Hymn to Agni
Rigveda I.150 is a sūkta (hymn of praise) addressed to Agni, the divine fire, messenger between mortals and gods, the eternal priest of the sacred rite. It is one of the 1,028 hymns of the Rigveda organized within Maṇḍala 1, the first of ten books. The ṛṣi (seer) to whom this hymn is attributed and its precise liturgical context are recorded in the traditional Śākalya Anukramaṇī.
The Rigveda is the oldest of the four Vedas and one of the oldest surviving religious texts in the world, composed approximately 1700–1100 BCE in the Vedic Sanskrit of the Indus-Sarasvatī region. Its hymns were preserved through oral transmission across millennia before being committed to writing. This is a Good Works Translation produced for the Good Works Library from the Sanskrit of the Śākala recension.
1. Agni, I have praised you greatly — has your devoted worshipper indeed come to you, as to a refuge, toward your greatness?
2. Turn away from the ungenerous man, the miser, even at the moment of offering — never side with the two who go forward without devotion to the gods.
3. He — the shining, inspired one, though mortal, greatest, most exalted in heaven — may he go forth. Agni, may we be counted among those eager for you.
Translator's note: this hymn's transmitted Sanskrit is unusually compressed and, in places, syntactically broken — a preverb stands apart from its verb (verse 2's initial "vy"), several nouns admit more than one plausible sense (aninasya, "the not-mighty" or "the ungenerous"; prahoṣe, "at the offering" or "in the pouring-forth"; vrādhantamo, "most exalted" or "most grown"; vanuṣaḥ, "eager ones" or "rivals"), and no finite verb survives in verse 2 to anchor its clause. The rendering above follows the most conservative sense of each word; readers consulting the Sanskrit should treat this hymn as genuinely difficult rather than settled.
Colophon
Rigveda I.150 is drawn from the Śākala recension of the Rigveda, composed approximately 1700–1100 BCE. This is a Good Works Translation rendered verse by verse from the Sanskrit text printed below. Prepared for the Good Work Library by the Tianmu Anglican Church with AI-assisted translation.
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Source Text: ṛgveda I.150
puru tvā dāśvān voce 'rir agne tava svid ā |
todasyeva śaraṇa ā mahasya || 1 ||
vy aninasya dhaninaḥ prahoṣe cid araruṣaḥ |
kadā cana prajigato adevayoḥ || 2 ||
sa candro vipra martyo maho vrādhantamo divi |
pra-pret te agne vanuṣaḥ syāma || 3 ||
Source Colophon
Sanskrit text of the Rigveda, Śākala recension. The standard scholarly edition is the Bombay Oriental (Vishva Bandhu, 5 vols., 1963–66). IAST transliteration available from GRETIL (Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages) and Vedaweb (University of Cologne). Both sources are open access. IAST transliteration from the Aufrecht edition (1877) via GRETIL (Van Nooten & Holland input, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).