Research in School of Indian Heritage

Purpose

The purpose of this thematic e-concordance is to provide a swift search mechanism for shlokas/mantras in the principal Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Mandukya Karika. What distinguishes this from word/string search programmes that already exist is the feature that it is thematic.

Target Audience

Researchers: At the click of a mouse one would have available all shlokas from the above sources occurring under a given theme. Editors/Authors: Often for the purpose of writing articles it is useful to have available all shlokas/mantras on a particular theme. The same may be said for those who would like to prepare a talk/speech on a given theme.

Structure

a) Fourfold classification:

The e-concordance is divided into 4 broad themes:
    1) Jiva (the individual) 
    2) Spiritual Practice and Values
    3) Supreme Reality
    4) Philosophy

This is in accordance with standard texts on Vedanta/Yoga. 

In the Brahmasutras for instance there are 4 chapters: 

    1) Samanvaya - the main thrust of this chapter is to conclude that the Upanishad vakyas have Brahman as their focus. This would correspond roughly to "Supreme Reality" in our classification scheme
    2) Avirodha - dealing with philosophical arguments countering other schools of thought. This would correspond roughly to "Philosophy" in our classification scheme.
    3) Sadhana - This would correspond roughly to "Spiritual Practice" in our classification scheme.
    4) Phala - These are the intermediate steps in terms of fruits that accrue to the Jiva (individual soul)

From the point of view of Vishishtadvaita, a natural classification scheme would consist of 

    1) Jiva (individual soul)  
    2) Jagat (the world) - The view of the world is what constitutes "Philosophy"
    3) Ishwara - Supreme Reality
    4) Spiritual Practice - connecting the individual soul to Ishwara

Patanjali's Yoga Sutras consists of a similar four-fold classification:

    1) Samadhipada - dealing with the Supreme Reality
    2) Sadhanpada - dealing with Spiritual Practice
    3) Vibhutipada - dealing with fruits that accrue to the Jiva (individual soul)
    4) Kaivalyapada - dealing with Philosophical tenets of the Yoga school.

Finally, in the Ramakrishna Vivekananda tradition, the following issues are vital: 

    1) Who am I? dealing with the individual (Jiva)
    2) Who is He? dealing with the Supreme Reality
    3) What is the relation between us? dealing with Spiritual Practice connecting the individual to the Supreme
    4) How to live in the world? dealing with Philosophy 

b) Tree-like structure of subthemes: 

Under each of these heads a number of subthemes are present. These in turn are divided into subheads and so on till a depth of four to five. The total number of themes thus obtained in the final level of classification is about 230. This seems to be the optimum number for providing enough themes while at the same time retaining enough content (in terms of number of shlokas/mantras) per theme.

Acknowledgements 

We would like to acknowledge the following sources: 

    1) The original .itx files of the principal Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Mandukya Karika were downloaded from the site http://www.sanskrit.gde.to Misprints were corrected at the Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University. We welcome from our users any intimation of other misprints that might have been overlooked. Please send email to mahan.mj at gmail dot com or swathyprabhu at gmail dot com 

    2) ITRANS has been used to generate the Devanagri output with the font xdvng 

    3) We are grateful to Professor Mandar Mitra of Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata for having given us his valuable time and labour to write the program that generates the final HTML output that is available on this site. The input file consists of a shloka-by-shloka classification. This was done by hand. The program converts this to a thematic classification with all shlokas under a given theme occurring together.