Seven books, 28,087 verses, one conversation.
Read the textThe Yoga Vasishtha is a long Sanskrit work built as a single conversation. Prince Rama, still a young man, comes home from a pilgrimage unable to take any pleasure in his own life: wealth, power and the world itself all look hollow to him. In front of his father's whole court, the family teacher Vasishtha answers him. The answer runs to some twenty-eight thousand verses.
Tradition assigns the text to Valmiki, who is also credited with the Ramayana. Scholars disagree sharply about when it was actually composed; the estimates spread across many centuries, and no dating is settled. What is not in doubt is that it grew over time rather than being written at one sitting.
Vasishtha rarely argues. He tells stories — and the people inside those stories tell more stories, so the text folds several layers deep before returning. A man watches an entire lifetime pass in a moment. A woman travels through the inside of a stone. A king lives out another man's life and comes back.
The same handful of images come back again and again: a rope mistaken in the dark for a snake, a mirage, a dream, a city seen in the clouds. They all carry one claim, which is the book's central one — that the world you experience has the substance of a dream, and that the mind which takes it for solid is what holds you to it.
The text is divided into seven prakaraṇas. Each one is complete here, and you can start reading any of them:
1Vairāgyaवैराग्यDispassion33 ch · 1,145 verses2Mumukṣuमुमुक्षुThe Seeker20 ch · 805 verses3Utpattiउत्पत्तिCreation122 ch · 5,389 verses4Sthitiस्थितिExistence62 ch · 2,396 verses5UpaśamaउपशमDissolution93 ch · 4,241 verses6Nirvāṇa Iनिर्वाणLiberation, part one128 ch · 5,297 verses7Nirvāṇa IIनिर्वाणLiberation, part two216 ch · 8,814 versesयोग वासिष्ठ संस्कृत का एक बहुत बड़ा ग्रंथ है, जो एक ही बातचीत के रूप में लिखा गया है। युवा राम तीर्थयात्रा से लौटकर आते हैं और उन्हें जीवन में कहीं कोई रस नहीं दिखता। तब उनके गुरु वसिष्ठ उन्हें पूरी सभा के सामने उत्तर देते हैं। यही उत्तर लगभग अट्ठाईस हज़ार श्लोकों तक चलता है।
वसिष्ठ तर्क कम करते हैं, कहानियाँ ज़्यादा सुनाते हैं — और उन कहानियों के पात्र फिर और कहानियाँ सुनाते हैं। बार-बार वही चित्र लौटते हैं: अँधेरे में रस्सी को साँप समझ लेना, मृगतृष्णा, सपना, आकाश में दिखता नगर। इन सबका एक ही अर्थ है — जो जगत आप देख रहे हैं, उसकी हकीकत सपने जैसी है, और जो मन उसे ठोस मान लेता है, वही बंधन है।
इस साइट पर पूरा मूल संस्कृत है, साथ में हर श्लोक का सरल हिन्दी और अंग्रेज़ी अनुवाद। पढ़ना बिलकुल मुफ़्त है, कोई खाता बनाने की ज़रूरत नहीं।
The Sanskrit here is public domain, given in both Devanagari and IAST transliteration, and the whole text is searchable in either script. The English and Hindi translations were produced with a language model working from the Sanskrit, and have not been checked by a Sanskrit scholar. They aim at plain, ordinary language rather than a scholarly register — the point is that you can read a verse without a dictionary open beside you.
Treat them as a study aid, not an authority. Where a translation matters to you, the Sanskrit is on the same line, and older public-domain English versions such as Vihari-Lala Mitra's 1891 translation exist elsewhere for comparison. A much shorter traditional abridgement, the Laghu Yoga Vasishtha, is also widely read and is a gentler place to begin than the full text.
Book 1 is the shortest and sets up the whole conversation — Rama saying what is wrong, at length. If you would rather begin with the stories the book is best known for, go to Book 3, which is where they start in earnest.