| abstract
| - The verses of the Vedas have a variety of different meters. They are divided by number of padas in a verse, and by the number of syllables in a pada. Chandas (छंदः), the study of Vedic meter, is one of the six Vedanga disciplines, or "organs of the vedas".
* jágatī: 4 padas of 12 syllables
* triṣṭubh: 4 padas of 11 syllables
* virāj: 4 padas of 10 syllables
* anuṣṭubh: 4 padas of 8 syllables, this is the typical shloka of later Hindu poetry
* gāyatrī: 3 padas of 8 syllables No treatises dealing exclusively with Vedic meter have survived. The oldest work preserved is the Chandas-shastra, at the transition from Vedic to Classical (Epic) Sanskrit poetry. Later sources are the Agni Purana, based on the Chandas shastra, chapter 15 of the Bharatiya Natyashastra, and chapter 104 of the Brihat-samhita. These works all date to roughly the Early Middle Ages. Vrittaratnakara of Kedarabhatta, dating to ca. the 14th century, is widely known, but does not discuss Vedic meter. The Suvrittatilaka of Kshemendra was also influential, and valuable for its quotations of earlier authors. The main principle of Vedic meter is measurement by the number of syllables. The metrical unit of verse is the pada ("foot"), generally of eight, eleven, or twelve syllables; these are termed gāyatrī, triṣṭubh and jagatī respectively, after meters of the same name. A ṛc is a stanza of typically three or four padas, with a range of two to seven found in the corpus of Vedic poetry. Stanzas may mix padas of different lengths, and strophes of two or three stanzas (respectively, pragātha and tṛca) are common. Syllables in a pada are also classified as metrically short (laghu "light") or long (guru "heavy"): a syllable is metrically short only if it contains a short vowel and is not followed by consecutive consonants in the same pada. All other syllables are long, by quality (having a long vowel or diphthong) or by position (being followed by a consonant cluster.) Comparison with the Avestan literature shows that originally there were no constraints on permissible patterns of long and short syllables, the principle being purely quantitative. Vedic prosody innovated a number of distinctive rhythms:
* The last four syllables of a pada, termed the cadence by Indologists, are usually iambic or trochaic. This is mainly a strict alternation in the penultimate and antepenultimate syllables, as the final syllable can be of either weight.
* A caesura is found after the fourth or fifth syllable in triṣṭubh and jagatī padas, dividing the pada into an opening and break before the cadence.
* The break very often starts with two short syllables.
* The opening shows an iambic or trochaic tendency in keeping with the cadence, though the first syllable can be of either weight, the alternation being in the second and third. There is, however, considerable freedom in relation to the strict metrical canons of Classical Sanskrit prosody, which Arnold (1905) holds to the credit of the Vedic bards:
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