Rta

Rta is easiest to see in the Rig Veda's favorite evidences: the dawns. Hymn after hymn marvels that Ushas arrives again, on time, in order, never jostling her sisters, and the poets' word for the track she keeps is rta. The rivers flow by rta; the year turns by it; the cow gives milk and the fire ascends by it. But the same word governs the ritual ground: a sacrifice performed according to rta works, and one that departs from it is mere gesture. And it governs speech: the true word is spoken along rta, the lie is its violation, anrta. This triple coverage, nature, rite and word, is the concept's whole originality. The hymn 10.190 makes the order of dependence explicit at the level of cosmogony: rta and satya, order and truth, are born first, from kindled heat, before the ocean, the year, the sun and moon. Order precedes the things ordered.

The guardians of this order are Mitra and Varuna, invoked as the pair who mount their chariot as gopa rtasya, herdsmen of rta, and Varuna in particular watches oaths and punishes their breach with his snares. Notably, the gods do not create rta; they too travel by it, and their authority consists in keeping its ways. The intuition that the regularity of the world, the efficacy of religion and the bindingness of truth are one fact, with even heaven subject to it, is rta's bequest to everything downstream.

The word rta did not survive; the idea did, twice over. Within India its work passed to dharma, a younger word built on the root dhr, to uphold. The transfer can be watched happening: in the later Vedic literature dharman appears alongside rta as the upholding of the ordinances, and by the time of the dharmasutras and the epics, dharma has absorbed the whole territory, cosmic regularity, ritual correctness and moral obligation, while adding what rta never quite had, a jurisprudence: duties differentiated by station, stage of life and circumstance.

When the Buddhists made dhamma the name of their teaching and the Hindus made dharma the name of right order itself, the old Vedic intuition was traveling under new papers. The second survival ran west. Rta's exact cognate is the Avestan asha, and the pairing is one of the cleanest results in the comparative study of religion: two traditions, Vedic and Zoroastrian, separated before either wrote anything down, each carrying the same inherited word for enacted truth as the spine of its religion, Varuna guarding the one, Ahura Mazda championing the other, each opposing it to a matching word for the lie. Whatever the common Indo-Iranian religion was, its center is visible here. Scholars have long set rta, asha, the Egyptian ma'at and the Chinese dao side by side as the great cosmic-order concepts; the family resemblance is real, but only rta and asha are actual kin.