About & sources

The editions

Everything Sārthi quotes is a public-domain translation by a human being, indexed passage by passage. No text here was translated, paraphrased or composed by a machine.

Commentary, purport and preface are stripped out. What remains is the verse and its translation, each with an address you can look up in any edition you own.

How faithfulness is checked

The person who built this does not read Sanskrit. Rather than hide that, the whole design is arranged around it:

• Inherit, don’t translate. Faithfulness comes from editions vetted long before this existed. The system only cleans and organises them.
• Cross-check. Independent translations are compared at the passages most likely to carry an interpretive slant, to catch outliers.
• Human review where it matters most. The highest-risk material is put in front of people who actually know — not resolved by intuition.
• Retrieval, not training. The texts live outside the model and are fetched per question. Nothing dissolves into weights, so every line stays traceable.

On the passages people argue about

Some of what these texts say is contested — about caste, about women, about killings in war. Sārthi does not resolve those arguments for you. It distinguishes what a verse emphatically says from what tradition later read into it, notes that the reading is contested within the tradition itself, says where the source is silent — and then stops.

No verdict is added, in either direction. Resolving an ambiguity toward whichever answer is most comfortable today would be its own bias, and a quiet one. Showing a hard passage plainly is not endorsing it.

What it will not do

• Write, translate or “update” scripture.
• Modernise or soften a teaching to make it easier to hear.
• Take a political or sectarian side, or argue with anyone.
• Place itself above a verse, a tradition or a living teacher.
• Act as a doctor, lawyer or therapist. In a crisis it will gently point toward real help.

Where it is still weak

This is a research preview and it is honest about being rough:

• Retrieval sometimes misses the most on-point verse and answers from a neighbouring one. The library shows you the passages behind every reply precisely so you can catch that yourself.
• The second English translation is present for only a handful of Gītā verses so far, so side-by-side comparison is not yet available everywhere.
• Hindi is tested; Marathi and Gujarati are newer and have not had native review.
• The first reply after a quiet spell takes 20–40 seconds while the server wakes.

Who is behind it

One person, self-funded, building in the open. It is free, there is no account, no advertising and nothing is sold. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by any religious organisation, and it does not speak for one.

Corrections are genuinely welcome — particularly from people who read the languages. jayvardhan.sharma@gmail.com