Our Sources & Editorial Policy

The Bhagavad Gita translation

Every English translation on our Bhagavad Gita verse pages is the work of Shri Purohit Swami, from The Geeta: The Gospel of the Lord Shri Krishna (1935).

We use this translation for one reason: it is unambiguously free to publish. Shri Purohit Swami died in 1941; his translation is out of copyright and in the public domain. We use it for all 701 verses rather than picking a different translator verse by verse, so that the voice you read stays consistent and you always know whose it is.

Shri Purohit Swami condenses some passages and does not render every verse separately. Six verses have no translation of their own in his edition — 4.33, 6.38, 8.1, 10.15, 12.3, 12.18. On those pages we say so plainly and show the Sanskrit, the transliteration, our own word-by-word meanings and our own commentary instead. We would rather leave a gap visible than quietly fill it with a translation we have no right to publish.

The Sanskrit

The Devanagari text and the IAST transliteration are the received text of the Gita, which has been in the public domain for roughly two thousand years. We source ours from the open vedicscriptures dataset and check it at build time against a list of known corruption patterns, because scraped scripture does occasionally arrive with an error message where a verse should be.

The commentary and word-by-word meanings

These are ours, not anyone else’s translation. The word-by-word glosses and the explanatory commentary on each verse page are written for this site.

They are AI-assisted and human-reviewed. We draft with AI and then read, correct and approve before publishing. We say this because you deserve to know how the words in front of you were made. AI is a drafting tool here; it is not a substitute for someone taking responsibility for what the page says.

Everything positional or numeric — verse numbers, chapter structure, and every figure in our astrology reports — is computed, never written by a model. A date or a degree on this site comes from an ephemeris calculation, not from a sentence generator.

The free scripture library

Our free library holds 109 texts, each carrying its licence: 51 public domain, 11 openly licensed, and 47 free to read but still under their publisher’s copyright.

We host the full text only of the public-domain and openly-licensed items. Anything in the third group links out to whoever published it, and always will. Where a text comes from Project Gutenberg we credit the source and strip their header and trademark references, as their licence requires.

Festivals, panchang and calendar data

Festival dates, tithi, nakshatra and muhurat timings are astronomically computed for the calendar year rather than copied from another calendar. Regional traditions differ on some observances; where they do, we follow the most widely observed reckoning and say so on the festival page.

Corrections

If you find a mistranslation, a misattributed text, a wrong festival date, or anything on this site you believe we do not have the right to publish, please tell us and we will fix it or take it down. Write to gitaguidance1@gmail.com or use our contact page. Copyright complaints are acted on, not argued with.