There are already excellent places to read the scriptures. This school exists for what happens after reading, and that means every source, explanation and research draft has to be genuinely traceable.
This page describes how that is enforced. Not as a promise, but as a description of how the system is actually built.
Nothing is copied from the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust
The translations and purports published by the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust are copyrighted works. We do not reproduce them, we do not paraphrase them sentence by sentence, and we do not run them through a rewriting tool to disguise their origin. Rewording someone else’s translation is still copying it; it is simply copying badly.
Where we say what Śrīla Prabhupāda emphasises in a verse, that is an original summary of a philosophical point, written in our own words, the same way a teacher explains a predecessor’s position in a classroom. It is labelled as a summary, never presented as his words.
This applies equally to every other publisher, ācārya’s commentary and modern edition.
How our translations are made
Every English translation on this site is composed directly from the Sanskrit: the grammar of each word, the syntax of the sentence, the lexical range of the terms, and the context of the surrounding passage.
That work is done in the open. On any verse you can see the word-by-word analysis the translation was built from: lemma, root, case, number, gender, and the contextual sense chosen. If you disagree with a rendering, you can see exactly which decision produced it.
Every block of text carries its origin
This is not an editorial habit; it is a field in the database. Nothing can be published without it.
- Sanskrit source text: the ancient text itself, in Devanāgarī and IAST.
- Independent translation: composed here, from the Sanskrit.
- Independent analysis: original grammatical and lexical work built from dictionaries and grammars.
- Original commentary: explanatory writing by Aniruddha Dāsa.
- Research edition: source-linked educational material developed as an editorial research layer for this school, visibly labelled and never attributed to Aniruddha Dāsa or an ācārya.
- Teaching summary: an original summary of a teacher’s emphasis, in our words.
- Direct quotation: verbatim. Cannot be published without a citation and a cleared rights status.
- Traditional account: a narrative with no single modern author, marked as traditional.
Quotations
We do quote. A school that could not quote its own tradition would be absurd. But a quotation here is short, visibly a quotation, and attached to its source: book, chapter, verse or page.
Quotations are stored separately from our own writing, precisely so the two can never blur together over years of editing. A quotation whose rights status is unresolved cannot go live.
Pictures are labelled too
Every image states what kind of image it is: a historical photograph, a devotional artwork, an educational reconstruction, a diagram, a map, or an original digital illustration. You should never have to wonder whether you are looking at a photograph of a place or an artist’s impression of it.
Stories carry the same treatment. A scriptural narrative, a traditional account and a classroom illustration look different on the page and are labelled differently. An example invented to make a point is never allowed to read as history.
Where editorial material is used, and its boundary
The site’s original learning sequences, practice prompts, workspaces, research summaries and interface copy are labelled “sourced research edition” and show the evidence used. This is educational design, not concealed teacher authorship.
Editorial material is never presented as the words of Śrīla Prabhupāda, an ācārya or Aniruddha Dāsa. It does not silently import a modern translation, invent Sanskrit, or turn an unreviewed theological opinion into a teacher’s approved conclusion.
The 701-verse Bhagavad-gītā layer contains ancient Sanskrit source text and transliteration from a public-domain-licensed repository. It deliberately omits that repository’s modern word meanings, translations and commentaries. Human-reviewed commentary remains a separately labelled layer.
The same provenance rule governs Hindi, Bengali and Odia: a machine-assisted rendering must remain labelled until a qualified human reviewer approves it.