Rudra becomes the one Lord

Some centuries before the common era, a teacher of the Black Yajurveda composed a short Upanishad in the name of the sage Shvetashvatara. In it the old storm-archer of the Veda is no longer one god among many: the text says Rudra is one and the knowers of Brahman admit no second; he makes the worlds, watches over them and releases souls from the wheel of births. Again and again it calls him shiva, gracious, so often that the adjective seems to be turning into a name. The same work gives one of the earliest clear statements that the world is the Lord's maya, and closes with a verse that asks for devotion to god and equally to the teacher. Flood reads it as the moment Rudra was raised to Lord; Chakravarti as the first systematic Shaiva philosophy. Hume and Srinivasan, reading the same pages, see a broader vision of the one behind many gods rather than a book about Shiva alone.