Puranas

Ancients)[1] are a vast genre of Indian literature that include a wide range of topics, especially legends and other traditional lore.

Composed originally in Sanskrit[3] and in other Indian languages,[4][5] several of these texts are named after major Hindu deities such as Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma, and Tridevi.

[5] The Puranic literature is encyclopedic,[1] and it includes diverse topics such as cosmogony, cosmology, genealogies of gods, goddesses, kings, queens, heroes, heroines, sages, other gods, other goddesses, folk tales, pilgrimages, temples, medicine, astronomy, grammar, mineralogy, humor, love stories, theology, philosophy, etc.

[11] While all Puranas praise many gods and goddesses and "their sectarianism is far less clear cut" than assumed,[12] the religious practices included in them are considered Vaidika (congruent with Vedic literature).

[13] The Puranic literature wove with the Bhakti movement in India, and both Dvaita and Advaita scholars have commented on the underlying Vedantic themes in the Maha Puranas.

[20] Another early mention of the term 'Itihas-purana' is found in the Chandogya Upanishad (7.1.2), translated by Patrick Olivelle as "the corpus of histories and ancient tales as the fifth Veda".

These texts were collected for the "second time between the fourth and sixth centuries CE under the rule of the Gupta kings and queens", a period of Hindu renaissance.

[27] However, the editing and expansion of the Puranas did not stop after the Gupta era, and the texts continued to "grow for another five hundred or a thousand years" and these were preserved by priests who maintained Hindu pilgrimage sites and temples.

He points out that even for the better established and more coherent Puranas such as Bhagavata and Vishnu, the dates proposed by scholars continue to vary widely and endlessly.

[73] The mythological part of the text weaves together the stories of Shiva and Vishnu, along with those featuring Parvati, Lakshmi, Rama, Krishna, Sita, Rukmini and other major gods and goddesses in the Hindu pantheon.

However, a comparison shows that the 9th century CE document is entirely different from versions of Skanda Purana that have been circulating in South Asia since the colonial era.

[84] The Puranas, states Flood, document the rise of the theistic traditions such as those based on Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma, Tridevi and include respective mythology, pilgrimage to holy places, rituals and genealogies.

The is a Shaiva story that features Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, the three major gods of Hinduism, who get together and debate about who is supreme amongst the three of them and after various incidents of the story, the glory of Shiva is established at the end by the apparition of the Linga which is a form of Shiva as Lingodbhava over Vishnu and Brahma, thus it shows that Vishnu and Brahma are secondary gods in the Trideva because he expanded and conquered the entire universe and them being secondary gods with lesser powers, so they cannot find his beginning and end at a single place in the universe.

The son of Bhaya (fear) and Máyá (deceit) was the destroyer of living creatures, or Mrityu (death); and Dukha (pain) was the offspring of Naraka (hell) and Vedaná (torture).

On the contrary, Daksha and the other Rishis, the elders of mankind, tend perpetually to influence its renovation: whilst the Manus and their sons, the heroes endowed with mighty power, and treading in the path of truth, as constantly contribute to its preservation.

[96] Sudhakar Malaviya and VG Rahurkar state the connection is closer in that the Puranas are companion texts to help understand and interpret the Vedas.

Ramaswami Sastri and Manilal N. Dvivedi reflect the third view which states that Puranas enable us to know the "true import of the ethos, philosophy, and religion of the Vedas".

[17] In the general opinion, states Rocher, "the Puranas cannot be divorced from the Vedas" though scholars provide different interpretations of the link between the two.

[52] The colonial-era scholars of Puranas studied them primarily as religious texts, with Vans Kennedy declaring in 1837 that any other use of these documents would be disappointing.

[105] John Zephaniah Holwell, who from 1732 onwards spent 30 years in India and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1767, described the Puranas as "18 books of divine words".

[106] British officials and researchers such as Holwell, states Urs App, were orientalist scholars who introduced a distorted picture of Indian literature and Puranas as "sacred scriptures of India" in 1767.

[107] Ludo Rocher, for example, states, I want to stress the fact that it would be irresponsible and highly misleading to speak of or pretend to describe the religion of the Puranas.

[5] They are best described, states John Cort, as post-scripture literary corpus based upon themes found in Jain scriptures.

In the final analysis, all Puranas weave their legends to celebrate pluralism, and accept the other two and all gods in Hindu pantheon as personalized form but equivalent essence of the Ultimate Reality called Brahman.

[112][113] The Puranas are not spiritually partisan, states Bryant, but "accept and indeed extol the transcendent and absolute nature of the other, and of the Goddess Devi too".

[121] The different versions of manuscripts of Skanda Purana suggest that "minor" redactions, interpolations, and corruption of the ideas in the text over time.

[129] Marinas Poullé (Mariyadas Pillai) published a French translation from a Tamil version of the Bhagavata Purana in 1788, and this was widely distributed in Europe becoming an introduction to the 18th-century Hindu culture and Hinduism to many Europeans during the colonial era.

The most significant influence of the Puranas genre of Indian literature has been, stated scholars and particularly Indian scholars,[132] in "culture synthesis", in weaving and integrating the diverse beliefs from ritualistic rites of passage to Vedantic philosophy, from fictional legends to factual history, from individual introspective yoga to social celebratory festivals, from temples to pilgrimage, from one god to another, from goddesses to tantra, from the old to the new.

[133] Om Prakash states the Puranas served as an efficient medium for cultural exchange and popular education in ancient and medieval India.

[136] The myths, lunar calendar schedule, rituals, and celebrations of major Hindu cultural festivities such as Holi, Diwali and Durga Puja are in the Puranic literature.