Righteousness Is Best

The Ashem Vohu is one of the two principal short formulas of Zoroastrian prayer, a brief invocation in the ancient Avestan language praising asha, righteousness, truth, the right order of the world that stands at the centre of Zoroastrian ethics and cosmology. Recited constantly, before and after prayers, on waking and at the ordinary acts of the day, it is among the first prayers a Zoroastrian child learns and is repeated many times over in the course of worship. Its few words affirm that righteousness is the highest good and a happiness in itself, condensing the tradition's central conviction that the cosmos is the arena of a struggle between truth and falsehood in which the faithful are to align themselves with asha. Together with the Ahuna Vairya, it is treated as one of the most sacred and potent of the Avestan formulas, its holiness residing in the ancient words themselves, which are preserved and recited in the original liturgical language.