Introduction

In the Brachminical culture which spawned the philosophical schools we'll be looking at in the coming episodes, nothing was more central than the practice of ritual. For the Buddhists, rituals were nothing special, just another set of actions undertaken in the pursuit of desires that we would be better off without. Thanks to the Veda, though, called these texts Shruti, meaning what is heard,. In other words a revelatory source of knowledge about the duties laid upon humanity.