cs.CLJul 8, 2026

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

Authors: Tamal Maharaj

Abstract

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.

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