PAÑCATANTRA. The Pañcatantra is a collection of animal stories, in Sanskrit, compiled by an unknown author some time prior to the sixth (possibly as early as the fourth) century CE. Many of the stories were doubtless drawn from the great...

PURUṢA is a Sanskrit word meaning "person" or "a man." Throughout Indian intellectual history the term has acquired the independent meanings of "the first man, self," and "consciousness."...

Term for various forms of Old Indo-Aryan. The oldest form is the language of the Vedas (ritual texts originating before 1000 BC but written down much later), followed by the language of speculative writings such as Brāhmanas and theoretical works...

The earliest traces of Sanskrit, an Indo-Aryan language that is part of the larger family of Indo-European languages, occur in the hymns of the Rig Veda (the earliest Hindu sacred writings), which may have been composed as early as the second...

Sanskrit (संस्कृता वाक् saṃskṛtā vāk, for short संस्कृतम् saṃskṛtam) is a classical language of Indian sub-continent, a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism, and one of the...

In Tara Guber's ideal world, American children would meditate in the lotus position and chant in Sanskrit before taking stressful standardized tests.But when she asked a public elementary school in Aspen, Colo., to teach yoga in 2002, Christian fundamentalists and even some secular parents lobbied...

In Tara Guber's ideal world, American children would meditate in the lotus position and chant in Sanskrit before taking stressful standardized tests.But when she asked a public elementary school in Aspen, Colo., to teach yoga in 2002, Christian fundamentalists and even some secular parents lobbied...

The numbers in India are frightening: In a country of more than 1 billion people, some 5.7 million are infected with HIV/AIDS. That makes India home to more victims of the disease than any other country in the world. ...