A Word-Level Digital Reader of the Prasthanatrayi with Sankara's Bhasya: Corpus, Method, and an Open, Offline Reading Aid for the Advaita Vedanta Canon
This work provides a practical tool for scholars and students of Advaita Vedanta, addressing the difficulty of reading Sanskrit texts with sandhi and compounds, though it is an incremental application of existing NLP methods to a specific corpus.
The paper presents an open, offline word-level digital reader for the entire Prasthanatrayi with Sankara's commentary, enabling clickable word analysis and concordance. The resource covers 36,881 word-occurrences of root text and 95,587 commentarial surface forms, achieving over 99% agreement with an authoritative inflectional lexicon for high-confidence analyses.
The Prasthanatrayi -- the ten principal Upanisads, the Brahmasutra, and the Bhagavadgita, with Sankara's commentaries (bhasya) -- is the foundational corpus of Advaita Vedanta. Continuous euphonic combination (sandhi), long compounds (samasa), and dense scholastic prose make it hard to read at the word level: where one word ends, and what each word means grammatically, are both obscured. We present an open, fully offline, word-level digital reader of the entire Prasthanatrayi with Sankara's bhasya. Every word -- of both the root text (mula) and the commentary -- is clickable and resolves to a pop-up giving its split (padaccheda), morphological analysis, and gloss. Because every word carries a lemma, the reader also acts as a concordance: a search on a dictionary headword retrieves all of that word's inflected and sandhi-hidden occurrences, and its occurrences inside compounds, across both layers. The resource covers thirteen commentarial units (2,971 verses, sutras, and prose sections; 36,881 analysed word-occurrences of root text) and a global dictionary of 95,587 distinct commentarial surface forms. We describe the corpus, the hybrid pipeline -- a rule-based sandhi splitter over an inflected-form lexicon and attested-corpus look-ups, with LLM-assisted analysis under an adversarial two-pass verification protocol -- and a durable human-review loop whose corrections survive every regeneration. An intrinsic evaluation against independent Sanskrit resources finds high-confidence analyses agree with an authoritative inflectional lexicon on over 99% of attested forms, and a band-blind adjudication confirms that quality degrades predictably across confidence bands, with errors concentrated in the low-confidence tier the review loop targets. The reader is a single self-contained HTML file needing no server or network, offered as a freely redistributable teaching and reading aid.