700-verse text in the Markandeya Purana and the founding scripture of Shaktism; tells of the Goddess slaying Mahishasura
The oldest texts on law and conduct, terse and in mixed prose and verse, ascribed to Apastamba, Gautama, Baudhayana and Vasishtha; the seed of the Dha
Four verses that name the twelve jyotirlingas and promise that reciting them is the pilgrimage. Everyone credits Shankara, and the colophon belongs to
A Vaishnava Purana known for its teachings on death and the afterlife, and for its list of the seven sacred cities (Sapta Puri) that grant liberation.
Jayadeva's twelfth-century song cycle on Radha and Krishna, which opens with the hymn that fixed the order of the ten avatars.
A late Nath compilation valued for the forty-eight works it quotes, and the one text citing a Shabaratantra by name with an ordinary citation formula.
Tulsidas's forty-verse Awadhi hymn to Hanuman; the most-recited prayer of north India, sung for courage and protection.
Svatmarama's fifteenth-century manual of hatha yoga: posture, breath-control, the seals and locks, and the awakening of kundalini as a ladder toward r
The only principal Upanishad set within a Samhita (the fortieth chapter of the White Yajurveda); a short, dense verse text on the Lord indwelling all.
A vast Kalikula tantra in four hexads, whose first section carries the fullest classification of the scriptural seats that survives, including the nam
A Shakta Purana of eastern India (c. 10th to 11th century) that glorifies the goddess Kamakhya and sets out her worship, including the Rudhiradhyaya o
The dialogue of the boy Nachiketa with Yama, lord of death: the good versus the pleasant, the razor's edge, and the teaching of the deathless Self.
A Samavedic Upanishad asking by what power the mind and senses act, and pointing to the Brahman behind them, 'that which the mind cannot think.'
The root scripture of the Paschimamnaya, the Western Transmission. Its closing colophon claims twenty-five chapters and three and a half thousand vers
A principal Kaula tantra on initiation, the guru, and the disciplines of the kula path, much cited on the ethics and inner sense of the five m's.
Uddyotanasuri's Prakrit campu romance, finished in 779 CE, in which the holders of a savara-vijja are Vidyadharas wearing Shabara dress as a costume.
The 'thousand names of Lalita' from the Brahmanda Purana, the central litany of Srividya, each name a meditation on the Goddess and the Sri Chakra.
Forty chapters on Lalita Tripurasundari appended to the Brahmanda Purana, numbered to look original, and the source of almost everything Sri Vidya say
A Shaiva Purana centred on the linga and the arising of the pillar of light.
The great epic of the Bharata war, and the frame that holds the Bhagavad Gita; a vast store of dharma, story, and teaching.
Patanjali's 'Great Commentary' on Panini and Katyayana, the third pillar of the grammatical tradition and a classic of Sanskrit prose.
The fullest surviving work of the Krama, written at Chidambaram in the Tamil country around 1300. Seventy verses in Maharashtri Prakrit, with the auth
Gaudapada's two hundred and fifteen verses on the shortest Upanishad, where Advaita Vedanta becomes recognisably itself and argues in Buddhist vocabul
The shortest principal Upanishad, twelve verses analysing OM and the four states of consciousness: waking, dream, deep sleep, and the fourth (turiya).
The classical law-text; its account of the five daily sacrifices frames the logic of domestic worship.
One of the oldest of the eighteen Mahapuranas, best known for containing the Devi Mahatmya, the founding scripture of Goddess worship.
Among the oldest Puranas, named for Vishnu's fish avatar; a key source for temple and image-making lore and for the myth of the Vastu Purusha.
Jaimini's aphorisms on Vedic injunction, which open by asking what dharma is and answer, in the next line, that only the Veda can say.
The late text that catalogued the Upanishads, named the ten, fixed the hundred and eight, and never once used the word everyone quotes it for.
An Atharvavedic verse Upanishad; source of the image of the two birds on one tree and of the distinction between higher and lower knowledge.
A large Vaishnava Purana with an unusually technical mantra-shastra section, and no critical edition behind the text most people quote.
A Mahapurana whose Purvabhaga lists forty-nine mantra defects and carries the half-line at 1.87.39 where a named vidya is said to have been pinned by
Bharata's science of the stage, which called itself a fifth Veda made for everyone the other four shut out, and gave Indian art its one central idea.
Yaska's treatise on the meaning of Vedic words, the oldest surviving Indian work of etymology and a commentary on the glossary called the Nighantu.
The "Ocean of the Sixteen Nityas," the first part of the Vamakeshvara Tantra and a foundational scripture of the Sri Vidya tradition, expounding the w
A ritual manual (paddhati) of Sri Vidya worship by Umanandanatha, a disciple of Bhaskararaya, setting out the daily and occasional rites.
A foundational manual of shiksha, the science of Vedic pronunciation, and the source of the image of the Veda as a body whose limbs are the six Vedang
A concise sutra manual of Srividya worship attributed to Parashurama, a standard guide to the sequence of the rite.
An Atharvavedic Upanishad framed as six questions (prashna) put by students to the sage Pippalada, on the origin of beings, the breath, and OM.
Twenty sutras in which Kshemaraja compresses Kashmiri non-dualism for beginners, and then writes his own commentary on them.
Valmiki's epic of Rama; source of the descent of the Ganga and the worship at Rameshwaram.
Tulsidas's Awadhi retelling of the Ramayana, begun in 1574, the living Ramayana of north India, recited and enacted in the Ramlila; its Rama is wholly
Sixty-nine verses on a stone slab in Madhya Pradesh, carrying the charter myth of the Mattamayura Shaiva lineage, which its first editor declined to t
The oldest layer of the tradition; hymns to Rudra, the Gayatri to Savitr, and the Devi Sukta of Vak.
A classical commentary on the Nityashodashikarnava, attributed to Shivananda, valued for its exposition of the Sri Vidya mantra and the Sri Chakra.
The Veda of melody: chiefly Rigvedic verses set to chant (saman) for the Soma sacrifice, sung by the udgatar priest.
Chapter six of Purnananda's Shritattvacintamani, in fifty-five verses. Six centres, fifty petals, fifty letters, and the book that carried them to the
Bhaskararaya's celebrated commentary on the Lalita Sahasranama, the standard exposition of the thousand names of the Goddess.
'Waves of Beauty,' a hymn of one hundred verses to the Goddess attributed to Shankara, prized both as devotion and as an encoded manual of Srividya.
Bhaskararaya's eighteenth-century commentary on the Nityashodashikarnava (Vamakeshvara Tantra), one of the major expositions of Sri Vidya.
A title belonging to no single book: an early Garuda scripture listed around 800 CE, and the late bilingual incantation corpus first printed at Calcut
A Sanskrit compendium of mantra science ascribed to Lakshmanadeshika, carrying the earliest fixed enumeration of the six acts that anyone can point to
The great Brahmana of the Shukla Yajurveda; extends the debts a person owes and frames the five great sacrifices (pancha-maha-yajna) behind the debt t
The canonical treatises on art, image-making and architecture (Mayamata, Manasara, Samarangana Sutradhara and others) that govern temple design, propo
The major Shaiva Purana; source of the Lingodbhava, the twelve jyotirlingas, and the great myths of Shiva.
The geometry of altar construction within the Kalpa-sutras; they hold the earliest extant verbal statement of the theorem later named for Pythagoras.
The Upanishad that first names Rudra-Shiva as the one Brahman behind all things.
The largest Purana; the Kashi and Kedara Khandas and the Setu-mahatmya expand the jyotirlinga and temple traditions.
The principal tantra of the Mantrapitha, centred on Svacchandabhairava, and the one Bhairava scripture of its class to survive and be continuously rea
Kshemaraja's commentary on the Svacchanda Tantra, and the place where he takes a dualist reading of the scripture apart in public.
A theistic Upanishad of the Krishna Yajurveda; its opening weighs the rival causes of existence (time, nature, necessity, chance, the self) against wh
The forest book of the Black Yajur Veda, and the place where the Aghora mantra is printed under three different numbers depending on which division yo
The core Samhita of the Krishna Yajurveda; states the three debts a person is born owing, to the sages, the gods and the ancestors, the Vedic root of
A Black Yajurveda Upanishad; source of the teaching of the five sheaths (koshas), from the body of food inward to the sheath of bliss.
Abhinavagupta's vast synthesis of the Kashmir Shaiva tantras, the towering work of non-dual Shaiva thought, read in Srividya through Jayaratha's comme
The revealed scriptures of temple ritual and Tantric practice; each Shaiva, Vaishnava, and Shakta school draws on its own.
The philosophical summit of the Veda; the mahavakyas and the non-dual vision that Vedanta is built on.
Tirumular's Tamil classic of Shaiva yoga and mantra, an early southern witness to the practices that feed the Srividya stream.
Manikkavacakar's ecstatic Tamil hymns to Shiva as the dancer at Chidambaram.
'The Secret of Tripura,' a narrative and doctrinal work expounding the wisdom of the Goddess as the non-dual Self.
A short Shakta Upanishad on Tripurasundari, the Sri Chakra and the fifteen-syllable mantra, drawn on to give Srividya a Vedantic footing.
Kanada's aphorisms on what there is: substance, quality, motion and the rest, and an atomism arrived at long before anyone could test it.
A foundational Srividya tantra (also known by its section the Nityashodashikarnava) on the Sri Chakra, the mantra and the Nitya goddesses.
Bhaskararaya's treatise on the inner worship of the Sri Vidya mantra, with his own commentary, the Prakasha.
The oldest extant Indian astronomical text, attributed to Lagadha; a ritual calendar built to fix the times of the Vedic sacrifices on a five-year cyc
One of the earliest and most coherent of the great Puranas; H. H. Wilson's 1840 translation gives the classic account of the churning of the ocean for
The Veda of the sacrificial formula (yajus), the prose handbook of the rite, transmitted in a White and a Black recension; the Brihadaranyaka closes i
The classical definition of yoga as the stilling of the mind, and the eight limbs in which posture is just one.
'The Heart of the Yogini,' the inner portion of the Vamakeshvara corpus, on the meditative and internal worship of the Sri Chakra.
A late Shakta Tantra centred on Kamakhya and the goddess Kali; it openly records the Kirata (tribal) origin of the cult it transmits.