Puranas
purāṇaThe vast popular scriptures of myth, cosmology, genealogy and devotion, substantially composed in the Gupta and early-medieval centuries. They are classed as smriti rather than shruti, and stand beside the itihasa as the people's scripture.
Where this term appears
- How the Vedas Were Preserved History
This is also why the Veda is called shruti and everything else — the epics, the law books, the Puranas — is called smriti , "that which is remembered." The distinction is not just about authority.
- The Gupta Centuries: When Classical Hinduism Took Shape History
The Puranas , the vast popular scriptures of myth, cosmology, and devotion, were substantially composed and shaped in roughly these centuries.
- The History of Sanatana Dharma: A Timeline History
It appears in the Manusmṛti and in the Puranas, meaning the eternal moral order.
- The Reformers: How the Nineteenth Century Remade Hinduism History
Where Roy had looked to the Upanishads, Dayananda looked past them to the Vedas alone, declaring almost everything that came after, the Puranas, the image worship, much of popular practice, to be corruption.
- 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.