Narada Purana

A Vaishnava Purana that spends a surprising amount of its length on the technical apparatus of mantra, and which is quoted far more often than it is read.

What it is

A large Purana in two parts, the Purvabhaga and the Uttarabhaga, conventionally counted among the eighteen mahapuranas and associated with the sage Narada. Its subject matter is the usual Puranic range, cosmology, genealogy, pilgrimage and devotion, with a heavy Vaishnava orientation.

What distinguishes it for anyone working on mantra is a long technical section in the Purvabhaga dealing with mantra-shastra: the classification of mantras, the defects that render a mantra inoperative, the rites for repairing them, and the procedures for what the tradition calls kilita, a mantra that has been pinned or locked.

The forty-nine defects are counted verse by verse in chapter 8, and their distinguishing marks are given from 1.64.20 through to 1.64.57. Chapter 87 carries the kilita material proper.

A numbering note

Citations of this text appear in two forms. A reference like Purvabhaga 1.87.39 will also be found written 1.3.87.39, where the tritiya-pada, the third quarter of the Purvabhaga, is spelled out as a level of its own. The verse is the same.

The text problem

This is the part that matters and that almost nobody states. The electronic text in general circulation, the GRETIL file, names no edition at all. Its header records only that the text was input by members of the Sansknet project, and it carries a warning that the text still wants proof-reading.

So a reader checking a Narada Purana citation against the searchable text is checking it against an unattributed transcription of an unnamed printing. That is not a reason to distrust every quotation from it, but it is a reason to say so when the quotation is load-bearing, and to reach for a printed edition when an argument turns on the exact words.

What is not in it

Doctrine, where you would most expect it. The kilita passages give procedure and say nothing about purpose: 1.87.39 states that a vidya has been pinned by Shiva and moves directly to the remedy. There is no clause of intention anywhere in the passage, none in the curse-lifting material, and none in the defect list. The elaborate explanations of why mantras were locked, which circulate widely in English, are not in this text. They were supplied later, by other people.