Sacred texts in English

English is the everyday language of millions of people whose prayers are in another tongue. Many Hindu families in Britain, North America, the Caribbean, Fiji, and South Africa recite in Sanskrit or Awadhi but talk about their faith in English. Jewish communities in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and South Africa pray largely in Hebrew and often study in English, and much the same is true of many Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist, and Zoroastrian families.

English is also the language of many converts, who come to a faith as adults and learn its prayers before its language, and of students who meet these texts in a classroom. Some readers simply want to understand the words a grandparent said every morning, or a prayer they heard at a wedding or a funeral. This collection is written for all of them.

Every page shows the text in its original language first: Sanskrit or Awadhi in Devanagari script for the Hindu texts, and Hebrew with its vowel signs for the Jewish ones. A translation can carry the sense of a verse, but not its sound, its rhythm, or the way one word can hold several meanings at once. That matters, because most of these texts are meant to be said aloud, and many believers know them by heart in the original.

In many traditions the original wording is the scripture itself, and a translation is only a guide to it. Most Jews say the Shema in Hebrew wherever they live, and Hindu devotees chant the Hanuman Chalisa in Awadhi whether or not they speak it at home. Muslims regard the Arabic Quran as the scripture and translations as explanations of its meaning, and Sikhs read the Guru Granth Sahib in Gurmukhi script.

You do not need to read these scripts to use the pages. The Hindu texts have a Roman transliteration under every line, every verse of the Hebrew Bible has an English translation beneath it, and our explanation follows each verse or stanza.

Two faiths have pages so far, Hindu and Jewish, with five readings between them.

Each reading gives the text, an explanation of every verse or stanza, and an article on its history, its place in worship, and how to read it.

The faith cards on this page list all ten faiths whose texts are read in English: Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Taoist, Zoroastrian, and Shinto. The eight without pages yet are marked as not yet published. Their pages will follow, and each will take the same approach: the original text first, help with reading it, and an explanation in plain English.

We add texts slowly on purpose. Every line is checked against a named edition before it is published, and every explanation is written fresh for this collection. We would rather publish a few texts carefully than many in a hurry.

Every scripture and translation on these pages is in the public domain: free of copyright, usually because of its age, and free to share. For the Ramayana we use Ralph T. H. Griffith's English verse translation, published between 1870 and 1874, and for the Hebrew Bible the translation published by the Jewish Publication Society of America in 1917.

Many fine modern translations exist, but they belong to their translators and publishers, so we do not quote or adapt them. The explanation under each verse and the articles around the texts are our own writing, and where a word is hard to translate, we set out its range of meanings rather than borrow someone else's rendering.

The older translations use older English, with thee and thou, so our explanations put the sense into plain modern English. At the foot of every reading you will find the editions the text was checked against, line by line.

A reading opens with a short introduction and a line naming the edition. Then comes the text, verse by verse or stanza by stanza, each with an explanation beneath it, followed by an article on where the work comes from and how it is used in prayer and study, common questions, and the sources.

Each faith's page lists all of its texts, and each reading points to the others from the same faith. Where the same text is also published in another language, the page links to that version too.

These are sacred texts, and people come to them in different ways. A devotee may say the Hanuman Chalisa as a daily prayer, a student may read it as a poem of the sixteenth century, and a Jewish family may know Psalm 23 from a funeral. We write for all of these readers: we describe beliefs as beliefs and legends as legends, and where scholars disagree about dates or authorship, we say so briefly.

Many traditions have customs for handling scripture, such as washing before reading or treating printed pages with special care. Those customs differ from one community to another, and a teacher of your own tradition is the best guide to them.