On the 8th of September, 1985, the author, and founder of Ananda Marga, Shrii Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, began an extraordinary series of Sunday lectures in his native Bengali that would eventually fill a total of twenty-six volumes over the next five years. The title he gave to this series was Shabda Cayaniká, which translates into English as “A Collection of Words”. As the title suggests, each discourse consists of a discussion of a certain number of words from the Bengali language, beginning, in the first discourse, with the first letter of the Bengali alphabet, a, and continuing on alphabetically. What results, then, is neither an encyclopedia, nor a dictionary, but something unique to the fields of scholarship and literature.

Ostensibly, Shabda Cayaniká is a series devoted to the linguistics and philology of the Bengali language, but in reality it is much more than that. The author uses the platform of the word as a point of departure to take the reader on a journey through all the varied landscapes of human knowledge – history, geography, medicine, science, art, religion, philosophy, etc. – and in the process adds the indelible stamp of his own unique intellect, enriching our experience with new ideas and enabling us to see our human heritage in a way we have never been able to before.

Like most great authors, he is a consummate storyteller, using a seemingly inexhaustible supply of anecdotes, personal experiences and stories to capture the reader’s interest and lead him or her effortlessly through the garden of human knowledge. Along the way the author refines and develops a language that is the world’s fifth most widely spoken and the closest living language to its great classical ancestor, Sanskrit.

Footnotes by the translators have all been signed “–Trans.” Unsigned footnotes are those of the author.

Square brackets [   ] in the text are used to indicate translations by the translators or other editorial insertions. Round brackets (   ) indicate a word or words originally given by the author.

The author uses a certain shorthand for explaining etymologies of words. Under this system, a minus sign (–) follows a prefix, and a plus sign (+) precedes a suffix. Thus ava – tr + ghaiṋ = avatára can be read, “the root tr prefixed by ava and suffixed by ghaiṋ becomes avatára.”

The first English publication of the material on hysteria in the section entitled “Acetana” appeared in The Awakening of Women, 1995. The passage was translated by Ácárya Vijayánanda Avadhúta, Shrii Deváshiiśa, Avadhútiká Ánanda Rucirá Ácáryá and Ácárya Acyutánanda Avadhúta.

Many thanks to Avadhútiká Ánanda Rucirá Ácáryá for her invaluable assistance with layout and indexing.