Chandas — The Vedic Science of Metre, and Its Place in Jyotiṣa

छन्दः

Chandas (छन्दस्) is the Vedic science of metre, one of the six limbs of the Veda. This article explains where the metres come from according to the Veda itself, what the Chandas Vedāṅga contains, how a metre is built, which great works were composed in which metres, and where to study further. It then turns to Jyotiṣa. There the classical texts touch chandas in two concrete places: Varāhamihira's transit chapter, written in deliberately varied metres, and the Vedic mantras prescribed as planetary remedies. Beyond these, the horā classics set out no doctrine of chandas, and the article says so plainly rather than filling the gap from later teaching.

1. What chandas is

Chandas is the science of metre: how many syllables a verse has, how they fall into feet (pādas), and the pattern of light and heavy syllables. Every Vedic mantra is known by three marks: its seer (ṛṣi), its deity (devatā) and its metre (chandas). The metre is not decoration. It is the vessel the mantra is carried in.

Chandas and Jyotiṣa are two of the six Vedāṅgas, the "limbs of the Veda." The Pāṇinīya Śikṣā (41–42) gives each limb a place on the body of the Veda: chandas is its feet, Jyotiṣa its eyes. The feet carry the Veda forward in rhythm; the eyes show it when to act. (The Śikṣā is not a Jyotiṣa text; it is cited here only for this framing.)

The Vedic metres most often met in Jyotiṣa practice are:

2. How the metres came to be

The Veda itself tells where the metres come from and why they are called chandas.

They cover and protect. The Chāndogya Upaniṣad (1.4.2) says that the gods, afraid of death, entered the three Vedas and covered themselves with the metres: te chandobhir acchādayan. "Because they covered (ācchādayan) themselves with them, the metres are called chandas." Yāska's Nirukta (7.12) gives the same derivation: chandāṃsi chādanāt, "metres, from covering." A metre is a protective sheath around the mantra.

Each is yoked to a deity. Ṛgveda 10.130.4–5, the hymn of creation as a sacrifice, pairs the seven chief metres with seven gods:

They fetched the Soma. In the Brāhmaṇas the metres are living beings. When Soma was guarded in heaven, Jagatī and Triṣṭubh flew up to bring it and failed, losing syllables on the way; Gāyatrī, as a falcon, brought it back. This is why the Gāyatrī, the shortest of the three, opens the morning Soma offering and is called the foremost metre. (The story recurs across the Brāhmaṇa literature, for example in the Taittirīya Saṃhitā, book 6.)

3. The Chandas Vedāṅga

The Vedāṅga of metre is preserved in several layers.

The Vedic layer. These texts record the metre of every Vedic verse:

• Ṛgveda Prātiśākhya (attributed to Śaunaka), whose closing chapters (16–18) set out the Vedic metres and their varieties.
• Sarvānukramaṇī of Kātyāyana, the index that names the ṛṣi, devatā and chandas of every hymn and verse of the Ṛgveda. It is still the reference used to find a mantra's metre.
• Nidāna Sūtra, the Sāmavedic treatise on metres.

Piṅgala's Chandaḥsūtra. The Vedāṅga proper is the Chandaḥsūtra (also called Chandaḥśāstra) of Piṅgala, traditionally placed in the last centuries BCE. Its eight chapters cover:

Chapter 8 is famous beyond prosody. Its rules for enumerating patterns amount to binary counting, and the tenth-century commentator Halāyudha (Mṛtasañjīvanī) explains them with the meru-prastāra, a triangle of numbers identical to what the West later called Pascal's triangle.

The later handbooks. Medieval poets learnt metre from shorter manuals:

• Vṛttaratnākara of Kedāra Bhaṭṭa (c. 11th–12th century), the standard textbook for centuries.
• Chandomañjarī of Gaṅgādāsa.
• Śrutabodha, traditionally attributed to Kālidāsa: each verse defines a metre while being written in it.
• Suvṛttatilaka of Kṣemendra, which advises which metres suit which subjects.

4. How a metre is built

Vedic and classical metres are measured differently.

• Vedic metres count syllables (akṣaras). A Gāyatrī needs 24 syllables in three feet of eight. The length of each syllable is free, apart from a tendency at the line's end.
• Classical syllabic metres (varṇa-vṛttas) fix both the number of syllables and the exact sequence of light and heavy ones in each foot. A syllable is heavy (guru) if it has a long vowel, or a short vowel followed by two consonants or an anusvāra or visarga; otherwise it is light (laghu).
• Moraic metres (mātrā-vṛttas) count length rather than syllables: a light syllable is one mātrā, a heavy one two. The Āryā has 30 mātrās in its first half and 27 in its second.

Piṅgala's eight gaṇas name every three-syllable pattern (L = light, H = heavy). Later teachers packed them into the mnemonic ya-mā-tā-rā-ja-bhā-na-sa-la-gāḥ:

5. The classical metres most often met

6. Great compositions and their metres

• The Ṛgveda. Triṣṭubh is the most frequent metre, followed by Gāyatrī and Jagatī; together these three carry the great majority of its verses. The Puruṣa Sūkta (10.90) is in Anuṣṭubh, closing with a Triṣṭubh.
• The birth of the Śloka. The Rāmāyaṇa (Bālakāṇḍa, sarga 2) tells how Vālmīki, grieving (śoka) at a hunter's killing of a mating bird, cried out mā niṣāda, and his grief came out as a perfectly formed verse: the śloka. The epic was then composed in it, and Vālmīki is honoured as the ādikavi, the first poet.
• The Bhagavad Gītā is almost all in śloka, but shifts into the weightier Triṣṭubh at moments of intensity, above all in the vision of the cosmic form (chapter 11).
• Kālidāsa's Meghadūta keeps one metre, Mandākrāntā, for all its verses; its slow steps carry the exiled yakṣa's longing.
• Jayadeva's Gītagovinda sets its songs in moraic, singable metres, bridging Sanskrit metre and music.
• The Jyotiṣa classics. Parāśara's Bṛhat Horā Śāstra is in śloka, easy to memorise and recite. Varāhamihira, a poet as well as an astronomer, moves through many classical metres in the Bṛhat Jātaka and Bṛhat Saṃhitā (see section 7). Āryabhaṭa wrote his whole astronomy in Āryā.

7. Bṛhat Saṃhitā 104: transits written in many metres

The clearest meeting of chandas and Jyotiṣa in the classics is chapter 104 of Varāhamihira's Bṛhat Saṃhitā, the Grahagocara-adhyāya on the transits of the planets.

• The stated aim (104.2). Varāhamihira says he will describe the effects of the transits "in stanzas written in a variety of metres."
• Each verse names its own metre. In the standard translation, the note to 104.2 explains that each stanza is composed in a distinct metre and works the name of that metre into its own wording. Verse 3, for example, is in Jaghanacapalā, and verse 57 in Anuṣṭubh. Verse 54 names the Āryā-family metres (Āryāgīti, Vaitālī, Māgadhī-gāthā, Āryā).
• The closing claim (104.64). He says he composed the chapter "in a variety of sweet metres after examining the science of prosody."

The chapter shows that, for Varāhamihira, a master Jyotiṣī was also expected to command chandas. It also doubles as a handbook of metres: a student learns the transit results and the classical metres in the same reading.

8. Graha-śānti: the planets' Vedic mantras and their metres

The second place chandas enters Jyotiṣa is the remedy. Both the Bṛhat Parāśara Horā Śāstra (in its graha-śānti chapter) and the Yājñavalkya Smṛti (1.300–301) prescribe a Vedic verse to be recited for each planet. Each verse comes with its own metre, so the remedy for a planet is always chanted in a particular chandas.

Yājñavalkya lists them in a single couplet:

आकृष्णेन इमं देवा अग्निर्मूर्धा दिवः ककुत् । उद्बुध्यस्वेति च ऋचो यथासंख्यं प्रकीर्तिताः ॥
बृहस्पतेऽति यदर्यस्तथैवान्नात्परिस्रुतः । शं नो देवीस्तथा काण्डात्केतुं कृण्वन्निमांस्तथा ॥

ākṛṣṇena imaṃ devā agnir mūrdhā divaḥ kakut | udbudhyasveti ca ṛco yathāsaṃkhyaṃ prakīrtitāḥ ||
bṛhaspate 'ti yad aryas tathaivānnāt parisrutaḥ | śaṃ no devīs tathā kāṇḍāt ketuṃ kṛṇvann imāṃs tathā ||

Two points stand out from the table:

• The two texts differ only on Rāhu. Parāśara gives the Gāyatrī verse kayā naś citra; Yājñavalkya gives the dūrvā-grass verse kāṇḍāt kāṇḍāt, in Anuṣṭubh.
• The metres follow the Vedic verse, not the planet. No classical text says that a planet rules a metre. The metre comes with the verse chosen for the planet. Even so, a pattern appears: the Sun and Jupiter are invoked in the broad Triṣṭubh, while Mars, Saturn, Ketu and (in Parāśara) Rāhu are pacified in the compact Gāyatrī. That observation is ours, not the texts'.

9. What the Jyotiṣa classics do not say

It matters to be clear about the limits of the sources:

• To the best of our reading, the major horā texts (Bṛhat Parāśara Horā Śāstra, Bṛhat Jātaka, Sārāvalī, Phaladīpikā, Jātaka Pārijāta) do not assign metres to houses, signs or planets, and do not read a native's "birth metre" from the chart.
• Schemes that map chandas onto the bhāvas, or that prescribe a metre according to a planet's placement, come from later teaching traditions. They may be valuable, but they are not found in these texts and are left out of this article.
• In the classics, chandas reaches the chart in two ways only: through the Jyotiṣī's own learning (Bṛhat Saṃhitā 104), and through the metres of the Vedic mantras used as planetary remedies (graha-śānti).

10. Where to study chandas in depth

Primary texts

1. Piṅgala, Chandaḥsūtra, with Halāyudha's commentary Mṛtasañjīvanī: the root text of the Vedāṅga. Sanskrit editions are published in the Kāvyamālā and Chaukhamba series.
2. Kātyāyana, Sarvānukramaṇī: to look up the ṛṣi, devatā and chandas of any Ṛgvedic verse.
3. Ṛgveda Prātiśākhya, chapters 16–18: the Vedic metres in detail.
4. Kedāra Bhaṭṭa, Vṛttaratnākara, with Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa's commentary: the classical metres, as traditionally taught.
5. Gaṅgādāsa, Chandomañjarī, and the Śrutabodha: short, memorable primers to begin with.

Modern studies and aids

• **E. V. Arnold, **Vedic Metre in its Historical Development (1905): the standard scholarly study of Vedic metre.
• **H. D. Velankar, **Jayadāman: a critical collection of the major Sanskrit treatises on metre.
• **V. S. Apte's **Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary: its appendix on Sanskrit prosody is a convenient table of metres with definitions.
• **Charles P. Brown, **Sanskrit Prosody and Numerical Symbols Explained (1869): an accessible introduction in English.
• GRETIL: free Sanskrit e-texts, including many of the works above.

A suggested path: learn light and heavy syllables and the eight gaṇas first; then scan familiar ślokas from the Gītā; then learn five classical metres from the table in section 5 by chanting one known verse in each; and only then open Piṅgala with Halāyudha.

11. Index of sources

Metres marked "to verify" should be checked against a Saṃhitā edition with its anukramaṇī (index of ṛṣi, devatā and chandas).

Online texts consulted: Bṛhat Saṃhitā ch. 104, tr. Subrahmanya Sastri & Ramakrishna Bhat (Wisdom Library) · Yājñavalkya Smṛti (GRETIL) · Parāśara's Graha Śānti Mantras (Shri Freedom)