Who Surya is
Surya is the sun. Of all the Vedic gods he is the one whose body everyone can see. The Sanskrit word means both the god and the bright disc in the sky, and the poets of the Rigveda never let the two drift far apart. About ten whole hymns are his, most of them in the first and the last books.
The hymns call him the eye. He is the eye of Mitra and Varuna, and of Agni too, and with that eye the gods watch what people do. Nothing is hidden from him. He looks on the good and the bad deeds of mortals, and one poet asks him, as he rises, to tell the other gods that the worshippers are free of guilt.
He drives a chariot. Sometimes a single horse named Etasha pulls it, and more often seven bay mares, which the poets call the daughters of his car. Dawn comes before him, and he follows her, one hymn says, the way a young man follows a girl. When he unyokes his horses in the evening, Night spreads her cloth over everything, even over work left half done.
The poets tried many pictures for him. He is a bird flying across the sky, a jewel set in the middle of heaven, a wheel, and once a white horse led out by the Dawn. He rolls the darkness up like a hide. The stars slip away from him like thieves.
What people asked of him was simple. They wanted to go on seeing him. To live, in these hymns, is to see the sun rise, and the prayers ask for a long life, for freedom from sickness and bad dreams, and for many more mornings. One hymn asks him to take away a sick man's yellow colour and give it to the parrots.
We have come up out of the darkness, looking on the higher light, to Surya, god among the gods, the best light there is.
Surya is not the only sun in the Veda. Savitr is the sun as the power that sets the world moving, Pushan guards the roads, and Vivasvat, the shining one, is the father of Yama and of Manu. Later ages treated them all as names of one god. The Rigveda itself tells very few stories about Surya. Indra once took a wheel of his chariot to help a friend in battle, and a demon named Svarbhanu once pierced him with darkness until the sage Atri found him again. The long stories came afterwards.