The Eighteen

There is a verse the tradition recites to hold the canon in memory, a string of eighteen names. Brahma, Padma, Vishnu, Shiva, Bhagavata, Narada, Markandeya, Agni, Bhavishya, Brahmavaivarta, Linga, Varaha, Skanda, Vamana, Kurma, Matsya, Garuda, Brahmanda. Eighteen great Puranas, the Mahapuranas, and behind them a second eighteen, the Upapuranas, the lesser Puranas, and behind those a long tail of still smaller works claiming the name. The number eighteen has the feel of a sacred constant, the same eighteen that counts the books of the Mahabharata and the days of its war.

And yet even here, at the level of a simple list, the Puranas will not quite hold still. This chapter is about the canon the tradition is most confident about, and about the ways that confidence frays when you look closely.

The list that wobbles

The count is fixed at eighteen. The membership is not.

The Vishnu Purana gives the list in H. H. Wilson’s 1840 translation, naming the eighteen and adding that “those who are acquainted with the Puranas enumerate eighteen.” But its fourth name is the Shiva, or Saiva, Purana, and many other authoritative lists put the Vayu Purana in that place instead, treating the Shiva Purana as a lesser work or a substitute. A few schemes shuffle the Agni and the Vayu as well. So the tradition agrees, firmly, that there are eighteen, and disagrees about which eighteen. Ludo Rocher, the genre’s most careful modern student, simply notes the variation as a fact of the literature: the number is doctrine, the roster is negotiable.

This is the first sign of something that runs through the whole genre. The Puranas behave less like a closed canon of fixed books and more like a living shelf to which volumes were added, swapped, and relabelled over centuries. The number eighteen is the frame the tradition insists on. What hangs in the frame kept changing.

Sorting the gods

Eighteen large texts, each tending to exalt a particular deity, invite sorting, and the tradition produced a famous scheme for it. It comes from the Padma Purana, and it sorts the eighteen by the three gunas, the three strands of quality that the Samkhya philosophy says make up all of nature.

Six Puranas are called sattvic, of the quality of purity and light, and these are the ones that exalt Vishnu: the Vishnu, the Bhagavata, the Narada, the Garuda, the Padma, the Varaha. Six are rajasic, of the quality of passion and activity, the group loosely associated with Brahma the creator. And six are tamasic, of the quality of darkness and inertia, the Puranas that exalt Shiva and the Goddess: the Shiva, the Linga, the Skanda, the Agni, the Matsya, the Kurma.

It is a tidy and influential scheme, and it is worth saying plainly what it is doing. It comes from a Vaishnava text. It places the Vishnu-centred Puranas at the top, in the quality associated with wisdom and liberation, and files the Shaiva and Shakta Puranas under the quality associated with darkness and a lower destiny. This is not a neutral library catalogue. It is one sect ranking the scriptures of the others beneath its own, in the language of metaphysics. The honest way to use the scheme is as a real and old classification, and as evidence of how sectarian the Puranic world was, with Vaishnava, Shaiva, Shakta and Brahma-centred currents each promoting its own books. A simpler grouping, free of the value judgment, just sorts the Puranas by which deity each one exalts, and that grouping is the more useful map.

The scale of it

Whatever the disputes about list and rank, the sheer mass of the Puranas is not in doubt, and the mass is part of what they are.

The eighteen Mahapuranas together are traditionally said to total around four hundred thousand verses. That figure should be held lightly, as a round and auspicious number rather than a census; the Puranas carry their own verse-count tables, in texts like the Narada and the Matsya, and the counts vary by manuscript. But the order of magnitude is real. The longest single Purana, the Skanda, is traditionally reckoned at some eighty-one thousand verses, larger by itself than the entire Ramayana. And the Skanda is the clearest case of what modern scholarship has found across the genre: it is not one book at all. The project that has worked to produce a critical edition of it, gathering manuscripts that span from around the ninth century to the nineteenth, has shown that the Skanda Purana is really several different works under one name, redacted and re-redacted, a library wearing the cover of a book.

And the contents are as wide as the verse-counts are large. A Mahapurana may give you, in a single sweep, the structure of the cosmos and its dissolutions, the genealogies of gods and kings, the geography of the worlds and continents, the rituals of worship, the legends and merit of pilgrimage places, the rules of vows and fasts and gifts, the duties of kings, fragments of medicine and grammar and law, and vast reaches of devotional story. The Veda is narrow and deep. The Purana is the opposite: shallow in places, encyclopedic, gathering the whole practised religion into itself. Dimmitt and van Buitenen reached for the image of a library to which new volumes were continually added, not at the end of the shelf but anywhere, at any time. That is why dating a Purana is so hard, and it is the subject this volume will keep returning to.

For now the shape is clear enough. Eighteen great Puranas and eighteen lesser, a fixed number around a shifting list, sorted by sect under a scheme that is itself sectarian, running to hundreds of thousands of verses of the most miscellaneous scripture the tradition produced. The next chapter goes into the one kind of content the five marks did promise and the Puranas genuinely deliver, on a scale almost beyond imagining: their vision of time.