A religion of hymns and fire
The oldest religious literature of India is the Ṛgveda, a collection of more than a thousand hymns in an early form of Sanskrit. Scholars usually place its composition somewhere around 1500 to 1000 BCE, among peoples who had moved into the north-west of the subcontinent and later spread east into the Ganges valley.
The hymns praise gods such as Agni, the sacred fire, and Indra, the warrior god of storms, and accompany rituals in which offerings were poured into the fire. Performed correctly, these sacrifices were believed to sustain the order of the world and bring rain, cattle, children and long life.
Carried by memory
For many centuries the Vedas were not written down at all. Families of brahmin priests memorised them with remarkable precision, using techniques that let them recite the same words, in the same order, generation after generation.
Around the hymns grew further layers of text explaining how the rituals should be done and what they meant. Over time these also came to support an ideal social order, in which brahmins held the highest place because they alone could perform the rites.
The world the Buddha answered
By the Buddha's time, brahmins were a familiar and influential presence. The early Buddhist discourses are full of conversations with them, and the Buddha often takes their own words and gives them a new meaning: a true brahmin, he says, is made by conduct and understanding, not by birth or ritual.
Buddhism did not grow out of Vedic religion so much as alongside it and in argument with it. Knowing this world makes it easier to see what was new in the Buddha's teaching.
Why it matters
Buddhism would later emerge within, respond to and challenge parts of this religious environment.
History and tradition
What historians can say
The Ṛgveda is securely very old, but its dates are estimates based on language, geography and comparison with related Iranian texts; no manuscript survives from anywhere near that time. Scholars still debate how Vedic culture spread and how dominant it was in the eastern Ganges region where the Buddha later taught.