Of Old

A Hindu child is far more likely to meet the tradition through a Purana than through the Veda. The story of the boy Prahlada and the god who burst from a pillar, the churning of the ocean of milk, the elephant-headed Ganesha and his broken tusk, Vishnu measuring the cosmos in three strides, the Goddess riding a lion against an army of demons: these come from the Puranas. The Veda is the higher revelation, guarded and recited by specialists. The Purana is the scripture that actually reached the village, the temple, the grandmother telling a story at night. And it is, for all that reach, the hardest of all the genres to pin down.

The previous volumes of this work followed the Veda, the Upanishads, and the epics. This one turns to the largest and most sprawling body of Hindu scripture there is, and it has to begin with a confession: nobody can quite say what a Purana is. (The shorter guide What are the Puranas? gives the overview.)

The word and the five marks

Start with the word, because the word is a claim. Purana means ancient, of old. A Purana is, by its own account, a telling of what happened in the deep past, before memory, when the world was being made and the gods and the first kings walked it. Like the epics, the Puranas are smriti, the remembered scripture of human authorship, ranked below the revealed Veda, and the two are so often spoken of together that the tradition has a single compound for them, itihasa-purana, the histories-and-ancient-tales, which the Chandogya Upanishad had already called a fifth Veda.

The tradition does offer a definition, a neat one, and it is worth knowing precisely because of how badly it fails. A Purana, the texts say, has five marks, the pancha-lakshana. The defining verse appears in several of the Puranas themselves. Its five terms are sarga, the original creation of the cosmos; pratisarga, its dissolution and re-creation, the cycle of world after world; vamsha, the genealogies of the gods and the ancient sages; manvantara, the vast ages each presided over by a Manu, a progenitor of humankind; and vamshanucharita, the genealogies and deeds of the royal dynasties, the solar and the lunar lines of kings. Creation, re-creation, the families of the gods, the ages of the world, the lines of kings. That, the definition says, is what a Purana contains.

The definition that does not fit

Now open an actual Purana, and the definition falls apart in your hands.

The surviving Puranas are enormous and miscellaneous, and the five marks account for only a fraction of what is in them. Alongside the cosmology and the genealogies you find detailed instructions for worship, descriptions of pilgrimage sites and the merit of visiting them, the rules of vows and fasts, manuals of gift-giving, temple and image lore, statecraft, medicine, grammar, law, and above all immense quantities of devotional story and praise directed at one god or another. A reader coming to the Skanda Purana or the Padma Purana expecting five tidy topics would be lost within a page.

Scholars have made this gap one of the central facts about the genre. Ludo Rocher, whose 1986 survey is the standard reference, argued that the pancha-lakshana is a traditional, idealized definition that the actual texts simply do not meet, and that trying to define or date a Purana by the five marks is hopeless. R. C. Hazra had suggested earlier that the five-mark material is an older layer, the original kind of Purana content, later buried under centuries of added ritual and devotional matter. Cornelia Dimmitt and J. A. B. van Buitenen observed that of all the great Puranas only the Vishnu Purana even roughly keeps to the five marks. The definition, in other words, describes a Purana that mostly no longer exists, an older and simpler thing than the vast compilations that came down to us.

The tradition itself half-admits the strain. The Bhagavata Purana, the most theologically ambitious of them, quietly replaces the five marks with ten, the dasha-lakshana, adding categories for divine sustenance, for the deeds of the Lord, and for the soul’s final resort, so that the definition can stretch to cover what the genre had actually become. When a tradition expands its own definition from five marks to ten, it is telling you the original frame had broken.

Vyasa, and the problem of one author

There is one more claim the tradition makes about the Puranas as a whole, and it is the same claim it made about the Mahabharata. They are the work of Vyasa.

The Vishnu Purana describes it directly, in H. H. Wilson’s public-domain translation of 1840: Vyasa, accomplished in the matter of the Puranas, “compiled a Pauranik Sanhita, consisting of historical and legendary traditions, prayers and hymns, and sacred chronology,” and taught it to his disciple, the bard Romaharshana, from whom it branched into the many Puranas we have. One sage composes the original; a line of reciters carries it outward and it multiplies.

The historian reads this as the tradition’s way of giving a single sacred origin to what is, by every textual sign, the most multiple and multi-authored body of writing in the whole corpus. The Puranas were not composed by one person in one age. They were assembled, expanded, and rewritten by many hands across many centuries, in different regions and different sects, which is exactly why no two of them agree and why the genre resists every attempt to fix it. Vyasa is the name the tradition gives to that vast collective labour, gathering it under one revered author the way the epics gathered their growth under his name too.

So a Purana is, by the tradition’s definition, a text of five marks composed by Vyasa of old. And a Purana is, by the evidence, a sprawling and ever-growing compilation, miscellaneous beyond any five marks, written by no one we can name across a thousand years. Both descriptions are in this volume, kept apart, because the gap between them is itself the first thing worth understanding about the Puranas.

The next chapter takes up the count the tradition is most confident about, and which turns out to be less fixed than it looks: the eighteen great Puranas, and how they were sorted.