Abstract
No single standard translation of the mantra known as Sāvitrī, Gāyatrī, or Gāyatrī-Mantra (Ṛgveda III 62.10) has ever become widely accepted. Many authors seem to have felt that a famous mantra such as this one must have, or allow for, several interpretations and translations – a position that is not without justification, especially when it comes to mantras. Yet, translators of the Gāyatrī-Mantra have rarely taken into consideration that language changes over time, and that this has an impact on how the mantra is to be translated. The aim of this paper is to remedy this situation. It provides grammatical, morphological, etymological, lexical, and semantic analyses of the textual content of the mantra against the background of the linguistic changes that took place during the transition from early to late Old Indo-Aryan. In other words, this paper explores how the mantra would be understood by users of Vedic and Sanskrit. To this end, each textual component of the Gāyatrī-Mantra is analyzed in dedicated sections. An appendix also provides a collection of more than sixty scholarly translations into European languages.
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