About this edition

A digital edition of T. Subba Row, The Philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita: four lectures delivered at the Eleventh Annual Convention of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, December 27–30, 1886. The text follows the second edition (Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Madras, 1921) with S. Subramaniam’s memoir of Subba Row. The lectures first appeared in The Theosophist in 1887 and as a book in Bombay, published by Tookaram Tatya. The text is in the public domain.

Source

The scan of a copy from the University of California, digitised by the Internet Archive: philosophyofbhag00subbiala (colour, 400 ppi). Each page marker in the margin (for example 27) opens the scan of that page, so any passage can be checked against the original.

The first edition of 1912 is also at the Internet Archive (in.ernet.dli.2015.133127, Digital Library of India), but that scan lacks six pages and has leaves 33–48 bound out of place; so the complete and better-scanned second edition is used here.

How the text was made

Every page was read twice and independently by a vision language model (Claude Haiku): once from the page image with the old OCR as a hint, once from a sharper image without it. Wherever the two readings differed in a word or a mark, a third model (Claude Sonnet) compared both against the scan and settled the text. A separate pass then checked the diacritics only: every Sanskrit word on every page was compared once more with the scan at full resolution, since dots below letters are easily lost in an ordinary reading.

The book’s transliteration

The 1921 edition writes Sanskrit with diacritical marks, but in a system of its own rather than today’s scholarly standard (IAST). A dot below marks not only the retroflex consonants but often the dental t and d as well: Gīṭā, Avyakṭam, Ḍevas, Ḍaṭṭāṭreya; ś/ṣ appears as sh or ṣh (Kṛṣhṇa, sūkṣhma); and the printer set the same word with marks in one place and without them in another. All this is kept here as printed. The standard spelling (IAST) and Devanagari of each term are given in the glossary.

Differences from the printed book

Words broken across lines are joined; the old space before ; : ! ? is dropped. Spelling, capitals and italics follow the book.
Footnotes are numbered within each lecture.
Obvious misprints are not corrected: the text reproduces the book.