Shruti Scriptures

Shruti scriptures are the Hindu canon division comprising the texts Hindu tradition regards as directly heard or revealed rather than authored by any human hand. The class covers the four Vedas together with their embedded textual layers, the Samhitas, Brahmanas, Aranyakas and Upanishads, which orthodox schools treat as a fixed, unauthored body transmitted by memorized oral recitation across generations of reciters rather than composed and revised the way later literature was. Because shruti is held to carry no named human author, its authority in classical Hindu philosophy outranks the derivative, human-composed smriti corpus, and all six major schools of Hindu philosophy accept its supreme authority even where individual scholars within those schools differ on how literally to read the claim of revelation.