Hindu Scriptures

What are the Hindu sacred texts?

Hindu sacred texts fall into two broad classes, shruti and smriti. The scholars Eliot Deutsch and Lee Siegel explain the old division: shruti, meaning what is heard, is the eternally existing Veda, while smriti, meaning what is remembered, covers the epics, the Puranas, and other teaching texts.¹ Dancing with Siva, a catechism that teaches a monistic form of Shaiva Siddhanta,² holds that each lineage recognizes its own selection of smriti.³²⁴

Text or group	Class	What it contains
The four Vedas: Rig, Sama, Yajur, and Atharva	Shruti	Hymns, chants, and ritual formulas, many used in the Vedic sacrifice, and in the Atharva Veda, spells and incantations; historians count the Rig Veda as the oldest567
Brahmanas and Aranyakas	Shruti	Ritual instructions and interpretations, each linked to one of the Vedas895
Upanishads	Shruti	Teachings in prose and verse on Brahman, ultimate reality, and atman, the self; tradition counts 108, and almost all Vedic traditions, and most later traditions centered on one deity, accept ten to eighteen principal ones as revealed1011
Mahabharata (which includes the Bhagavad Gita) and Ramayana	Smriti	The two great epics, with the stories of Krishna and of Rama5
Puranas	Smriti	Eighteen major Puranas and many shorter ones: accounts of creation, the gods, kings, pilgrimage, and duty12
Dharmashastras	Smriti	Law books on duty and conduct, such as the Laws of Manu813
Agamas and Tantras	Revealed, in their own traditions	Texts of Shaiva, Vaishnava, and Shakta worship, temples, and initiation1415

How were the texts composed and handed down?

Many Hindu teachers hold that the Vedas are eternal and were heard, not composed, while historians date their composition to the second and first millennia BCE and trace a long oral transmission.¹⁶⁵

Both accounts agree that the Vedas lived for centuries in memory. Heesterman notes their faithful oral transmission among specialized brahmans, or priests, up to the present day.⁸ UNESCO, which listed Vedic chanting as intangible cultural heritage in 2008, describes how reciters learn from childhood to keep each word's sound unchanged, through tonal accents and set ways of pronouncing each letter. Only thirteen of more than a thousand recitation branches survive, it reports.⁷ The Writings section describes the manuscripts, and How ancient texts are dated explains the methods.

When were the epics and Puranas composed?

Tradition credits the epics and Puranas to ancient sages, while historians date them from about 500 BCE to, very roughly, 1200 CE, with the Puranas the hardest to date.¹²⁵

How did the texts gain authority?

Hinduism has no single closed canon. Dancing with Siva teaches that the shruti is shared by all Hindus, while each lineage defines its own growing body of smriti. ISKCON's site notes that the line between the two is often contested.⁴²⁴

Hiltebeitel writes that the smriti texts proclaim the Veda's authority in many ways, and that not rejecting the Veda became one of the most important touchstones for defining Hinduism. ISKCON's site adds that many schools ground their standing as orthodox in following scripture.⁵²⁰ Heesterman calls its place in Indian religion and philosophy pivotal but never undisputed.⁸ Dancing with Siva teaches that all Hindus accept the Vedas, yet each draws on them selectively and interprets them freely.²⁵

The Bhagavad Gita is formally smriti, as part of the Mahabharata, but Deutsch and Siegel write that it came to be accepted as revelation.¹ In the Gita itself, Krishna says: I alone am to be learnt from all the Vedas; I am the author of the Vedântas; and I alone know the Vedas. (Bhagavad Gita 15.15)²⁶ The Devi Bhagavata Purana calls shruti and smriti the two eyes of dharma and the Purana its heart.¹²¹

Each major tradition also reveres texts of its own. Dancing with Siva teaches that the Agamas, like the Vedas, are revelation, with the Vedas general and the Agamas specific. It gives the traditional count as 92 main Shaiva Agamas, 77 Shakta, and 108 Vaishnava Pancharatra Agamas.¹⁸¹⁵

The Vaishnava Pancharatra tradition, which G. R. Welbon describes as still a vigorous presence in South India and an essential part of Sri Vaishnava religion, holds that its texts are part of the Veda itself and that its Lord, Narayana, is the author of the Veda.²⁷ The Sri Vaishnava teacher Yamuna, active in the early eleventh century, defended the Pancharatra Agamas as equal to the Vedas in authority.²⁸ Welbon notes that others did not accept it: the mildest replies held that it could not be proved, and most were harsher.²⁷

Scripture also grew in regional languages. In the Tamil south, the hymns of the Vaishnava poet-saints called the Alvars were gathered into the Four Thousand Divine Verses in the tenth century.²⁹ The Shaiva Siddhanta school counts twelve books of Tamil hymns, the Tirumurai, as scripture beside the Vedas and Agamas.³⁰ In Hindi, the Ramcaritmanas, Tulsidas's telling of the story of Rama, is chanted from start to finish and staged each autumn.³¹

How do Hindu schools interpret the texts?

Hindu schools read their central texts through long traditions of commentary. Commentaries on the Vedanta Sutras gave rise to many different and often conflicting schools of Vedanta, ISKCON's site notes, and the Gita has drawn readings just as varied.¹⁰¹

Deutsch and Siegel place Shankara, the teacher of Advaita Vedanta, the school of nondualism, in the eighth century. He taught that the Gita holds the essence of the Veda and that knowing it leads to moksha, liberation. Ramanuja, in the eleventh century, read it as the word of a supreme and loving God. Madhva, in the thirteenth, held that Krishna can be reached only through bhakti, loving devotion.¹

Abhinavagupta, an eleventh-century Kashmir Shaiva philosopher, defined the liberation the Gita teaches as merger in Shiva.¹ In the modern era, Bal Gangadhar Tilak read it as a call to take up arms against British rule, while Mohandas Gandhi held that it taught nonviolence.¹

John Stratton Hawley writes that the Hindi devotional poets stressed personal experience of God.³¹ Some went further. Charlotte Vaudeville, a scholar of the poet Kabir, describes his scathing attacks on brahmans and his contempt for holy books and human gurus. Vaudeville adds that his fame kept growing among Hindus, who honor him as a saint, and that the Sikh scripture records his words as those of the foremost of the devotees before Nanak.³²

Many traditions also hold that the texts cannot be understood alone. ISKCON's site writes that a guru, or spiritual teacher, is required to understand scripture properly.²⁰ The Katha Upanishad teaches that study alone does not reach the Self, which reveals itself to the one it chooses: This Self cannot be attained by study of the Scriptures, nor by intellectual perception, nor by frequent hearing (of It) (Katha Upanishad 1.2.23)³³.

How have the texts been translated?

Hindu texts have been retold in India's regional languages for centuries and translated into European languages since the eighteenth century.³¹¹ In the north, Hindi versions of the Mahabharata and Ramayana began in the fifteenth century, and the Bhagavata Purana followed about a century and a half later.³¹

Mahony reports that Dara Shikoh, a son of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, sponsored a Persian translation of fifty Upanishads in 1656, which was put into Latin in 1801 to 1802.¹¹³⁴ Charles Wilkins published an English Gita in 1785, and hundreds of translations into European languages have followed.¹

This site quotes three translations published before 1931: Kashinath Telang's Bhagavad Gita (1882), Swami Paramananda's Upanishads (1919), and Ralph Griffith's Rig Veda (1896).²⁶³³³⁵ The Christianity vs Hinduism comparison sets these scriptures beside the Bible, and the Resources page lists the book series.