Resource Library for Dharmaśāstra Studies

Texts with Electronic Editions

Dharmaśāstra and Hindu law have been a research focus at UT-Austin for more than thirty years. Until recently, searchable versions of Dharmaśāstra texts existed only for the major source texts (mūlasmṛti), at repositories such as GRETIL or SARIT (thanks especially to the pioneering efforts of several Japanese scholars in the late 1990s). The voluminous later commentarial and digest literature, however, had not been transcribed. After an initial collaborative transcription and publication of the Mitākṣarā commentary in 2017, Patrick Olivelle dedicated great time and effort during the COVID-19 pandemic and after to transcribing many other important commentaries and digests. All the editions are offered as open educational resources under a CC BY-SA Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Warning to users: Almost none of the transcriptions on this site have been proofread and many mistakes exist in the files. Where available, scanned originals have also been linked for convenient double-checking. Users are strongly encouraged to double check all transcriptions against an original print source or scan before citing a text.

Root-texts (Dharmaśāstras)

Root-texts (Arthaśāstra)

Commentaries (bhāṣya, ṭikā, vṛtti, etc.) by root-text

Āpastamba-dharmasūtra

Āpastamba-gṛhyasūtra

Gautama-dharmasūtra

Mānava-dharmaśāstra

Pārāśarasmṛti

Yājñavalkya-dharmaśāstra

Digests (nibandha, sāra, saṃgraha, etc.) by title

Cooperative Annotated Bibliography of Hindu Law

Repository of more than 3000 citations to scholarly works on Dharmaśāstra and Hindu law.