Help & FAQ
Finding a verse
- By number — type a verse number like 2.47 in any search box and press Enter; you will land straight on it.
- By word — search any word in IAST, with or without diacritics: krsna finds kṛṣṇa, samatva finds every mention across verses, themes and the commentary.
- By browsing — Adhyāyas lists all 18 chapters; Themes arranges all 700 verses into 30 threads; Q&A indexes every question in the commentary.
Reading a verse page
- Mūla — the verse in Devanagari with IAST below, and its meter as a chip.
- Translation — Swami Gambhīrānanda's English; tap the toggle beneath it for Swami Tejomayānanda's Hindi.
- Pronunciation — Vaamshii — the chant-ready split. Read each group as one breath-unit. Symbols: # upadhmānīya, % jihvāmūlīya, ऽ avagraha, (!!) a transgression in the original text itself. Full method on the Chanting page.
- Word by word — every word glossed (padārtha).
- Themes — tap any chip to see all verses in that thread.
- Meaning — a question, and its answer: the author's reasoned solution where one exists, otherwise the verse's own translation standing as the reply.
Shortcuts and tools
- On any verse page, the ← and → arrow keys move to the previous and next verse — read an entire adhyāya without touching the mouse.
- The Special chandas page filters the ~50 non-anuṣṭubh verses by meter.
- Printing a verse page gives a clean chanting sheet — navigation is stripped and the Vaamshii split is enlarged automatically.
Why Advaita?
The reasoning on this site — in the Q&A commentary especially — works from within one philosophical framework: Advaita Vedānta, the non-dual teaching of Śrī Ādi Śaṅkarācārya. That is a choice, not a neutral default, and it is worth explaining why it was made — and why it need not put off a reader who does not (yet) share it.
To the sceptic
Advaita does not ask for belief before inquiry; it asks the opposite. Its method is vicāra — self-examination — and its evidence is not a scripture to be taken on faith but the one fact no scepticism can dislodge: that something is aware, right now, of these words being read. Doubt everything else — the body, the world, even God as commonly pictured — and that bare awareness is what remains, doing the doubting. Advaita's argument starts there, not from an article of faith the sceptic must first swallow.
To the philosopher
Advaita is one of the most sustained exercises in negative reasoning (neti neti — "not this, not this") in the history of thought: every candidate for "what I truly am" — body, senses, mind, intellect, even the sense of individual agency — is examined and set aside as an object witnessed, not the witness itself. Its classical epistemology — the analysis of waking, dream and deep sleep in the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, worked out further by Gauḍapāda and Śaṅkara — is a genuine argument, open to scrutiny, not a dogma exempted from it. That is why the Q&A commentary treats every verse the same way: state the difficulty plainly, then reason it through.
To the agnostic
Advaita does not require a prior answer to "does God exist?" before it can begin. It asks a smaller, harder-to-dodge question first: what is doing the not-knowing? The agnostic's own "I don't know" presupposes an "I" aware of not knowing — and that awareness, Advaita says, is what the word Brahman ultimately points to, prior to and independent of the doctrinal furniture the agnostic is right to be wary of.
To the materialist
Advaita does not quarrel with the materialist's description of the world — matter, energy, causation, the brain — at the level where that description operates (vyāvahārika, the transactional level, in Advaita's own vocabulary). It asks one further question that description does not itself answer: in what does the world of matter and energy appear? Not as one more object in the room, but as the light in which every object — including the concept "matter" — is known at all. Advaita calls that light consciousness, and identifies it, finally, with Brahman: a move compatible with, not contradictory to, every empirical fact the materialist has established.
To the theist
Advaita does not dissolve the personal God; it grounds Him more deeply. Śrī Kṛṣṇa as Bhagavān — the object of the devotee's love, worship and surrender across the Gītā's Īśvara and Bhakti verses — is, in Advaita, Brahman with qualities (saguṇa), the same one Reality wearing a face turned lovingly toward the seeker. Nirguṇa Brahman, the Absolute without form discussed in the Gītā's later chapters, is not a rival to that God but His own innermost truth. The Gītā closes the distance in one line: mayi sarvam idaṃ protaṃ sūtre maṇigaṇā iva — "all this is strung on Me, as gems are strung on a thread" (7.7). The devotee loses nothing; the thread and the gems turn out, at last, to be the same.
Each of these is a different door into the same room — which is exactly the logic behind Samanvaya, the thirtieth and closing theme of The Thematic Companion: not a forced agreement between schools, but the recognition that every honestly pursued path, followed far enough, arrives at the one Vastness this site's own name is quietly pointing to. See About → the name "allbig".
Frequently asked questions
Is this site really free? What's the catch?
Really free. No accounts, no paywall, no ads, no tracking beyond an anonymous visit counter. All three books are downloadable in full from the Books page. It is an offering, not a product.
Which edition does the verse numbering follow?
The Gita Press (Gorakhpur) edition throughout. Editions differ slightly — most famously around the disputed opening verse of adhyāya 13, which some editions count and others omit; this site follows Gita Press, and the Q&A commentary discusses the hidden verse on the 13.1 page.
What do the symbols #, %, ऽ and (!!) mean?
# upadhmānīya — a visarga before p/ph, pronounced like "f". % jihvāmūlīya — a visarga before k/kh, pronounced "hkh". ऽ avagraha — an elided "a". (!!) marks a place where the original text itself transgresses prosody or Pāṇinian grammar — these are features of the received text, not errors of this site. Full method on the Chanting page.
Why is a verse listed under several themes at once?
Because the verses are treated as independent instructions, each sortable under every theme it genuinely touches — the way vyākaraṇa sūtras are organised by topic. The site deliberately does not lean on prakaraṇa story-arcs between consecutive verses; the reasoning is spelled out in About → A note on method.
Some verses show a question whose answer is just the translation. Why?
The authored commentary takes up 236 questions covering 356 verses — the knotty ones. For the remaining verses, a study question is posed so that every verse meets the reader as an answer to something; Swami Gambhīrānanda's rendering stands as that answer, and is credited as such on the page.
How do I find a verse when I only remember its opening words?
Use the Index — the traditional śloka-anukramaṇikā. All 700 verses sorted by the first letters of the shloka itself, uvācha narrations excluded.
Is there audio? Will there be?
Phase two. Until then, the Chanting page links video playlists that walk through the Vaamshii method adhyāya by adhyāya.
May I use this material in my class, satsang or study circle?
Yes — share freely, print freely, distribute the PDFs freely. A mention of the source (allbig.in / Sudarshan Ravi) is appreciated. For collaborations, write to samskrta.nandini10@gmail.com.
I found a mistake. What do I do?
Please say so — no compilation of this kind can claim completeness. Leave a note on the Comments page or email the author; corrections genuinely shape the next revision.
Something else?
Leave a note on the Comments page, or write to the author at samskrta.nandini10@gmail.com.