The Vedas & Upanishads.
Hymns for the fire, then questions about the fire — shruti, that which was heard.
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The Bhagavad Gita.
Seven hundred verses on a battlefield: duty, devotion, and the self that cannot be slain.
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The epics.
The Ramayana and the Mahabharata: dharma taught not as rules but as two very long, very hard cases — and inside the second, the Gita.
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The Puranas.
If the Vedas are the constitution, the Puranas are the literature — and the literature is what people actually know. Each one is partisan: the Shiva Purana and the Vishnu Purana argue at length about who is supreme, using the same stories.
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The Bhagavata Purana.
The text that made Krishna's childhood the emotional centre of north Indian religion — the stolen butter, the flute, the gopis leaving their houses at night. Chaitanya, Vallabha and the whole Braj devotional world are built on its tenth book.
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The Devi Mahatmya.
The first text to say the Goddess is not a consort but the supreme reality, and that the gods are helpless without her. Bengali households wake at four in the morning on Mahalaya to hear it on the radio, as they have since the 1930s.
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The three starting points.
Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhva, Nimbarka, Vallabha and Chaitanya's followers all wrote commentaries on the same three texts and reached incompatible conclusions. In this tradition you innovate by insisting you are only explaining.
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The Yoga Sutras.
Patanjali defines yoga in his second line as the stilling of the mind's movements, and spends the rest on concentration, ethics and the strange powers that arrive on the way. Posture gets three aphorisms out of 196.
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The Agamas — the texts the temple runs on.
How to build the sanctum, install the deity, time the festivals, and who may touch what. Temple ritual follows the Agamas rather than the Vedas, and Indian courts have repeatedly had to rule on what they require.
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The Tirumurai.
Tamil Shaivism's own canon, and the reason Tamil is called a divine language by people who mean it doctrinally. Its last book is a set of saints' lives that includes a hunter who fed the god meat and a poet the temple would not admit.
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The Nalayira Divya Prabandham.
One hundred and eight temples are Divya Desams because these poems name them, and a Srivaishnava pilgrim's map is simply the poems. Andal's Tiruppavai is recited every morning through Margazhi by people who are not otherwise religious.
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The scriptures that refused Sanskrit.
When Tulsidas wrote the Rama story in Awadhi in the sixteenth century the Varanasi pandits are said to have been furious; four centuries later his book is what north India means by the Ramayana. The vachana poets went further and attacked temples, priests and scripture by name, in prose-poems.
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The Manusmriti.
The dharmashastras are smriti — remembered, human, revisable — and Manu was one text among many until the British made it the code. Ambedkar burned a copy in public at Mahad on 25 December 1927, and the date is still observed.
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