The Leela rules everyone thinks are ancient were invented in 1975

By Alexander Krasnobaev, who builds Leela Online · Published September 9, 2026

Where modern Leela comes from

Almost every version of Leela you can play today — in a book, in a workshop, in a browser, including ours — follows Harish Johari’s 1975 book. He is the reason the game exists in the West at all, and his 72-square layout is a real Vaishnava chart, catalogued in the same corpus as the eighteenth-century boards. None of what follows is an argument against him.

But his book presents its rules as tradition, and two of the best known turn out to be his own.

The six that lets you on the board

In Johari’s version your piece begins in Vaikuntha, square 68, and you must roll a six before you may enter the board at square 6. Players remember this rule above all others, because it is the one that makes them wait.

Jacob Schmidt-Madsen searched the whole surviving corpus for it — nearly 150 unique charts, more than 170 counting variants — and wrote, on page 205:

The rule is not attested in any other sources, and is likely to be of Johari’s own invention.

Special entry throws do exist historically. They are a “1” on the Jaina stick die, or a “10” with six cowrie shells on Sufi boards. Never a six, and not on this board at all: “on the whole, 72-square Vaiṣṇava charts seem to have avoided rules involving special throws.”

The exact throw at the end

The second rule is the overshoot: land exactly on 72 and take the snake down, or forfeit your turn. Schmidt-Madsen notes in a footnote that this one is not attested either, and was “probably adapted from the modern game of snakes and ladders.”

Read that twice. The children’s game that descends from gyan chaupar lent a rule back to its own ancestor, and the loan is now read as scripture.

What the charts themselves do is simpler. On the 72-square Vaishnava boards the winning square is 68, in the middle of the top row rather than at the end, and “no additional throw is required after a pawn lands on sq. 68.” You arrive and you are done.

“Arrows” is his word too

The historical boards have ladders, and so does every scholarly description of them. “Arrows” is Johari’s term. It is a good one — a ladder you climb, an arrow carries you — but it is not what the eighteenth century called them.

Why there was so much left to invent

This is the part that explains the rest. The rules were almost never written down. Schmidt-Madsen, page 200:

Instructions for playing gyān caupaṛ were rarely included on the charts themselves, and never on the 72-square Vaiṣṇava and 84-square Jaina charts under consideration here.

Only two rule texts survive from before the twentieth century: the Sanskrit Krīḍākauśalya of 1872, and a Gujarati manual of 1877/78 held at the L. D. Institute of Indology in Ahmedabad. They describe different boards. Neither describes the 72-square board that modern Leela uses.

Even the ending varied. Page 208:

Different sources propose different solutions to this problem, and it therefore seems likely that no standard solution was applied to the game as a whole.

So anyone reviving the game in 1975 was not restoring a lost rulebook. There was no rulebook. There was a board, a tradition of use, and a gap where the instructions would have been — and the gap had to be filled by somebody.

What is actually old

• The named squares. Every square carries a state — a virtue, a vice, a condition of mind. The board is a map, not a track.
• Ten snakes. Schmidt-Madsen calls it “the standard number of ten snakes” on the 72-square board, with roughly as many ladders. Jaina boards carry nine snakes and five or six ladders.
• Board size by tradition. Vaishnava 72 with the goal at 68, Jaina 84, Sufi 100, Advaita Vedanta 108, and one Punjab Hills family chart that runs to 342.
• No cubic dice. Vaishnava boards were played with six or seven cowrie shells, the score being how many landed face up. Jaina boards used a single four-sided stick die inscribed 1-2-5-6. Cubic dice are late.
• The dating. Not two thousand years. The corpus does not support the game existing before the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, and the earliest chart that can be securely dated was made in Lucknow in 1780–82 for Richard Johnson of the East India Company. It is in the British Library.

Why we are telling you this about our own game

We built an online version of Johari’s 72-square board, six and all, so this is not neutral ground. Keeping the six is a legitimate choice: his layout is a real chart, and his design is the one that carried the game into the modern world. Changing it would make our version worse, not more authentic.

But a player deserves to know which parts are inherited and which parts one author added in 1975. If you are waiting for a six to get on the board, you are following Harish Johari, not the eighteenth century. That is worth saying out loud, and almost nobody says it.

Sources

• Jacob Schmidt-Madsen, The Game of Knowledge: Playing at Spiritual Liberation in 18th- and 19th-Century Western India, PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2019. Open access, both volumes: vol. 1, vol. 2, appendices. Page numbers above refer to volume 1.
• Harish Johari, Leela: The Game of Self-Knowledge, 1975.

Quotations are given verbatim; everything attributed above was checked against the source itself rather than against secondary write-ups. If you find an error here, tell me and I will correct it.