Questions
I genuinely have no time.
This is the question the Jagadguru answered above, and he did not accept
it. Ten minutes, then go to work. The compilations add the practical form:
reduce the prāṇāyāma, leave the mudrās, ten gāyatrī, and you are done in
ten to twelve minutes.
I stopped years ago. Can I start again?
Yes, and the sources treat this as the ordinary case rather than a
scandal. Omission has a prescribed prāyaścitta, which your ācārya will give
you; for a long lapse the guidance is to resume under a teacher rather than
to calculate. Begin.
I am past sixty. Is it too late to learn?
No. The teaching camps that produced these Q&A documents report
students from eight years old to eighty. As one answer puts it, in English,
better late than never.
It looks impossibly complicated.
The standard reply is the driving lesson: the first day at the wheel
feels the same way, and today there is hardly a person who cannot drive.
Ten days of practice and you will say it is easy. Learn it from a teacher
rather than a book or a video — the mantras are svara-bound, and the
hand-placements are shown, not read.
What if I am travelling, or ill?
Travel is no exemption: bathe where you can, keep the articles with you,
and perform it — the compilations describe doing so on train platforms and
in airport prayer rooms. In illness, do what you are able, even mentally;
where one is genuinely incapable, a father, son, brother or pupil may
perform it on one's behalf with the appropriate saṃkalpa. Where water is
unavailable, mental performance is allowed. What is not allowed is
abandoning it.
Does it earn puṇya?
Not directly, on the usual account — it destroys the sins accumulated
since the previous sandhyā, and it makes one's other observances capable of
bearing fruit. What it is said to bring is longevity, clarity, and
brahmavarcas: āyuḥ prajñāṃ dhanam.
Does the place matter?
The tradition grades it: performed at home it carries its own measure;
at a riverbank ten times that, in a gośāla a hundred, in a yāgaśāla a
thousand, and at a tīrtha or siddhakṣetra without limit. But the home is
where the daily rite is actually kept, and that is what counts.
Whose pañcāṅga does the app follow?
Sringeri's. Tithi, nakṣatra, yoga, karaṇa and the festival days are read
from what Śrī Śāradā Pīṭham publishes rather than computed independently and
then disagreeing with it. Beyond the published range the app falls back to a
Sūrya-Siddhānta calculation and says so.
Who may perform it?
Sandhyopāsana with the Gāyatrī is prescribed for the twice-born after
upanayana. On who may perform what, and with which mantras, follow your own
ācārya — the app takes no position and simply computes the times and the
saṃkalpa.
Does the app cost anything?
No.
