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Garuda Purana

गरुड पुराण garuda purana

A Vaishnava Purana cast as a dialogue between Vishnu and his mount Garuda. Its Preta Khanda is the classical Hindu manual of death: the journey of the soul after dying and the rites (the ten days, the pinda offerings) the living perform to settle the departed among the ancestors.

Where this term appears

  • The Vishnu Sahasranama Worship

    Other thousand-name hymns to Vishnu survive in the Padma Purana , the Skanda Purana , and the Garuda Purana , each with its own list.

  • What is Tirtha? Pilgrimage in Hindu Life Temples

    The Garuda Purana counts the inner virtues, truth and charity and patience and self-control, as the real fords, and urges the seeker to bathe in the crossing-place of the purified heart.

  • Why do Hindus cremate their dead? Essentials

    …ings of pinda , balls of rice, which, in the classical account of the Garuda Purana, literally build a new subtle body for the departed, limb by limb, feeding the traveller for the journey.

  • Aniconic Forms: Shaligrama and Yantra Deities

    In Manmatha Nath Dutt's 1908 translation of the Garuda Purana , Vishnu himself describes them: "I shall describe the characteristic marks of Shalagrama, by touching which stone, one has the sins accumulated in …

  • The debt to the dead Treatise

    In the ten days after a death, the Garuda Purana , in the book it devotes to the departed, the Preta Khanda , teaches that one pinda offered each day builds, limb by limb, a new subtle body for the deceased.

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