Śruti — The Vedic Corpus
श्रुति
The revealed corpus — unauthored, eternal, transmitted by hearing. Subdivided by textual layer rather than by Veda, because readers look for the Īśa Upaniṣad, not for the Upaniṣad layer of the Śukla Yajurveda. Each work records its parent Veda as an attribute, so the lineage is preserved without becoming the navigation.
The core collections of metrical hymns, mantras and benedictions used in yajña.
Prose exegesis: ritual instruction and the mythology that frames it.
Forest treatises — the turn inward, from performed rite to its meaning.
Vedānta — the end of the Veda. The thirteen principal Upaniṣads, and more than a hundred minor.