Shastra

A shastra is not merely a book. The word covers the whole apparatus by which a field of knowledge is ordered, preserved, and handed on: the texts, the commentaries, the methods of study, the teachers. There are shastras of grammar, of medicine, of dance, of statecraft, of liberation.

What makes a text shastra rather than literature is its intent to change the reader's conduct. One reads a poem to be moved; one reads shastra to be reorganised. The reading is slower, cyclical, resistant to summary - the same verse returns differently at forty than it did at twenty.

This publication borrows the word deliberately: a digest not of news but of teachings, arranged so that reading can become, in a small way, practice.

From the Editors' Desk, Shastra Digest.