Ahimsa was one of the Philosophy and religion good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
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Should the title of this article have diacritics (Ahiṃsā), or not (Ahimsa)? Most articles have preferred the latter: Sanskrit instead of Saṃskṛta, Rigveda instead of Ṛgveda,Shanti instead of Śāntiḥ, etc. There have been equally viable arguments for and against the usage of diacritics in article titles: supplying the diacritics better respects the original language and culture, one may argue, but not every device can display diacritics, and the title might appear to some as "Ahi□s□", or something like that, which can be considered even worse to the original language and culture than leaving the diacritics out. What is Wikipedia's currently standing official policy about this? ωικιωαrrιorᑫᑫ1ᑫ16:07, 4 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Opting for the former, ahiṃsā, would elegantly avoid the discussion whether it is preferred that the article be named "ahinsa" or "ahimsa" to which issue raised - correctly - I reply below. Are there really still devices that do not display Unicode? Yak-indolog (talk) 20:21, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
"It is also the first of the five precepts of Buddhism."
No it is not. The first of the five precepts of Buddhism is "not to strike down / kill living beings." The idea is close, but not identical.
MBOrsborn (talk) 15:10, 25 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
If we wanted to be precise, the idea is identical, but the actual word is not used.
ahiṃsā primary meaning and usage is precisely the same (not taking life), the wording of the pali precept being a fitting definition of the term ahiṃsā which is not used (note that this is the case with the other precepts in Pali too: "not appropriating ungiven" is the definition of asteya, but the term is not used, "not behave wrongly in erotics" could be seen as the definition of brahmacarya in its broad sense, but the term is not used, etc)
So the sentence you objected against was in fact not wrong, just potentionally confusing - if it looked like the same TERM is used for the same concept. Yak-indolog (talk) 20:30, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The translaton of spelling of अहिंसा to ahimsa is wrong . This is a hindi word pronounced as ahinsa and not ahimsa.Even When a person use google translate to get its correct spelling it shows ahinsa not ahimsa. If you meet a India and ask this word's correct pronounciation he would say ahinsa not ahimsa. Jayvrr (talk) 04:49, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia normally uses the spelling used generally by scholars and academics. "Ahimsa" is the usual spelling found in most scholarly sources and academic works. Hence it is used as the primary spelling here. Rasnaboy (talk) 07:15, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Though one might challenge you to try to give a statistics of all scholarly articles using the respective two spellings (ahinsa and ahimsa WITHOUT a dot under m), my estimate is you might quite likely end up right that "most scholarly sources" might actually use ahimsa. Yet, if the policy does not tackle the following, we should start a discussion on it at some proper place: Scholars very often use terms/touch upon topics they are not specialists in. For example, Tibetologists, Buddhologists, scholars from Religion studies, and many others, will frequently use terms from Sanskrit, though they should not be taken as authority on their correct spelling, that authority being limited to indologists specializing in Sanskrit language, and anglicists tackling spelling norms of English. Being a Sanskritist by education (and phonetician by one of my unfinished education fields), I can support the original contributor of this objection: The person is wrong in citing it as Hindi word (only), since the word is Sanskrit by its origin, but correct that the nearest English transcription, if the rule in English is to approximate the pronunciation (someone specialized in English loanwords spelling rules and norms should comment whether that is the rule), would be Ahinsa. The spelling Ahimsa (and similar, like Samhita) originate from a simplistic approach to transcription (NOT transliteration): The correct transliteration (which means Romanization of Sanskrit according to IAST or ISO norms) is not Ahimsa, this would be a typo, it has to involve a dot below or above (depending on norm) the letter m. Dotless m is reserved for a totally different Devanagari letter and its corresponding Sanskrit sound, which is [m]. The "dotted m" letter is a transliteration of a mere diacritic of Devanagari, which corresponds to several phonetic realizations in Sanskrit, depending on the adjacent sounds. It is only when immediately preceding letter "p" or "b" or "m" that the "dotted m" is pronounced as "m". In all other cases it is pronounced starkingly differently from "m". Thus, the simplistic practice of removing diacritics from IAST/ISO romanization of Sanskrit, that dates back to tackling typographic costs in decades long past, does not happen to coincide with the ideal anglicization of Sanskrit words. The more correct English transcription would actually be ahinsa. The reason being that it is the similar situation as when French nasal vowels preceding [s] are rendered in English pronunciation by the sequence [ns], and exactly the same situation as when the Polish nasalized vowels are treated so (e.g. English pronunciation [walensa] for the name Walęsa (sorry for incorrect L) ). To be sure, there are Sanskritists who do write ahinsa and sanhita (unlike the crowd of "dot-omitters", who avoid the need to think about the proper transcription by just removing all diacritics from transliteration). Yak-indolog (talk) 20:16, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
transliteration versus transcription/anglicized spelling
Kindly illuminate me (by direct message / mail / comment on my talk page) what the
[undefined] Error: {{Transliteration}}: no text (help) template intends to mean.
Whatever it intends, it is clearly used incorrectly here:
Taking it literally, it should introduce the same that the template IAST does. The reason: IAST is a standard for transliteration of Sanskrit. (There are other standards for the same, notably the appropriate ISO standard for transliteration of Indic scripts)
What is more important, though, is the fact that
Ahimsa
as given in the beginning of this article is apparently WRONG. The reason being that while the form ahiṃsā is a transliteration, the form ahimsa IS NOT ANY TRANSLITERATION.
Do not get transliteration and transcription confused. Unlike the latter (which may employ various methods) transliteration always employs only one method: Assigning a single rendering (a letter, or a cluster of letters) in the target script to each single letter/character/sign in the source script. It can always be converted back to the script which it transliterates by a simple one-to-one conversion.
ahimsa is not a transliteration from any of the scripts used for writing Sanskrit, and if you tried to convert it back to, say, Devanagari, you would end up with a completely different result than what you actually thought you transliterated. This is because you did not transliterate, you transcribed.
The template should clearly be removed here. (If you like to use the template, you need to enter a correct transliteration, such as the IAST, which is ahiṃsā - the dot under the M and the macron over the A cannot be ignored for it to be any transliteration)
It is not a big issue, since the fact this template has been used is not currently displayed in the view of the article. Yet, it might result in more confused usage by those who see it used here using the source view) Yak-indolog (talk) 20:47, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
level-5 vital article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
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