The Shiva Sutras (IAST: śivasūtrāṇi; Devanāgarī: शिवसूत्राणि) or Māheshvara Sutras (Devanāgarī: माहेश्वर सूत्राणि) are fourteen verses that organize the phonemes of the Sanskrit language as referred to in the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, the foundational text of Sanskrit grammar. Within the tradition they are known as the akṣarasamāmnāya, "recitation of phonemes," but they are popularly known as the Shiva Sutras because they are said to have been revealed to Pāṇini by Shiva (also known as Maheshvara). They were either composed by Pāṇini to accompany his Aṣṭādhyāyī or predate him. The latter is less plausible, but the practice of encoding complex rules in short, mnemonic verses is typical of the sutra style.

Each verse consists of a group of basic Sanskrit phonemes (i.e. open syllables consisting either of initial vowels or of consonants followed by the basic vowel "a") followed by a single 'dummy letter' or anubandha, conventionally rendered by capital letters in Roman transliteration. This allows Pāṇini to refer to groups of phonemes with pratyāhāras, which consist of a phoneme-letter and an anubandha (and often the vowel a to aid pronunciation) and signify all of the intervening phonemes Pratyāhāras are thus single syllables, but they can be declined (see Aṣṭādhyāyī 6.1.77 below). Hence aL refers to all phonemes (because it consists of the first phoneme a and the last anubandha L); aC refers to vowels (i.e., all of the phonemes before the anubandha C: a i u ṛ ḷ e o ai au); haL to consonants, and so on. Note that some pratyāhāras are ambiguous. The anubandha Ṇ occurs twice in the list, which means that you can assign two different meanings to pratyāhāra aṆ (including or excluding ṛ, etc.); in fact, both of these meanings are used in the Aṣṭādhyāyī. On the other hand, the pratyāhāra haL is always used in the meaning "all consonants"---Pāṇini never uses pratyāhāras to refer to sets consisting of a single phoneme.