Continuing Sādhanā – Guest Lectures for our Teacher Community

In our tradition, the path of a teacher is also the path of a student. The Taittirīya Upaniṣad pairs the two as a single obligation: svādhyāya-pravacanābhyāṁ na pramaditavyam, do not neglect study and teaching. Neither one closes once the other has begun. To teach Veda chanting is to keep learning it, in deeper and deeper passes, alongside everyone we are training.

This is why our teacher community is invited into every guest teaching we host. The teachers who come to us bring decades of study from their own lineages, and what they share belongs to the whole community we are building together. Below is a glimpse of four such teachings offered to our teachers across April, a rich month, with a note on what each one opened up for us.

Prof. Gauri Mahulikar on the Puruṣa Sūktam

This class was offered to our advanced Level-2 teachers as part of the Pañca Sūktāni training, where the Puruṣa Sūktam takes a central place.

Prof. Gauri walked us through the sixteen mantras of the Ṛgveda Puruṣa Sūktam and the cosmological vision they carry: the Cosmic Puruṣa as sahasraśīrṣā, sahasrākṣaḥ, sahasrapāt, where “thousand” does not mean a finite number but as many as there are beings in creation. Only one quarter of the Puruṣa becomes the manifest world. Three quarters remain immutable, beyond our apprehension, in the realm of immortal consciousness. The teaching is offered, she reminded us, not to diminish creation but to cultivate reverence for the Creator.

She drew our attention to the inner teaching held in verses six through twelve, where the gods perform the cosmic sacrifice with the Puruṣa himself as the offering. Sāyaṇācārya calls this a Manasa Yajña, a Sarvahuta Yajña: everything belonging to “I and mine”, ahantā and mamatā, is offered. This sacrifice of ego and possessiveness is the bīja, the seed-form, of the Bhagavad Gītā’s later teaching on naiṣkāmya bhāvana, the spirit of desireless action. The Puruṣa Sūktam holds Karma Yoga in its earliest stratum.

Prof. Gauri also reminded us of the Itihāsa-Purāṇa method of reading Veda: that the deepest meaning of a mantra is opened through the lens of the great narrative tradition. The sūktam is not a closed text but a living utterance carried forward through the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa, and the Purāṇas, where its themes are dramatised, retold, and made available to the heart.

For our teachers: Each session of chanting can be entered as its own small Yajña. The three pillars Prof. Gauri named, dravya (the offering), devatā (the deity), and tyāga (relinquishment), are all present when we sit to chant: our breath and attention as the dravya, the deity of the mantra as the devatā, and the letting go of ahantā and mamatā as the tyāga that completes it. Without tyāga, Yajña is incomplete. This is a teaching our teachers can carry quietly into how they hold their own practice and how they invite their students into the chant.

Dr. Gauri Mahulikar is the Academic Director of Chinmaya International Foundation and former Head of the Sanskrit Department at Mumbai University, with a Ph.D. in Vedic Studies, an honorary D.Litt., eight books and over 150 articles to her name. An award-winning scholar and sought-after speaker at institutions including Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford, she has taught a series of courses on the Sūktas and their Devatās at Chinmaya, and continues to mentor scholars and practitioners worldwide.

Komilla Sutton on Jyotiṣa

Komilla Sutton came to introduce our community to Jyotiṣa, the science of light, one of the six Vedāṅgas and described in the tradition as the eyes of the Vedas. Without these eyes, she said, the Vedic teachings cannot be fully decoded. Jyotiṣa was always part of traditional Vedic study, and translations that soften specific references to grahas and nakṣatras into vague language about stars or the cosmos lose something the original texts speak about directly.

She introduced the navagraha, the nine planets used in classical Jyotiṣa, which include the seven visible to the naked eye plus the two lunar nodes, Rāhu and Ketu. The word graha means to grasp, to hold, to perceive: the planets grasp the information of the cosmos and reveal the grasp of karma upon us. She walked us through the three levels of karma, sañcita, prārabdha, and kriyamāṇa, and reminded us that what we do today is the most consequential, because today’s kriyamāṇa karma becomes tomorrow’s sañcita.

Each day of the week is also ruled by a planet, and honouring the graha of the day, with its mantra or simply with awareness, is one of the oldest forms of Jyotiṣa-aligned practice. Komilla ji opened the class with the Navagraha prayer (Vāmana Purāṇa 14) used in any pūjā to honour the trimūrti and the nine planets together:

brahmā murāris-tripurāntakārī
bhānuḥ śaśī bhūmisuto budhaśca |
guruśca śukraḥ śanirāhuketavaḥ
kurvantu sarve mama suprabhātam ||

May Brahmā, Murāri, and Tripurāntakārī, and the Sun, Moon, Mars and Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Rāhu and Ketu, all of them, make my morning auspicious.

For our teachers: This is the takeaway we want every Veda Studies teacher to hold close. In Jyotiṣa, mantra japa, regular sādhana, observance of Caturthī, Śivarātri, and the festivals of the spiritual calendar are themselves upāya, remedies that calm the mind and lighten the grip of karma. They work even when the practitioner does not know their own chart. The work we are already doing, and teaching others to do, is Jyotiṣa-aligned practice. The Taittirīya Upaniṣad places study and teaching together as a single obligation, svādhyāya-pravacanābhyāṁ na pramaditavyam. As we train to teach, both halves of that obligation are being met.

Komilla Sutton is one of the leading voices of contemporary Jyotiṣa, with over thirty years as a consultant, educator, author, and speaker since 1995. She is the founder of the Academy of Vedic Sciences, which offers a four-level online Vedic Astrology programme and advanced courses, and co-founder and Chairman of the British Association of Vedic Astrology.

Dr. Nagaraj Paturi on Indian Kāvya

Dr. Nagaraj Paturi graced our community with his first teaching for us, an introduction to Indian Kāvya, Sanskrit poetic literature, with attention shaped specifically for students of Veda chanting. Before entering Kāvya itself, he laid down the linguistic and prosodic ground we need to walk on.

He drew a clear line between Svara and stress. Svara is intonation, the precise tonal pattern of a Veda mantra, preserved exactly as it was at the moment of revelation and transmitted unchanged through the lineage from ācārya to adhyāpaka to adhyetā. Sanskrit has no stress. English-language writings on Veda often collapse intonation, stress, and accent under the term “accent markers”, which is imprecise. He then opened up Sanskrit prosody: the mātrā as the unit of time, the laghu of one wink and the guru of two, and the four-pāda eight-syllable structure of Anuṣṭup, the most beloved meter of the tradition. Of the Mahābhārata’s roughly 232,000 verses, about 200,000 are in Anuṣṭup, and the same proportion holds across the eighteen Mahāpurāṇas.

The most beautiful turn in his lecture was on the word Chandas itself. Chandas originally names the Veda, and also names the science of prosody (one of the six Vedāṅgas). The root is chadi, to cover or to hide. A Brāhmaṇa story explains it: when the Devatās were attacked by Asuras, the Veda mantras gave them shelter. Hidden inside the mantras, the Devatās could not be reached. The Veda is therefore Chandas, the hiding one, the one in which the divine takes refuge.

For our teachers: Dr. Nagaraj closed with a teaching that names exactly what we are doing each time we sit to chant. The purpose of chanting is to take the chanter back to the state from which the mantra was revealed. The chanter is asked to become the Ṛṣi through whom the mantra has come, and Svara, with the chanting process itself, is capable of carrying us there. Every session is meant to inspire that return. This is the experience we are training our teachers to recognise in themselves and to hold space for in their students.

Dr. Nagaraj Paturi is a senior professor with over thirty years of experience in Culture Studies, Folk Culture, Sanskrit Linguistics, and Mythology, trained in Sanskrit and Advaita Vedānta by his polymath father and a Ph.D. from the University of Hyderabad. With more than 120 publications across Vedic principles in anthropology, classical Indian poetry, and creative projects in dance, theatre, and media, he brings together academic rigour and lived cultural practice.

Dr. Raj Balkaran on the Devī Māhātmyam through the Yā Devī Hymn

Dr. Raj Balkaran joined us as part of our Durgā Sūktam course offering to bring the Devī Māhātmyam into view through one of its most luminous passages, the Yā Devī hymn of chapter five.

He set the text in its frame: chapters 81 to 93 of the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa, composed roughly 400 to 600 CE, 700 verses across thirteen chapters and three episodes. It is the only Sanskrit scripture devoted entirely to the Goddess. The text does not open with cosmology. It opens with two dispossessed human beings, a deposed king and an exiled merchant, who retreat to the forest to find the sage Medhas. Their problem is not ignorance; both men know they should let go. Their problem is moha, capture at the level of the will. The text meets us where we are.

The Yā Devī hymn arises in the third episode. The hymn’s formula, yā devī sarvabhūteṣu [ X ] rūpeṇa saṃsthitā, namas tasyāi namas tasyāi namas tasyāi namo namaḥ, runs through twenty-one iterations. Not repetition, Dr. Raj said, but accumulation. Each verse names a different mode of her presence, spanning four orders of being: abstract principles, faculties of mind, biological urges, and qualities of feeling. Hunger is her. Sleep is her. Bewilderment is her. As Dr. Raj put it, the Devī Māhātmyam directly refutes any spirituality that requires the body to be overcome.

He then drew the line we wanted our teachers to see. The Yā Devī hymn begins exactly where the Devī Sūktam of the Ṛgveda (10.125) begins. The rṣikā Vāk Āmbhrṇī, in eight first-person mantras, reports what rises in her as a body that has become Vāk. A thousand years later, the Devī Māhātmyam names that same condition as the nature of reality. What rises in the body of the chanter now is what rose in hers.

For our teachers: Recitation is not a communication addressed to the sacred. It is the mode in which the sacred becomes present. We are not petitioning a Goddess who might arrive; we are participating in the dimension in which she is already arrived, the dimension of sacred utterance itself. This is what our teachers are training to hold for their students.

Dr. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative literature, with a focus on the myths of the Indian Great Goddess and the Sanskrit Epics, and a particular interest in what he calls the “dharmic double-helix”, the Indic interplay between world-affirmation and world-renunciation. A public scholar, speaker, and podcaster, he teaches online education courses at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own Indian Wisdom School.

A Closing Word

Across these four classes, one thread holds them together: the unbroken life of the Veda mantra, and the chanter’s place inside it. Prof. Gauri locating Karma Yoga at the cosmic Yajña of the Puruṣa Sūktam. Komilla ji showing us that mantra japa is itself the most accessible upāya, available to every practitioner whether or not they know their chart. Dr. Nagaraj reminding us that the chanter’s task is to return to the Ṛṣi’s state of revelation. Dr. Raj showing that the same condition the Vedic rṣikā voiced in the Ṛgveda, and that the Devī Māhātmyam later articulates, is the condition that arises again in the body of the chanter today.

Our thanks to each of these guest teachers, and to the community of Veda Studies teachers who showed up with attention, questions, and care. We, INDICA & Veda Studies are committed to the continuing education of our teachers. Please check our live events calendar for details of the next Teacher Training Program.