A Sanskrit edition of the hora shastra. The editor states plainly where the text comes from: three palm-leaf manuscripts, whose colophons give the name of the commentary. The palm-leaf tradition is not the printed one. Manuscripts diverge among themselves, and an edition that names its sources and...
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The Brihat Samhita is Varahamihira's second large book and of an entirely different kind from the Brihat Jataka. A samhita speaks not of a person's fate but of a country's and a year's: omens, rains, harvests, earthquakes, comets, architecture, gems, rites. What matters for our work is something...
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The Sanskrit text of the Brihat Jataka in Devanagari, without translation or commentary. We keep it for one reason: the translations disagree. Where Vijnanananda and Subrahmanya Sastri differ, only the original settles it — and it settles it not by continuous reading but by checking a single...
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This edition is worth more than the other translations for one reason: it carries the commentary of Bhattotpala (tenth century), the oldest that survives. Sanskrit verse often admits two readings, and a translator must choose silently; Bhattotpala chooses aloud and explains why. The table of...
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The Brihat Jataka is Varahamihira's chief work (sixth century) and the foundation of all later Indian natal astrology. Nearly every later treatise — the Jataka Parijata, the Sarvartha Chintamani, the Phaladipika — either restates its rules or argues with them, so reading the later books without...
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