purana
पुराण purāṇa'Ancient, of old'; a class of Hindu smriti texts narrating cosmogony, genealogy, myth, ritual and devotion, paired with the epics as itihasa-purana.
Where this term appears
- Shruti and Smriti: what counts as Hindu scripture? Scriptures
The Puranas , the vast compendia of cosmology, genealogy, and the deeds of the gods, are smriti.
- What are the Puranas? Scriptures
That scene, or some version of it, opens text after text in the body of writing the tradition calls the Puranas.
- What are the Vedas? Scriptures
The great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana , the Puranas , the law book attributed to Manu: all of these are smriti.
- What is Jyotisha? Scriptures
This yuga is a five-year calendrical unit, not the cosmic mahayuga of the Puranas that runs to hundreds of thousands of years, which we treat in the chapter on the wheel of ages.
- Āgama and Veda: two revelations Lineages
…ce came from śruti , in the second from smṛti , in the third from the Purāṇa, and in the age of Kali from the Āgama alone.
- Devas and Asuras Deities
…btitled a comparative study of Indian mythology from the Vedas to the Puranas, follows exactly this kind of movement across the whole span, which is the scale at which the change becomes visible at all.
- Eighty-five titles and no text: the Saura tantras and how a tradition disappears Lineages
…y-six pages of quotations gathered from the Veda, the Upanishads, the Puranas, the Mahabharata, the Upavedas and various shastras , assembled into an essay, with fifty-odd pages of appendices after it.
- Hindu cosmology: the fourteen worlds and the ages of the universe Essentials
Two seed pictures, then, at the very root: the world as an egg that hatches, and the world as a body that is offered. The Puranas would spend a thousand years elaborating both.