The Shulva Sutras or Śulbasūtras (Sanskrit: शुल्बसूत्र; śulba: "string, cord, rope") are sutra texts belonging to the Śrauta ritual and containing geometry related to fire-altar construction.

The Shulba Sutras are part of the larger corpus of texts called the Shrauta Sutras, considered to be appendices to the Vedas. They are the only sources of knowledge of Indian mathematics from the Vedic period. Unique Vedi (fire-altar) shapes were associated with unique gifts from the Gods. For instance, "he who desires heaven is to construct a fire-altar in the form of a falcon"; "a fire-altar in the form of a tortoise is to be constructed by one desiring to win the world of Brahman" and "those who wish to destroy existing and future enemies should construct a fire-altar in the form of a rhombus".

The four major Shulba Sutras, which are mathematically the most significant, are those attributed to Baudhayana, Manava, Apastamba and Katyayana. Their language is late Vedic Sanskrit, pointing to a composition roughly during the 1st millennium BCE. The oldest is the sutra attributed to Baudhayana, possibly compiled around 800 BCE to 500 BCE. Pingree says that the Apastamba is likely the next oldest; he places the Katyayana and the Manava third and fourth chronologically, on the basis of apparent borrowings. According to mathematical historian Kim Plofker, the Katyayana was composed after "the great grammatical codification of Sanskrit by Pāṇini in probably the mid-fourth century BCE", but she places the Manava in the same period as the Baudhayana.

With regard to the composition of Vedic texts, Plofker writes,

The Vedic veneration of Sanskrit as a sacred speech, whose divinely revealed texts were meant to be recited, heard, and memorized rather than transmitted in writing, helped shape Sanskrit literature in general. ... Thus texts were composed in formats that could be easily memorized: either condensed prose aphorisms (sūtras, a word later applied to mean a rule or algorithm in general) or verse, particularly in the Classical period. Naturally, ease of memorization sometimes interfered with ease of comprehension. As a result, most treatises were supplemented by one or more prose commentaries ..."

There are multiple commentaries for each of the Shulba Sutras, but these were written long after the original works. The commentary of Sundararāja on the Apastamba, for example, comes from the late 15th century CE and the commentary of Dvārakãnātha on the Baudhayana appears to borrow from Sundararāja. According to philosopher Frits Staal, certain aspects of the tradition described in the Shulba Sutras would have been "transmitted orally", and he points to places in southern India where the fire-altar ritual is still practiced and an oral tradition preserved. The fire-altar tradition largely died out in India, however, and Plofker warns that those pockets where the practice remains may reflect a later Vedic revival rather than an unbroken tradition. Archaeological evidence of the altar constructions described in the Shulba Sutras is sparse. A large falcon-shaped fire altar (śyenaciti), dating to the second century BCE, was found in the, 1957-59, excavations by G. R. Sharma at Kausambi, but this altar does not conform to the dimensions prescribed by the Shulba Sutras.

The content of the Shulba Sutras is likely older than the works themselves.^{[citation needed]} The Satapatha Brahmana and the Taittiriya Samhita, whose contents date to the late second millennium or early first millennium BCE, describe altars whose dimensions appear to be based on the right triangle with legs of 15 pada and 36 pada, one of the triangles listed in the Baudhayana Shulba Sutra.

The origin of the mathematics in the Shulba Sutras is not known. It is possible, as proposed by mathematical historian Radha Charan Gupta, that the geometry was developed to meet the needs of ritual. Some scholars go farther: Staal hypothesizes a common ritual origin for Indian and Greek geometry, citing similar interest and approach to doubling and other geometric transformation problems. Seidenberg, followed by Bartel Leendert van der Waerden, sees a ritual origin for mathematics more broadly, postulating that the major advances, such as discovery of the Pythagorean theorem, occurred in only one place, and diffused from there to the rest of the world. Van der Waerden mentions that the author of Shulba sutras existed before 600 BCE and could not have been influenced by Greek geometry. While historian Carl Benjamin Boyer mentions Old Babylonian mathematics (c. 2000 BCE–1600 BCE) as a possible origin, the c. 1800 BCE Plimpton 322 tablet containing a table of triplets, however also states that Shulba sutras contain a formula not found in Babylon sources. Abraham Seidenberg argues that either "Old Babylonia got the theorem of Pythagoras from India or that Old Babylonia and India got it from a third source". Seidenberg suggests that this source might be Sumerian and may predate 1700 BC. In contrast, Pingree cautions that "it would be a mistake to see in [the altar builders'] works the unique origin of geometry; others in India and elsewhere, whether in response to practical or theoretical problems, may well have advanced as far without their solutions having been committed to memory or eventually transcribed in manuscripts." Plofker also raises the possibility that "existing geometric knowledge [was] consciously incorporated into ritual practice".