Hymn to Pūṣan
Rigveda VI.55 is a sūkta (hymn of praise) from Maṇḍala 6 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 is a Good Works Translation produced for the Good Works Library from the Sanskrit of the Śākala recension.
1. Come, O son of Unyoking, glowing one — let the two of us join together. Be our charioteer of the cosmic order.
2. We implore the best of charioteers, the braided one, lord of great bounty — the friend who brings wealth.
3. You are the stream of riches, O glowing one, O good lord, a heap of wealth, you whose steeds are goats — friend of every devout man.
4. Now let us praise Pūṣan, the goat-charioted, the vigorous one, who is called the lover of his own sister.
5. I have called him the wooer of his mother, the lover of his sister — let him hear us, my brother, the friend of Indra.
6. Let the goats, firmly yoked, carry Pūṣan in his chariot — the god beloved of the people — bearing him along.
Translator's note: verse 6's "niśṛmbhāsaḥ" is an obscure form, rendered conservatively here as "firmly yoked"; verses 4–5 preserve the hymn's kinship riddles (Pūṣan called lover of his sister, wooer of his mother, brother and friend of Indra) exactly as the Sanskrit states them, without softening or explaining them away.
Colophon
Rigveda VI.55 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 VI.55
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.
ehi vāṁ vimuco napād āghṛṇe saṁ sacāvahai |
rathīr ṛtasya no bhava || 1 ||
rathītamaṁ kapardinam īśānaṁ rādhaso mahaḥ |
rāyaḥ sakhāyam īmahe || 2 ||
rāyo dhārāsy āghṛṇe vaso rāśir ajāśva |
dhīvato-dhīvataḥ sakhā || 3 ||
pūṣaṇaṁ nv a1jāśvam upa stoṣāma vājinam |
svasur yo jāra ucyate || 4 ||
mātur didhiṣum abravaṁ svasur jāraḥ śṛṇotu naḥ |
bhrātendrasya sakhā mama || 5 ||
ājāsaḥ pūṣaṇaṁ rathe niśṛmbhās te janaśriyam |
devaṁ vahantu bibhrataḥ || 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).