Electronic Sanskrit Texts

There is little need to emphasise the obvious benefits for scholars and students of having machine-readable and therefore searchable electronic versions of the texts they study. Quite a wide range of e-texts in Indian languages have been entered by people from round the world and put on the web, most of which can be located and downloaded easily from the register maintained in Goettingen (GRETIL). Sanskrit literature of many periods and styles is represented, but there is as yet relatively little on offer in a domain in which the French institutions of research in Pondicherry have long specialised: that of the Śaiva Siddhānta.

Research scholars working in the IFP and the EFEO in Pondicherry have decided to start to fill this gap and are herewith putting on-line a small collection of Sanskrit Saiva works for scholarly use. For the moment, all the e-texts provided are based on published editions ( The Texts on offer).

Other readers of Saiva literature are welcome to offer their electronic texts in this same forum. Please contact: Dominic Goodall .

Transcription

For the moment, they are all offered in two formats: in UNICODE UTF8 (filename.utf) and in an ASCII transcription scheme devised by Velthuis for the Devanagari font he designed for TeX (filename.dn). The Sanskrit alphabet reads as follows in the latter.

Vowels :

a aa i ii u uu .r .R .l .L e ai o au a.m a.h

Consonants :

k kh g gh "n

c ch j jh n

.t .th .d .dh .n

t th d dh n

p ph b bh m

y r l v

"s .s s h

Texts entered following this ASCII scheme can easily be converted into whatever transcription scheme is preferred by those who download the texts.

The texts on offer