Viṣṇu Sahasranāmamश्रीविष्णुसहस्रनामस्तोत्रम्
Devanāgarī

Script

About

Sources and thanks

The text
prapatti.com, Śrīmad Āṇḍavan Āśramam edition prepared by Sunder Kidāmbi
Printed at
https://www.prapatti.com/slokas/english/vishnusahasranaamam.pdf
Scripts
Stored once in Roman; Devanāgarī, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam are drawn from it.

The edition

The text on this site is the Śrī Viṣṇu Sahasranāma Stōtram as published on prapatti.com in the edition of the Śrīmad Āṇḍavan Āśramam, prepared by Sunder Kidāmbi with the blessings of Śrī Raṅgarāmānuja Mahādēśikan, His Holiness Śrīmad Āṇḍavan of Śrīraṅgam. Its first page offers salutations to Śrī, to Śrīmat Rāmānuja and to Śrīmat Nigamānta Mahādēśika, Vēdānta Dēśika. The names are numbered as in the same edition's nāmāvaḻi.

Every line of Sanskrit here is that edition's, in the order it prints, from the opening invocations to the colophon. The three short stotras that follow the Sahasranāmam in the same edition, the Pañcāyudha, the Dvādaśanāma Pañjara and the Āpaduddhāraka Śrīrāma, are not included.

The hymn itself stands in the thirteenth book of the Mahābhārata, the Anuśāsana Parva. It is chapter 135 in the critical edition of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, and chapter 149 in many older printings, the numbering that Kisari Mohan Ganguli's translation follows. The chapter holds a hundred and forty-two verses: thirteen of the frame, a hundred and seven of names and twenty-two of fruits. The invocations, the nyāsa, the dhyāna and the closing verses belong to the tradition of recitation.

With gratitude to Sunder Kidāmbi, whose patient work on prapatti.com has put these stotras, carefully set in many scripts, within reach of everyone who wishes to recite them. This site owes him its text, and its thanks.

The second edition

Each verse has been compared with the Viṣṇu Sahasranāma text at sanskritdocuments.org. Most verses agree letter for letter. Where the two differ, sometimes in spelling, as with maṅgaḻam, and sometimes in a word, the Āśramam's reading is kept. The other text also prints some lines of the nyāsa that this edition does not, and they are not added here.

The meanings

Every gloss, meaning and reflection on this site is written for it, from the Sanskrit words and the tradition's understanding of them. Where the Śrīvaiṣṇava reading of a name is known, the site follows Parāśara Bhaṭṭar's Bhagavad Guṇa Darpaṇam, the sampradāya's own commentary on the thousand names; elsewhere it keeps to the plain sense of the word.

No translation and no commentary has been copied or closely followed. English renderings of both great commentaries exist, as do many fine translations of the hymn; they belong to their translators, and a reader who wants them should go to them.

Stories are told as the tradition tells them. The dates of historical teachers are given as the tradition gives them or as historians place them, and no age of the world is offered as a date of history.

The numbers of the names

The names are a thousand, and the site calls them so. The numbers beside them are those of the Āśramam's nāmāvaḻi, the list in which each name is offered on its own, in the form ōṃ viśvāya namaḥ, and that list runs to 1,003. It divides a few names more finely than the usual reckoning: ōṃ śāśvatāya namaḥ and ōṃ sthāṇavē namaḥ, offered there as 121 and 122, are a single name, the Eternal and Steadfast, in both great commentaries.

The commentaries themselves divide a few names differently, Ādi Śaṅkara reading sthavirō dhruvaḥ as one name where Bhaṭṭar reads two, so a name's number in another book may differ from the number here. Both reach a thousand at sarvapraharaṇāyudhaḥ, which is 1,003 in the Āśramam's list.

The map of people

The People page shows everyone who speaks in the hymn or is named in it, and those the telling needs around them: the narrators and their listeners, the line of Vyāsa, the houses of Kuru and of Yadu, the voices of the closing verses, the forms of the Lord that the names recall, and the teachers who commented on the names.

Each relation drawn there rests on a passage. Where the hymn itself states a tie, its own verse is the ground. Ties from the epic follow the Mahābhārata in Kisari Mohan Ganguli's translation, which is in the public domain, and the lives of the later teachers follow the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition's own accounts of them. A tie that rests on tradition alone is told as tradition.

One text, six scripts

The Sanskrit is stored once, in the edition's own Roman letters, which follow ISO 15919: ē and ō are the long vowels, ṃ is the anusvāra, and ḻ is the letter heard in maṅgaḻam. Devanāgarī, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam are all drawn from that single text, when each page is built and again in your browser when you change script. So the six can never drift apart: a correction made once is made in all of them.

Sources