Dānastuti — In Praise of Gifts
Rigveda VIII.55 is a sūkta (hymn of praise) from Maṇḍala 8 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. The hymn opens by invoking Indra's power, then turns into a dānastuti — a catalogue of gifts (bulls, dogs, hides, cattle, horses) given to the Kāṇva poets by a patron.
1. I have seen much of Indra's might as it comes toward me. Your bounty, O Vṛka, goes out even to the Dasyu.
2. A hundred white bulls shine in the sky like stars; by their greatness they hold up the sky, as it were.
3. A hundred flutes, a hundred dogs, a hundred worn hides, a hundred tufts of balbaja-grass for me, and four hundred ruddy cows.
4. You Kāṇvāyanas are truly favored by the gods, moving about age after age, striding on like horses.
5. Then indeed they proclaim the great, unfailing fame of the team; the dark mares speed along the paths — not to be caught even by the eye.
Translator's note: Verse 1 is syntactically compressed; "vṛka" ("wolf") may instead be a proper name of the patron addressed, and "dasyave" ("to the Dasyu/enemy") is kept literal rather than smoothed over. Verse 5 turns on "sāptasya," here read as "of the [horse] team," and the sense of the dark mares outrunning sight is rendered conservatively; both lines admit other readings.
Colophon
Rigveda VIII.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 VIII.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.
bhūrīd indrasya vīrya1ṁ vy akhyam abhy āyati |
rādhas te dasyave vṛka || 1 ||
śataṁ śvetāsa ukṣaṇo divi tāro na rocante |
mahnā divaṁ na tastabhuḥ || 2 ||
śataṁ veṇūñ chataṁ śunaḥ śataṁ carmāṇi mlātāni |
śatam me balbajastukā aruṣīṇāṁ catuḥśatam || 3 ||
sudevāḥ stha kāṇvāyanā vayo-vayo vicarantaḥ |
aśvāso na caṅkramata || 4 ||
ād it sāptasya carkirann ānūnasya mahi śravaḥ |
śyāvīr atidhvasan pathaś cakṣuṣā cana saṁnaśe || 5 ||
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).