Scriptures
Karma Yoga in the Bhagavad Gita
Understanding selfless action through Lord Krishna's timeless teachings.
May 12, 2024·8 min read
Editorial Desk
Prajna Insights Editorial Desk
Most essays on Prajna Insights are credited to the Editorial Desk rather than to an individual, because that is a more honest description of how they were made: researched and drafted with the assistance of AI tools, then reviewed, corrected, and taken responsibility for by Kiran Karanam before publication. This is the same convention used by publications such as The Economist and the Associated Press, and it is described in full in our Editorial Policy and Code of Ethics. As real contributors — translators, historians, practitioners — write for Prajna Insights, their work carries their own name; see Contribute.
Essays by Prajna Insights Editorial Desk
Darshana
What is Dvaita Vedanta?
An introduction to the profound philosophy of Madhvacharya and its relevance today.
May 8, 2024·10 min read
Practice
The Power of Daily Spiritual Discipline
Simple yet powerful practices that transform the mind and life.
May 5, 2024·7 min read
Tradition
The Guru–Shishya Parampara
The living tradition of knowledge transmission in Sanatana Dharma.
May 1, 2024·9 min read
Scriptures
Reading the Isha Upanishad Today
The shortest of the great Upanishads compresses an entire philosophy of possession, work, and knowledge into eighteen verses.
Apr 26, 2024·9 min read
Saints & Acharyas
The Short, Blazing Life of Adi Shankaracharya
In thirty-two years, a boy from Kerala reshaped Indian philosophy and left institutions that have endured for over a millennium.
Apr 22, 2024·11 min read
Arts & Literature
Nataraja: The Cosmic Dance in Bronze
The Chola bronze of dancing Shiva is perhaps the most complete philosophical statement ever cast in metal.
Apr 18, 2024·8 min read
Science & Cosmos
Aryabhata and the Spinning Earth
In 499 CE, a twenty-three-year-old proposed that the earth rotates and calculated pi to four decimal places.
Apr 15, 2024·9 min read
Temples
The Grammar of the Gopuram
Why the towering gateways of South Indian temples are built the way they are — a thousand-year architectural syntax, decoded.
Apr 11, 2024·10 min read
Practice
Japa: The Practice of the Name
Repeating a mantra seems almost too simple to work. That simplicity is precisely the engineering.
Apr 8, 2024·6 min read
Scriptures
Yudhishthira and the Burden of Dharma
The Mahabharata gives its most righteous man its heaviest burdens, and refuses him every easy answer.
Apr 4, 2024·12 min read
Saints & Acharyas
Ramanuja and the Embrace of Devotion
How Ramanuja built the intellectual house that bhakti lives in, and why he broke his vow of secrecy from a temple tower.
Apr 1, 2024·10 min read
Science & Cosmos
The Kerala School and the Birth of Calculus
Two centuries before Newton, a school of astronomer-mathematicians in Kerala discovered infinite series for pi and the trigonometric functions.
Mar 28, 2024·11 min read
Darshana
The Six Darshanas: A Traveller's Map
A guide to the six classical schools of Indian philosophy — what each one asks, answers, and contributes to the whole.
Mar 25, 2024·13 min read
Culture & Heritage
The Kumbh Mela: A River of Humanity
Tens of millions gather at the confluence of rivers with no tickets, no headliner, and no organizing committee older than the stars.
Mar 21, 2024·9 min read
Science & Cosmos
Ayurveda Beyond the Doshas
The classical texts describe a complete philosophy of medicine — diagnosis, ethics, ecology — far richer than the wellness industry's three body types.
Mar 18, 2024·8 min read
Scriptures
Why Rama Went to the Forest
The Ramayana's pivotal moment is a man treating his word as more real than his kingdom — and the epic never lets us forget the cost.
Mar 14, 2024·10 min read
Tradition
The Sound of the Veda
How generations of reciters preserved the world's oldest continuously transmitted text — down to the pitch of every syllable.
Mar 11, 2024·9 min read
Temples
Chola Temples: Engineering Eternity
The Brihadisvara temple at Thanjavur is a thousand-year-old feat of engineering audacity — built without mortar, standing without repair.
Mar 7, 2024·11 min read
Darshana
What the Upanishads Mean by 'Self'
Atman is not a ghost in the machine. The Upanishads are pointing at something both nearer and stranger than 'soul'.
Mar 4, 2024·12 min read
Culture & Heritage
The Wari: Walking with Vithoba
For seven hundred years the road to Pandharpur has filled with pilgrims singing Tukaram and Dnyaneshwar — a university of devotion, twenty-one days long.
Feb 28, 2024·8 min read
Science & Cosmos
Zero: India's Quiet Gift to the World
Every equation on earth now runs through a symbol first treated as a number in India — the discovery that nothing is something.
Feb 25, 2024·7 min read
Arts & Literature
Rasa: How Art Becomes Experience
Why does a fictional grief move us to real tears? India's classical theory of aesthetics answered this two thousand years ago.
Feb 21, 2024·10 min read
Darshana
The Logic of the Nyaya School
How do you know what you know? India's logicians answered with a system so rigorous it became everyone's court of appeal.
Feb 18, 2024·11 min read
Practice
Fasting as Focus: The Inner Logic of Ekadashi
The elegant psychology behind the tradition's twice-monthly fast — and what an empty stomach has to do with a full attention.
Feb 14, 2024·6 min read
Scriptures
Hanuman: Strength in Service
The Ramayana's mightiest figure cannot remember his own strength until it is needed for someone else. That is the whole theology.
Feb 11, 2024·7 min read
Arts & Literature
The Alvars: Poets Drunk on God
Between the sixth and ninth centuries, twelve Tamil poets sang Vishnu with such intimacy that theology had to expand to hold them.
Feb 7, 2024·9 min read
Science & Cosmos
Jyotisha: How India Read the Heavens
The Vedanga of the heavens gave India its calendars, its eclipse predictions, and some of its finest mathematics.
Feb 4, 2024·8 min read
Temples
Konark: The Chariot of the Sun
The Sun Temple at Konark is a cosmological machine disguised as architecture — twelve pairs of wheels, seven horses, and a sanctum facing the dawn.
Jan 31, 2024·9 min read
History
Panini: The First Grammarian
The Ashtadhyayi generates the whole Sanskrit language from four thousand rules — a feat computer science recognized as its own ancestor.
Jan 28, 2024·10 min read
Culture & Heritage
The Meaning of Diwali
The festival of lamps is a five-day meditation on light, wealth rightly held, and homecoming — older and deeper than its fireworks.
Jan 24, 2024·7 min read
Darshana
Sankhya: The Count of Reality
Before you can be free of the world, said Kapila's school, you must count it. The tally came to twenty-five.
Jan 21, 2024·10 min read
Practice
Food as Medicine: The Wisdom of Ritucharya
Ayurveda's seasonal regimens treat the calendar as a physician and the kitchen as a pharmacy — a science of eating with the year.
Jan 17, 2024·7 min read
Temples
Varanasi: The City That Remembers
Kashi has watched empires arrive and dissolve from its ghats. What the city knows, it teaches at dawn, by the river, daily.
Jan 14, 2024·11 min read
Scriptures
The Bhagavad Gita's Final Verse
Sanjaya, not Krishna, is given the Gita's last word — and his single verse may be the text's whole teaching in miniature.
Jan 10, 2024·8 min read
Arts & Literature
Carnatic Music: The Architecture of Devotion
In the Carnatic tradition, composition is worship, the concert is liturgy, and the greatest composers are canonized as saints.
Jan 7, 2024·9 min read
Darshana
Sharanagati: The Theology of Surrender
Is liberation earned or received? The doctrine of surrender answers with the tradition's most tender and most debated theology.
Jan 3, 2024·8 min read
Practice
Pilgrimage: Why We Walk
Chardham, Kailash, Sabarimala, Pandharpur — the geography of Indian pilgrimage is deliberately difficult, and the difficulty is the point.
Dec 27, 2023·9 min read
History
The Charaka Samhita on the Good Physician
India's foundational medical text devotes as much care to the healer's character as to his pharmacology — and its ancient oath still instructs.
Dec 20, 2023·10 min read
Temples
Ellora: Carving a Mountain into Prayer
At Ellora, eighth-century artisans removed two hundred thousand tonnes of basalt to reveal a temple that was inside the mountain all along.
Dec 13, 2023·12 min read