Hymn of the Dappled Cow

Rigveda X.189 is a sūkta (hymn of praise) 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 short three-verse hymn is one of the Rigveda's riddle-hymns: a dappled cow strides forth between her mother and father, breathes within a realm of light, and a mighty buffalo surveys the sky as speech is granted to a bird at every dawn. Tradition reads the cow and the bird as figures for the sun and for speech itself, but the verses do not name their referents outright, and are translated here as they stand. This is a Good Works Translation produced for the Good Works Library from the Sanskrit of the Śākala recension.

1. This dappled cow has come striding forth; she has taken her seat before her mother, going onward toward her father, toward heaven.

2. She moves within his realm of light, breathing out after breathing in. The mighty buffalo has looked out across the sky.

3. Over thirty abodes he shines forth; speech is granted to the bird — at every dawn, day after day.

Translator's note: the hymn's referents are left unnamed in the Sanskrit itself. "Dham̐a" (verse 3) is rendered "abodes" — a station, seat, or realm rather than a physical dwelling — and "pataṅga" ("bird," verse 3) is kept literal rather than resolved to any single symbolic identity.

Colophon

Rigveda X.189 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 X.189

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.

āyaṁ gauḥ pṛśnir akramīd asadan mātaram puraḥ |
pitaraṁ ca prayan svaḥ || 1 ||

antaś carati rocanāsya prāṇād apānatī |
vy akhyan mahiṣo divam || 2 ||

triṁśad dhāma vi rājati vāk pataṁgāya dhīyate |
prati vastor aha dyubhiḥ || 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).