- श्रुति
Śruti and smṛti — the distinction that resolves half the arguments
Every Sanskrit sentence carries the same authority, so quoting any of them settles the matter.
The tradition sorts its own literature into two classes and treats them differently — and almost every modern argument about "what Hinduism says" ignores that sorting. What śruti and smṛti are, the rule the tradition gives for when they conflict, why one class is textually stable and the other is not, and how to tell which you are holding.
Read → - कोटि
Thirty-three, not thirty-three crore
Hindus have thirty-three crore gods — true or false?
The Vedic texts name a small, specific number of devas — and they enumerate them. Where the figure of thirty-three crore came from, and what कोटि actually means.
Read → - लिङ्ग
What liṅga means
Is the Shiva liṅga what you have been told it is?
The word is the ordinary Sanskrit term for a mark or sign — the same word logicians use when they say smoke is the sign of fire. How a word meaning "indication" came to be translated as one specific body.
Read → - अग्रे
Sati, and the verse that says the opposite
One vowel, and a wrong precedent that lasted centuries
The Rig Vedic verse most often cited to justify sati instructs the widow to rise and return to the living. How one vowel changed a verse about standing up into a verse about a pyre.
Read → - मनु
Manusmṛti — what it actually is, and who made it "Hindu law"
Manusmṛti is the law book of Hinduism, so what it says is what Hindus are required to believe.
One dharma text among a dozen, of the revisable class, with a manuscript history so varied that a critical edition had to be built — and elevated to "the law of the Hindus" by an administration that needed a single code to govern from. What the text is, what it is not, and why the answer does not require defending a line of it.
Read → - प्रक्षिप्त
What an interpolation is, and how anyone can tell
If a line is in the book, it was always in the book.
Texts copied by hand for two thousand years acquire lines they did not start with. That is not an accusation, it is a property of manuscripts — and scholars have real, checkable techniques for spotting it: metre that breaks, vocabulary from the wrong century, a sentence that closes cleanly once the passage is lifted out, and above all a passage missing from whole families of manuscripts. The methods, their limits, and the way the word gets abused.
Read → - पाठ
The Mahābhārata critical edition — forty-seven years, and it printed what it left out
Nobody has ever seriously established what the Mahābhārata's text actually is.
Between 1919 and 1966 an institute in Pune gathered manuscripts of the Mahābhārata from Kashmir to Kerala, sorted them into families, and constituted a critical text — and published, alongside it, every line it did not accept. The scale of the work, the method, why the result is shorter than the version most people know, and what the editors themselves said it was and was not.
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