Satya comes from sat, that which is, with the suffix making it roughly that which pertains to what is. Translating it as truth is fair but drops something, because the English word points primarily at statements: a sentence is true if it corresponds to the facts. Satya applies to statements and also to persons, actions and vows, and a person can be described as satya in a way that a person cannot really be described as true in English.
The wider sense is alignment. To be satya is to be in correspondence with what actually holds, which for a statement means accuracy and for a person means integrity in the structural sense of the parts holding together. This is why the tradition treats a broken promise as a failure of satya rather than merely of reliability: the utterance and the subsequent conduct have come apart, and something that was supposed to be one thing has become two.
The stakes attached to this are unusually high in Vedic thought because satya is understood as the human end of rta. A false statement is not only inaccurate; it is a small local departure from the pattern that everything else is holding to. This is the reasoning behind the satyakriya, the act of truth, found across early Indian literature, in which someone states something absolutely true about themselves and the statement produces an effect in the world, on the logic that perfect alignment has power because it is not adding anything to reality.
Truth as correspondence with the world rather than correctness of a sentence is a larger and more demanding idea. To see the order it corresponds to, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 26 of 100 — Series I: From the Beginning
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