Vedic texts

Although the earliest texts, such as the hymns of the R. gveda, were composed in verse, the liturgical works (brāhman. a) of the middle vedic period were composed in prose. This practice was continued in the literature of the expert traditions; most ancient works falling within the Vedic Supplements are in prose. Probably because instruction in the expert traditions was carried out orally and the pedagogy of these schools was based on first memorizing the basic texts and then delving into their meaning with the aid of the teacher, the basic texts came to be composed in an aphoristic style known as sūtra. A sūtra is a sentence from which most non-essential elements have been removed. Individual sūtras are often syntactically connected to the preceding, words of earlier sūtras being implicit in later ones, a convention technically called anuvr. tti. This convention makes the entire composition similar to a chain and each sūtra a link in that chain. It is this characteristic that probably gave it the name sūtra (lit., ‘thread’), the composition being compared to a thread on which each aphorism is strung like a pearl. Given the brevity of each sūtra, it is frequently impossible to understand the meaning without the benefit of either an oral explanation or a commentary.