A hymn of eighteen verses. After three long verses to Indra-Varuna that ask where their former help has gone, the poet turns to short three-line verses and honours five gods in turn with three verses each. Pushan is offered the newest song and asked to take it as a bridegroom takes a bride. The first of Savitr's three asks to reach the god's excellent glory so that he may stir the singers' thoughts; the next two ask for a share of prosperity and say that singers worship him moved by their own thoughts. Soma and Mitra-Varuna follow, and the close names Jamadagni.
A boy announces that he has come for studentship. The teacher asks his name, takes his hand, and commits him to Prajapati and Savitr, to waters and plants, heaven and earth and all beings. He orders him to sip water, work, feed the fire and not sleep. Then he teaches the Savitri: by lines, by half verses, and whole, each stage laying breath into the boy. Older teachers waited a year, six months, twenty-four, twelve, six or three days; a brahmin should be taught at once, and in the gayatri metre, not the anushtubh.
What is different here:
The verse is no longer one of eighteen but the rite of a second birth; Savitr is one of two gods to whom the student is handed over.
The three lines of the verse are the three worlds, the three Vedas and the three breaths; a fourth bright foot shines above the sky and no fee can equal it. The Gayatri is so called because it protects the breaths. King Janaka asks Budila Ashvatarashvi how he, who spoke as a knower of the Gayatri, became an elephant that carries him. Budila says he did not know its mouth: fire is its mouth, and as fire burns whatever is piled on it, one who knows this burns away his wrong and becomes clean.
What is different here:
Adds the fourth foot, the etymology and the Janaka and Budila anecdote; the verse is treated as a body with a mouth.
Prajapati milked the sounds a, u and m and the words bhuh, bhuvah, svah out of the three Vedas, and then milked out the verse sacred to Savitr that begins with tad, one line from each Veda. A brahmin who says the syllable and the verse with the three words at both twilights gains the merit of reciting the Vedas. Nothing surpasses the Savitri.
What is different here:
Gives the verse a divine origin from Prajapati and fixes it, with om and the three words, to the two twilights.
For centuries the verse was taught only at the initiation of boys of the upper classes. Reform movements of the nineteenth century opened it: the encyclopedia account read names the Brahmo Samaj and Swami Vivekananda, who in 1898 held that a person becomes a brahmin by learning from a teacher and not by birth, and who gave the verse to non-brahmins in the Ramakrishna Mission.
What is different here:
A change of who may say the verse, not of the verse.
The encyclopedia account read reports that in the Sutta Nipata the Buddha refers to the Savitri, of three lines and twenty-four syllables, as the foremost of the brahmins' chants. The Pali text itself was not opened.
What is different here:
The verse seen from outside the Vedic tradition, as the mark of brahmin learning.
In Balinese Hindu practice the verse forms the first of the seven sections of the Trisandhya prayer, recited three times a day, at six in the morning, at noon and at six in the evening.
What is different here:
Three daily recitations rather than the two twilights of Manu; part of a longer fixed prayer.
Sources: Hymns of the Rigveda, tr. R. T. H. Griffith (1896), hymns read for the Vedic layer; The Satapatha-Brahmana, tr. Julius Eggeling (Sacred Books of the East 12, 41); The Upanishads, tr. F. Max Muller (Sacred Books of the East 1 and 15); The Laws of Manu, tr. G. Buhler (Sacred Books of the East 25); Gayatri Mantra (Wikipedia)