Why Hindu Texts Do Not Always Say the Same Thing

By now you have met śruti and smṛti, the four Vedas, the Upaniṣads, the two epics and the Purāṇas. That is an enormous body of writing, produced across at least two thousand years by people who never met one another and never expected their works to be read side by side.

It does not all agree. That is not a scandal to be managed; it is a fact to be understood. And it is worth being told exactly how it fails to agree, because there are four different kinds of disagreement, they have four different causes, and treating them as one problem is how a reader ends up either dismissing the whole tradition or defending it badly.