Mystery 04
The Sanskrit Page
A page in my father’s handwriting. Written months before I was born. Addressed to a son he hadn’t met yet.
शून्यं वेदशशीनेत्रसोमबाणनगग्रहेन्दवः । नन्दनन्दाङ्गशून्याग्नित्रिग्रहषट्षडद्रिभिः ॥ १ ॥ वर्षं रेखांशकञ्चैव अक्षांशं मध्यविग्रहात् । जानीह्यात्मानमवतारम् अत्र स्थाने हि कुरु स्थितिम् ॥ २ ॥ कुरु लोकहितं पुत्र पूर्णशक्त्या सदादरात् । ज्ञानं विकिर लोकेऽस्मिन् मोदस्व च जगत्त्रये ॥ ३ ॥ मा फलं काङ्क्ष लोकेऽस्मिन् निष्कामः सर्वदा भव । दाता त्वमसि लोकेऽस्मिन् ग्रहीता न कदाचन ॥ ४ ॥ भ्रान्तौ जन्मनि सम्प्राप्ते स्मर चेदं सदा शुभम् ॥ ५ ॥
Reproduced from Volume 1, Chapter 10
Read one way, it’s devotional.
On the surface, the verse addresses a son directly — work for the welfare of the world, spread knowledge, seek no reward, remember this always as auspicious when confusion about your birth arises.
Read the other way, using a centuries-old Sanskrit convention called Bhūta Saṃkhyā, it’s also a sequence of digits.
Words that are also numbers
For over a thousand years, Sanskrit poets and astronomers used certain words as stand-ins for digits — by long convention, not by any code invented for this book. A few examples:
| Word | Why | Value |
|---|---|---|
| शून्य (śūnya) | empty, void | 0 |
| चन्द्र / इन्दु / सोम (moon) | there is one moon | 1 |
| नेत्र (eye) | a person has two | 2 |
| अग्नि (fire) | three sacred fires | 3 |
| वेद (Veda) | four Vedas | 4 |
| बाण (arrow) | five arrows of Kāma | 5 |
| अङ्ग / षड् (limb) | six limbs | 6 |
| अद्रि / नग (mountain) | seven traditional mountains | 7 |
One more convention worth knowing: these sequences are traditionally read in reverse positional order — the word given first represents the lowest place value, not the highest (अङ्कानां वामतो गतिः, “the digits proceed toward the left”).
Coincidence or code?
The verse contains a numerical layer once you know how to read it. Decoding it points toward a striking coincidence — a location that lines up with the region my father always said I was born in, while my own elder brother remembers my birth somewhere else entirely.
That is not proof of anything. I’m not printing the resulting numbers here. Volume 1 walks through the entire decode step by step — every word, every assumption, every alternative reading — and is explicit, the whole way through, about what’s established and what isn’t.
Watch me work through it in Volume 1 →