A law needs a lawgiver. This is true almost by definition in every legal system humans have built, and it is one reason rta, the Vedic term for cosmic order, is unusual: the texts go out of their way to avoid describing it as issued by anyone. Varuna is called its guardian, not its author. The gods themselves are described as operating within rta rather than standing over it, bound by the same pattern that keeps rivers running downhill and the sun rising on schedule.
This is a specific philosophical choice with a specific cost. It would have been simpler, and more common across other ancient traditions, to say that a supreme deity decreed the order of the world and that things run correctly because that decree is enforced. The Vedic texts decline this option. Order is treated as something that simply is the case, discovered by observation and named by the sages who noticed it, rather than commanded into existence by any will, divine or otherwise.
The motivation becomes clearer once the deeper metaphysics is in view. If Brahman, as later texts would argue, is not a personal agent who makes decisions, then cosmic order cannot be the record of a decision either. It has to be intrinsic: a structural feature of reality rather than a directive imposed on it from outside. Rta is the earliest Vedic name for exactly this idea, well before the philosophical vocabulary existed to state it in those terms.
A rough and explicitly limited comparison can be drawn to how physics treats conservation laws today, not as decrees enforced by an external authority but as necessary features of how the universe’s own symmetries work, true because of what the system is rather than because something outside it insists on them. The comparison is structural, not a claim that the Vedic seers anticipated physics; what the two share is a refusal to explain order by appeal to an external commander. What happens when that pattern is broken is a separate and equally old question, taken up next.
Part 31 of 100 — Series I: From the Beginning
Series I: From the BeginningThe Five KoshasIndexFAQThe Timeline