There is in the Rig Veda a word that recurs with an insistence and a density of meaning that make it one of the keystones of all Vedic thought: ṛta. Western translators have almost unanimously rendered it as cosmic order, and this translation is one of the most unfortunate one can imagine. Not because it is entirely wrong, but because it is so reductive that it ends up being misleading. Cosmic order evokes something mechanical, static, comparable to what the Greeks called the cosmos or what modern physicists call the laws of nature. It is an external, objective, observable reality that humanity can study and conform to or resist. The Vedic ṛta is something absolutely different.
Ṛta is Truth. Not truth in the sense that a proposition is true because it corresponds to an observable fact. Truth with a capital T, in the sense that it designates the fundamental reality of everything that exists — that reality which Maya, the illusion constructed by our limited senses, conceals from us in our ordinary state of consciousness, and which the experience of Brahman reveals directly. It is at once what the world actually is, beyond appearances, and the principle that makes the world what it is. It is the reality of Brahman manifested in the world, the very fabric of existence seen from the inside rather than from the surface.
The root of ṛta is the same as that of the Latin rectus, straight, just, and of the English right. But in Vedic Sanskrit, this root does not designate only what is straight in the moral or geometric sense. It designates what is, what is real, what holds, what cannot be other than it is. Ṛta is the way things are when they are seen without the filter of ego and Maya. It is naked reality, undistorted, as it reveals itself in the expanded state of consciousness that soma and the sacrifice produced.
In the hymns, ṛta is associated with a constellation of realities that seem at first disparate but that in fact form a coherent whole. The movement of the stars is ṛta: the sun rises and sets according to ṛta, the seasons succeed one another according to ṛta, the rivers flow according to ṛta. But the just speech of the rishi is also ṛta, the correctly performed rite is ṛta, the generous and disinterested action is ṛta, and the experience of Brahman is the direct encounter with ṛta in its fullness. What unites all these dimensions is not a principle of order in the mechanistic sense. It is Truth as a fundamental property of what is real, present at every level of existence, from the movement of the stars to the syllable pronounced in the sacrifice.
The opposite of ṛta is anṛta — the false, the lie, the illusion, what does not hold, what is not what it claims to be. And in Vedic thought, anṛta is not merely a moral category. It is an ontological one. The lie, in this vision, is not simply an ethical failing. It is a distortion of reality, an attempt to impose upon what is a form it does not have, and this attempt is doomed to failure because ṛta, fundamental Truth, cannot be durably falsified. It can be veiled, obscured, forgotten, but it remains what it is. It is Vritra who veils ṛta, who prevents consciousness from seeing it. And it is Indra who, by striking down Vritra, frees access to ṛta, lets the waters flow again, lets the Light appear.
Mitra and Varuna are the guardians of ṛta par excellence. These two inseparable gods watch over the maintenance of ṛta, not in the sense that they impose a law from outside, but in the sense that they are themselves aspects of ṛta, manifestations of fundamental Truth in the domain of relations between beings. Mitra is friendship, the contract, the word given and kept. Varuna is the consciousness that sees everything, that knows ṛta in its totality and that judges — not in the sense of a human tribunal, but in the sense of a vision that penetrates appearances and sees what is actually there. In the seventh mandala, the dialogues of Vasishtha with Varuna are dialogues with Truth itself: the rishi asks Varuna to reveal to him in what ways he has fallen short of ṛta, in what ways his own perception of reality has been distorted by ego and illusion.
Soma is the privileged means of access to ṛta in the Rig Veda. The hymns say this repeatedly and directly: soma allows one to reach the Truth. In the second mandala, hymn 41, verse 4: Mitra and Varuna, this juice of soma allows one to reach the Truth. This is not a metaphor. It is the description of a precise mechanism: by dissolving the egotistic constructions that filter and distort perception, soma allows consciousness to see ṛta directly, without the filter of Maya. This is why the ninth mandala, entirely devoted to purified soma, is also the one in which the association between soma and ṛta is the most dense and the most explicit. Soma pavamana, the soma that flows and purifies itself, is described as the one who makes ṛta grow, who nourishes ṛta, who reveals ṛta.
There is a dimension of ṛta that is particularly important and often underestimated: its social and political dimension. In a society where all those in positions of responsibility have regular access to ṛta through soma and the sacrifice, governance cannot be arbitrary. It must conform to Truth — that is to say, to what reality actually is, beyond the desires and fears of the ego. A raja who governs according to ṛta does not govern according to his personal interests. He governs according to what reality demands, what the situation actually requires, beyond egotistic calculation. This is why the civilisation of the 7 Rivers, in which all those responsible had this regular access to ṛta, was able to function without the pathologies we ordinarily associate with power.
The progressive disappearance of ṛta as direct experience, linked to the disappearance of soma, is one of the silent tragedies that the tenth mandala documents in its own way. When the direct experience of Truth is no longer accessible, ṛta becomes a concept, a norm, a rule imposed from outside rather than a reality lived from within. This is the passage from spirituality to religion, from lived Truth to believed truth. The Upanishads would attempt to find this path again by other means, and the word ṛta would gradually transform into dharma, that word which contemporary Hinduism often translates as duty or moral law, and in which the dimension of fundamental Truth of the original ṛta has been in part lost.
What ṛta tells us, in its oldest and purest Vedic formulation, is that Truth is not something one constructs, invents or decides. It is something one discovers, reaches, rejoins. It was there before us, it will be there after us, and our task is not to create it but to lift the veils that separate us from it. This is perhaps the thought most radically different from Western modernity that the Rig Veda offers us, and it is also, in the world in which we live, one of the most necessary.
Le Rig Veda 
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