mAnasa-taraMgiNI

This is by no means a comprehensive treatment of the text under consideration.

The first reflex of the Mārtāṇḍa myth, viz., the sun as the dead egg, is attested in maṇḍala-10 of the Ṛgveda as part of a famous cosmogonic sūkta (RV 10.72): aṣṭau putrāso aditer ye jātās tanvas pari |devāṃ upa prait … Continue reading →

As we have discussed before, outside the Indo-Iranian and Old Greek worlds, some of the most conservative Indo-European traditions were found among the Baltic peoples.

For an introduction, read this.

Guhyakālī by Nepali artist RP Shreshtha.

asmābhiḥ kalpitaṁ śastraṃ vijayāśā-parāyaṇam | tad eva śatravo yuñjanty asmattaḥ sutarām punaḥ || The weapon devised by us, devoted to the wish of victory – that very weapon [our] enemies now employ more thoroughly than we do.

In the course of our daily study (pārāyaṇa) of the śruti, we practiced the following ṛk of Vasukarṇa, the son of Vasukra of the clan of the Vasiṣṭha-s: dyāvā-pṛthivī janayann abhi vrata āpa oṣadhīr vanināni yajñiyā ।

While far removed from each other in space and time, both the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead describe a structured journey of consciousness through what seems like a non-ordinary postmortem reality.

The year 1991 flashed in our mind along with the letters S, K, G, K, S.

For the purposes of this note, we take a broad definition of soteriology.

The pervasiveness of didactic animal tales in the Śanti- and Anuśāsana-parvan-s of the Mahābhārata, the Jātaka-s of the Tathāgata, and the Pañcatantra of Viṣṇuśarman suggests that proto-versions of these tales were a prominent feature of Indo-Aryan folklo…

We have often wondered what was in the mind of the great mantravādin Bhāskararāya Makhīndra when he titled his commentary on the Nityāṣoḍaśikārṇava section of the Vāmakeśvara-tantra the Setubandha (building the bridge).

The Pleiades (Kṛttikāḥ), probably the visually most dramatic object in the Earthly skies, emerged quite recently in typical astronomical time scales.

This is just a brief discursion to note our thoughts on some recent events with the advantage of hindsight and to tentatively look forward in terms of what might ensue.

॥

Via an acquaintance, we ran into a middle-aged mleccha woman, who had survived a difficult health situation in her childhood.

In 1935, the fossil hunter Louis Grauvogel began discovering an enormous cache of fossils in the quarries of the Grès à Voltzia of the Vosges in the disputed Lorraine region between France and Germany.

Again and again, the question of who is a Hindu comes up on social media.

Japanese depiction of Ḍakinī-s in the Ninna-ji Taizō maṇḍala Unlike in the case of the Hindu tantra-s, the traditional classification of the Bauddha tantra-s approximates their evolutionary sequence.

In the long past days of our youth, the entrance exam to junior college often featured a problem in the mathematics paper involving the ages of a father and his son [Footnote 1].

The cat is a lion when catching a mouse, but it is a mouse when on the battlefield of the leopard -translation into English of a verse of some poet from Islamic Iran Molecular divergence estimates suggest that all the … Continue reading →

When the Egyptian religion came to an end at the hands of the second Abrahamism around 550 CE (following the closure of the temple of Philae around 537 CE by Justinian I), the tradition was already a hoary one – … Continue reading →

The results of the senior college admission exams were finally out.

A “depiction’’ of the deity of the Uttarāmnāya manifesting in viyat-pada during the 17-fold meditation yugapad yānti yatra+āśu sāmarasyaṃ viyatpade ।

The haṃsa (the divine swan/gander) is identified across Hindu mantra traditions with the breath cycle.

Rudraśakti While the four core āmnāya-s of the kaula tradition are presented by its texts (e.g., Ciñciṇīmata-sāra-samuccaya) as directional lodges, they also have an evolutionary relationship between themselves (we leave out the late, clearly syncretic ūr…

The attractor in consideration was probably rediscovered by multiple explorers of chaotic maps in the early days of the computational exploration of such objects.

Of the Sāmavedic schools, the Kauthuma-s follow the śrautasūtra of Lāṭyāyana and the gṛhyasūtra of Gobhila.

In earlier accounts, we have detailed how the Mahāmleccha Deep State had engineered the uccāṭana of Vijaya-nāma-vyāpārin.

dhūmaketum bhāṛjīkaṃ vyuṣṭiṣu yajñānām adhvaraśriyam ॥

Proboscideans are mammals with a deep evolutionary history of sociality and high intelligence (not immediately apparent from encephalization alone) that made them potential rivals as well as candidates for domestication by humans.

While heavily influenced by the Sinitic transmissions, Japan retained its own unique traditions throughout the historical period.

Word2Vec is a natural language processing technique developed by Mikolov and colleagues that generates word embeddings, i.e., dense vector representations of words in a text, which capture their semantic relationships.

A trail of memories, both victorious and unkind, In the rear-view mirror’s gaze, I find.

We had originally wished to write a piece or two about the system of thought of the great Renaissance thinker Giordano Bruno, but, as ever, the attempt to be comprehensive came in the way of producing anything substantial that was … Continue reading →

The Puruṣa-sūkta, or the chant of Puruṣa-Nārāyaṇa, is a late Vedic composition with multiple variants that occupies a focal position in the history of the Indo-Aryan strand of the Indo-European religion.

The ways of the fierce gods are not easy for men to comprehend with their finite lives.

It was the time Somakhya and Indrasena were by themselves — without their companions — for that is close to the ultimate test of a man.

It was a Śivarātrī.

The core of the material discussed in this note is based on the publications of the Hungarian-Mongolian Joint Expedition studying folk traditions in Mongolia and the masterly work of Igor de Rachewiltz on religion in the Secret History of the … Continue r…

While triangle centers (e.g., incenter, centroid circumcenter) are captivating to the amateur and mathematician alike, their serious investigation is a relatively modern pursuit.

Lootika had returned from a scientific competition, which had been held in the dreadful city of Mahāvisphoṭaka, like the victorious Roman army after sacking the towns of West Asian counter-religionists.

The below is the barest sketch of a topic that has already been treated in multiple book-length works by learned scholars of the Orient.

The śaiva pattern of worship, which is especially emphasized in the Iśāna-srotas (siddhānta), features the Nirmālya-devatā, Caṇḍeśvara with roots in the older Pāśupata atimārga.

Over the past decade, the “Black” Kalasha people from the Chitral (<Skt.

A key feature of most polytheistic religions, typically natural religions, is the importance of a multiplicity of visualizations of deities.

To our knowledge, the Hiraṇyakeśin branch of the Taittirīyaka-s is today only found in pockets in Mahārāṣṭra and the Drāviḍa states.

Sir Francis Drake, buccaneer bold and bloody, Sailed the seas in a gold-grabbing spree, With the Golden Hind, he circled the Earth wide – A murdering marauder on the swelling tide.

Leonhard Euler’s discovery of the zeta function in the course of solving the Basel problem was one of those momentous “unifications” in mathematics with deep philosophical implications that eventually led to the Riemann hypothesis.

This is the second of the Charuchitra series: Even if the story narrated were to resemble real-life incidents, all characters in it are fictitious.