A Charm to Drive Out Disease
Rigveda X.163 is a sūkta (hymn) from Maṇḍala 10 of the Rigveda, one of the 1,028 hymns organized within the ten books of the oldest Veda. The Rigveda was composed approximately 1700–1100 BCE in Vedic Sanskrit and preserved through oral transmission across millennia.
This hymn is not a hymn of praise to a god but a healing charm: the speaker addresses a sick person directly and, moving systematically from the head to the feet and then over the whole body, names each part and declares the disease (yakṣma) torn out of it. A close variant of this text is also preserved in the Atharvaveda, where such healing charms are more common.
This is a Good Works Translation produced for the Good Works Library from the Sanskrit of the Śākala recension.
1. From your two eyes, your two nostrils, your two ears, and from your chin, I root out from you the disease of the head — from your brain, from your tongue.
2. From your neck, your nape, your vertebrae, and your spine, I root out from you the disease of the arms — from your shoulders, from your arms.
3. From your intestines, your bowels, your belly, and your heart, I root out from you the disease — from your kidneys, your liver, your lungs.
4. From your two thighs, your two knees, your two heels, and your two forefeet, I root out from you the disease — from your hips, your seat, your loins.
5. From your organ of urination, from your testicles, from your body hairs, from your nails, I root out from you this disease — from your whole body.
6. From every limb, from every hair, born in joint after joint, I root out from you this disease — from your whole body.
Translator's note: several anatomical terms are technical and their exact referents are debated by scholars (e.g. plāśi in verse 3, rendered here conservatively as "lungs"; vanaṅkaraṇa in verse 5, rendered as "testicles"). The repeated verb vi vṛhāmi literally means "I tear apart / uproot," rendered throughout as "I root out."
Colophon
Rigveda X.163 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.
🌲
Source Text: ṛgveda X.163
Sanskrit source text from the Aufrecht edition (1877) via GRETIL (Van Nooten & Holland input). Presented here for reference, study, and verification alongside the English translation above.
akṣībhyāṁ te nāsikābhyāṁ karṇābhyāṁ chubukād adhi |
yakṣmaṁ śīrṣaṇyam mastiṣkāj jihvāyā vi vṛhāmi te || 1 ||
grīvābhyas ta uṣṇihābhyaḥ kīkasābhyo anūkyāt |
yakṣmaṁ doṣaṇya1m aṁsābhyām bāhubhyāṁ vi vṛhāmi te || 2 ||
āntrebhyas te gudābhyo vaniṣṭhor hṛdayād adhi |
yakṣmam matasnābhyāṁ yaknaḥ plāśibhyo vi vṛhāmi te || 3 ||
ūrubhyāṁ te aṣṭhīvadbhyām pārṣṇibhyām prapadābhyām |
yakṣmaṁ śroṇibhyām bhāsadād bhaṁsaso vi vṛhāmi te || 4 ||
mehanād vanaṁkaraṇāl lomabhyas te nakhebhyaḥ |
yakṣmaṁ sarvasmād ātmanas tam idaṁ vi vṛhāmi te || 5 ||
aṅgād-aṅgāl lomno-lomno jātam parvaṇi-parvaṇi |
yakṣmaṁ sarvasmād ātmanas tam idaṁ vi vṛhāmi te || 6 ||
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).