Miscellaneous Short Hindu Texts

These files are translations of short Hindu texts taken from various public domain sources, primarily scholarly journals. Many of them have been edited more or less extensively to remove both the untranslated text that often accompanies the translation and the more specialized notes and comments. I have made the assumption that those who need to reference the in-depth philological discussions of these long-dead Victorian Orientalists will have access to the original source materials; please forgive me if I am mistaken.

There were for all intents and purposes no hard standards in transcription at the time that these were written (and there are still none today); I have done my best to represent the varied systems as closely as possible in order to facilitate the transition to unicode that I hope to see in the near future. A period directly before any letter represents a dot-under, a double quote represents a dot-over, and a forward slash (/) before a consonant represents an acute marking over it. For /S and /s, however, I have used Š and š. Acute, grave, and circumflex accents (over vowels) have been rendered directly in HTML, and line-over vowels (macrons) are also shown as circumflex. Where macrons and circumflexes appear together, macrons are shown before the letter that they modify or otherwise noted. The º mark before a vowel represents the 'short' (breve) diacritic; the same marking is also sometimes used in Tibetan transcriptions and in other places, but is not ambiguous. The œ ligature is shown as two letters in older files, but rendered directly in the newer ones; all other diacritics are shown as they appear in the original unless otherwise noted.

For journal title abbreviations, see the Journals page, where all the articles (including non-Hindu) are organized according to their sources.

Last updated May 13, 2002.

Purana

The Mârka.n.deya Pûra.na. Books VII. VIII., trans. B. Hale Wortham (JRAS NS vol. XIII, pp. 355-379) [1881]

Philosophy (The Six Schools, etc.)

The Hastâmalaka ("universally considered as one of the best summaries of the Vedânta doctrines"), trans. Edward B. Cowell (IA vol. IX, pp. 25-27) [1880]
The Tattva-muktâvalî of Gau.da-pûr.nânanda-chakravartin ("a vigorous attack on the Vedânta system by a follower of the Pûr.naprajña school"), trans. Edward B. Cowell (JRAS NS vol. XV, pp. 137-173) [1883]

Vaishnava

Kîrtans, or Hymns from the Earliest Bengali Poets, trans. John Beames (IA, vol. I, pp. 323-326) [1872]
Chaitanya and the Vaishnava Poets of Bengal, by John Beames (IA, vol. II, pp. 1-7) [1873]
The Early Vaish.nava Poets: I. Bidyâpati, trans. John Beames (IA, vol. II, pp. 37-43) [1873]
The Early Vaish.nava Poets: II. Cha.n.dî Dâs, trans. John Beames (IA, vol. II, pp. 187-189) [1873]
The Šikshâ-Patrî of the Svâmi-Nârâya.na Sect, trans. Monier Williams (JRAS NS vol. XIV, pp. 733-772) [1882]

Miscellaneous

The Naladiyar (a Tamil book of ethics), trans. F. J. Leeper (IA, vol. II) [1873]