SANSKRIT PRAYERS IN ENGLISH

Daily Prayers - This is the prayerbook I use everyday. Therefore it is the most organized (table of contents) and well formatted of all the prayers on this website. It is a product of years of my hard work. I generally started with the prayer compilations on this website and then tweaked them until they became something that I, a native English-speaker, could understand and use in my daily prayers. Every prayer in my book has a translation, except Jaya Aadya Shakti (Mataji Ni Aarti). If you have or are able to translate that aarti, I would be very very appreciative of your sending a translation my way. My email address is swdesai21 (at) yahoo.com.

If you would like to "borrow" any of the translations, transliterations, formatting, or hey, the entire work itself (I refer here only to the Daily Prayers prayerbook above) for your own website, please feel free. One caveat: I would appreciate credit for my work (it is copyrighted, after all), and a link back to this website. If you intend to use my work for any monetary gain, please inform me beforehand at the email address above for permission. If you would like to steal my work and not pay me, well, you can do that too. But in that case please donate all of your profit off the work to your local Hindu temple.

If you have trouble pronouncing Sanskrit shlokas, please check out the audio files I have uploaded here. You can stream the audio files online in your spare time to correct your pronunciation. The files are hosted through 4share.com. I am not the copyright holder of these files, many of them I found on the websites of Hindu temples around the U.S. I am hosting these files for educational purposes. If you are the copyright holder and you find it offensive that I am providing these audio files to allow people to learn Hindu shlokas, please email me and I will be happy to take down those audio files.

LINKS

This page last updated on May 7, 2008.

UPDATE April 27, 2008: This is the last update to this website that I will be making. I have run out of room to post new pages and prayers and downloads. I will be looking to find a new domain, and once I have found it and gotten my new site up and running, I will post the address here. This website will be left as it is. Since it is a compilation website, with the information from other websites mirrored here, all the information should still be accessible years into the future. The only page that might become out of date is the "Links" site. I do not intend to update that.

UPDATE May 7, 2008: I did not get a new domain, this website seems to do the job quite well. Plus I seem to be very short on time these days, life being what it is. The main trouble with this website is the file transfer rate. A lot of people enjoy downloading hard copies of the prayers. To remedy that situation, I have put a lot of information on the 4share site that have been very popular with downloaders. Chief among that is my Daily Prayer book and audio files of the prayers in my Daily Prayer book. Google is also offering the opportunity to create websites, and so I put my Daily Prayer book on that site also. You can find my GooglePages site, Hindu Prayer Central, here. It is not the compilation that this site is, it is a searchable online form of my Daily Prayerbook. Hopefully this will ease the congestion around this site. Also, the Blogs listed above have a large number of prayers that have been compiled on this site, listed in a search-friendly manner. So if you have trouble accessing this site, there a number of alternatives listed in this paragraph. If all else fails, email me.

Thank you for visiting my website. I hope you have found it illuminating and helpful. I created it because I feel that it is important not only to pray to God, but also to know what you are saying and why you are saying it. Very few people understand Sanskrit shlokas nowadays. Even fewer have the time, resources and inclination to research the issue. There are a number websites on the internet which have this information. However, this information is not centralized, or organized. Also, to be frank, the transliteration is a little, well, funky. It is more academic and scholarly than practical. I wanted a resource that would centralize the information, and work on standardizing the translation. It had to be simple, not cluttered or filled with advertising. The information should be the focal point, not anything else. I could not find a site like that, so I created it. If even one person who visits this site is inspired to do more in this field, then I truly find the time I invested here well spent. The result of over two years of work is in the prayerbook linked above (titled "Daily Prayers"). Hopefully you will find my work practical, and helpful. Jai Mataji.