Who Varuna is
Varuna is the king of the Rigveda. Indra is its hero and wins its battles, but when the poets want a word for a ruler whose law holds everywhere, they give it to Varuna.
He has few hymns to himself. The scholar A. A. Macdonell counted hardly a dozen, and yet called him the greatest of the Vedic gods beside Indra. Many more hymns praise him together with Mitra, his constant companion.
What he rules is the order of things, which the hymns call rita. Varuna held heaven and earth apart and spread the earth out. He cut a road for the sun to travel. The moon walks through the night and the stars vanish by day because his rules do not weaken. The rivers run at his command, and one poet wonders at a thing nobody else had thought to notice: all the rivers pour into the one sea, and they never fill it.
He also sees. He sits among his people in a golden mantle, with his watchers seated around him. He knows the path of the birds through the air and of the ships on the sea, and the path of the wind. The Atharvaveda says that when two people sit and whisper together, King Varuna is the third. He has counted the blinks of every eye.
Because he sees, people come to him with their wrongs. Wrong is spoken of as a rope, and Varuna holds the ropes. Nearly every hymn to him asks to be untied. The poets confess to him plainly: they cheated at dice, they wronged a friend or a brother or a stranger, they broke his laws day after day without thinking. They ask him to be gracious, and they say he is. He has a hundred remedies, a thousand. He shows mercy even to the one who has done wrong.
The best known of these voices is the seer Vasishtha, who remembers sailing with Varuna in a boat and asks where that friendship has gone. Another is the bound boy Shunahshepa, whose cry from the sacrificial post the Rigveda remembers.
Water is already close to him in these hymns. He lets the rain-cask pour down, he lives at the source of the rivers with his seven sisters, and he is called an ocean. But he is not yet a sea god. He is the sky that looks down on everything.
Loosen the rope above me, the rope between and the rope below, Varuna, so that I may live.