Shiva Sutras

The Śiva·sūtras, technically akṣara·samāmnāya, variously called ', pratyāhāra·sūtrāṇi, varṇa·samāmnāya, etc., refer to a set of fourteen aphorisms devised as an arrangement of the sounds of Sanskrit for the purposes of grammatical exposition as carried out by the grammarian Pāṇini in the Aṣṭādhyāyī.

Pāṇini himself uses the term akṣara·samāmnāya whereas the colloquial term "Shiva sutra" is a later development, as per claims by Nandikeśvara in his Kāśikā, that the god Śiva sounded his drum fourteen times to reveal these sounds to Pāṇini. They were either composed by Pāṇini to accompany his ' or predate him.

Text and notation

1. a i u Ṇ
2. ṛ ḷ K
3. e o Ṅ
4. ai au C
5. ha ya va ra Ṭ
6. la Ṇ
7. ña ma ṅa ṇa na M
8. jha bha Ñ
9. gha ḍha dha Ṣ
10. ja ba ga ḍa da Ś
11. kha pha cha á¹­ha tha ca á¹­a ta V
12. ka pa Y
13. śa ṣa sa R
14. ha L

Each verse consists of a group of basic Sanskrit phonemes (i.e. open syllables consisting either of initial vowels or consonants followed by the basic vowel "a") followed by a single 'dummy letter', or anubandha, conventionally rendered in upper case and named by Pāṇini.

Shiva Sutras

This allows Pāṇini to refer to groups of phonemes with ', which consist of a phoneme-letter and an anubandha (and often the vowel a to aid pronunciation) and signify all of the intervening phonemes. Pratyāhāras are thus single syllables, but they can be declined (see Aṣṭādhyāyī 6.1.77 below). Hence the pratyāhāra aL refers to all phonemes (because it consists of the first phoneme of the first verse (a) and the last anubandha of the last verse (L)); aC refers to vowels (i.e., all of the phonemes before the anubandha C: i.e. a i u ṛ ḷ e o ai au); haL to consonants, and so on.

As an example, consider Aṣṭādhyāyī 6.1.77: ':

• iK means i u ṛ ḷ,
• iKaḥ is iK in the genitive case, so it means ' in place of i u ṛ ḷ;
• yaṆ means the semivowels y v r l and is in the nominative, so iKaḥ yaṆ means: y v r l replace i u ṛ ḷ.
• aC means all vowels, as noted above
• aCi is in the locative case, so it means before any vowel.

• 1.1.49 ' which says that the genitive case in a sutra signifies "in the place of"
• 1.1.50 ' which says that in a substitution, the element in the substitute series that most closely resembles the letter to be substituted should be used (e.g. y for i, r for ṛ etc.)
• 1.1.71 ' which says that a sequence with an element at the beginning (e.g. i) and an IT letter (e.g. K) at the end stands for the intervening letters (i.e. i u ṛ ḷ, because the Aká¹£arasamāmnāya sutras read ').

• 6.1.101 ' teaches that vowels (from the aK pratyāhāra) of the same quality come together to make a long vowel, so for instance ' and ' make ', not '. This ' rule takes precedence over the general ' rule mentioned above, because this rule is more specific.