Shiksha

For other uses, see Shiksha (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Shiksa.

Shiksha is one of the six Vedangas, or limbs of Vedic studies, dealing with phonetics and phonology in Sanskrit. The Sanskrit word IAST: śikṣā (Sanskrit: शिक्षा) means 'instruction, lesson, learning, study of skill'. Practitioners studied the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, accent, quantity, stress, melody and rules of euphonic combination of words during a Vedic recitation.

Shiksha is the oldest and the first auxiliary discipline to the Vedas, maintained since the Vedic era. It aims at construction of sound and language for synthesis of ideas, in contrast to grammarians who developed rules for language deconstruction and understanding of ideas. This field helped preserve the Vedas and the Upanishads as the canons of Hinduism since the ancient times, and shared by various Hindu traditions.

Each ancient Vedic school developed this field of Vedanga, and the oldest surviving phonetic textbooks are the Pratishakyas. The Paniniya-Shiksha and Naradiya-Shiksha are examples of extant ancient manuscripts of this field of Vedic studies.

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