thousand years. The later strata of the Vedas were composed as the Aryans moved
through the Punjab into the Ganges basin. These later parts of the Vedas included the
Brahmana literature, which stressed the importance of sacrifice, and the later
Aranyakas and Upanishads, which tended to focus on more speculative and philo-
sophical questions. During the period in which the Aranyakas and Upanishads were
composed, asceticism became an increasingly important element of Hinduism.
Asceticism denotes the use of physical discipline and deprivation as a way to attain
religious insight and liberate the soul from the cycle of reincarnation. Part of the rea-
son for asceticism’s prominence was the growth of competing groups, such as the Jains
and the Buddhists, whose monks lived an ascetic life. Asceticism has had an important
place in Indian religious life since that time.
The period after the composition of the Vedic literature is sometimes called the
Epic period. Between roughly 300 B.C.E. and 500 C.E., many of the ideas most impor-
tant to classical Hinduism were developed and codified. This time was marked by the
initial composition of the two great Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata, although their final revisions came centuries later. The early part of
this period also saw the composition of the religious literature known as the Kalpa
Sutras. In theory, each Kalpa Sutra had three parts: a shrauta sutra, a grhya sutra, and
a dharma sutra, but this neat ordering is belied by the scarcity of complete three-part
collections, and the abundance of one or another of these sections without its corre-
sponding parts. Shrauta sutras are manuals for Vedic sacrifice, which had become so
complex that additional reference material was needed. The shrauta sutra is the only
element of the three that has not retained great importance in modern Hindu life.
The grhya sutras are manuals for domestic sacrifices, which include the life-cycle
rites known as samskaras. Some elements of the grhya sutras still remain vital and
vibrant parts of modern Hindu religious life, probably because of their connection
with the central transitions in human life: birth, marriage, and death. The dharma
sutras provide prescriptions for an organized and stable society by means of a rigid
social hierarchy. The prescriptions in the dharma sutras were later expanded in the
dharma shastras, which are the theoretical basis of the Hindu social structure.
Aside from the epics and the Kalpa Sutras, this period was also notable for the
development of the six classical philosophical schools: the Nyaya, Vaisheshika,
Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa, and Vedanta (although the defining figure in the Vedanta
school, Shankaracharya, is generally dated in the early ninth century). The philo-
sophical system developed by each of these six schools had a common goal: liberat-
ing the soul from the bondage of reincarnation. Each of the schools believed that the
soul could be liberated by avoiding conceptual errors and apprehending universal
truths, although there was considerable disagreement about the nature of these uni-
versal truths. The foundational texts for each of these schools laid out their basic
philosophical position; in some cases, these texts buttressed their position by
appealing to authoritative religious texts such as the Vedas. Over the following cen-
turies these foundational texts received further elaboration through multiple layers
of commentaries, which in some cases have continued to be written almost up until
contemporary times.
This period is also marked by the rise in importance of the deities Shiva, Vishnu,
and the Goddess, who are still the primary deities worshiped in modern Hinduism.
These deities had a central place in the sectarian literature known as the puranas,
another of the important types of text composed in this period. The puranas’ most
notable feature is their sectarian character, as they often exalt one particular deity over
the others. They also include information on many other aspects of religious life,
including sacred places, sacred times, instructions for various religious rites, and even
descriptions of the heavens and hells. The final type of religious text first composed in
this period were the tantras, which laid out esoteric and often hidden ritual traditions.x