Hindu scriptures
What counts as Hindu scripture and how it is ranked: shruti and smriti, and the long treatise on how the texts came down to us.
Hinduism has no single book, and the absence is structural rather than accidental. What it has is a library assembled over three thousand years, sorted into two grades of authority that the tradition takes seriously.
Shruti means what was heard. The Vedas and the Upanishads fall here, held to have been received rather than composed, and treated as authorless. Smriti means what was remembered: the epics, the Puranas, the law books, the Agamas. Human in origin, enormous in influence, and revisable in a way shruti is not.
The distinction does real work. It explains why a verse from the Brihadaranyaka settles an argument that a verse from a Purana cannot, and why reformers reached for shruti when they wanted to overturn smriti practice.
These pages map the whole library and say which layer each text belongs to. The full account is in The Unwritten Library.