The Puranas
The sacred story of the tradition: cosmology, genealogy, and the deeds of the gods that carried Sanatana Dharma to everyone.
The Puranas are where most Hindus actually meet their tradition. Not the Upanishads, which are difficult and few, but eighteen great collections of story, genealogy, cosmology and instruction, composed and recomposed across roughly a thousand years.
They are also the layer scholars find hardest to date. A Purana is less a book than an accumulation: verses added, sects inserting their own claims, whole sections written centuries after the frame. The Bhagavata, probably ninth or tenth century, reads as a unified work of literature. Others read as libraries bound together.
These pages set out what the Puranas contain and how the tradition uses them, with the dating handled honestly. Where a Purana makes a sectarian claim, and most do, the claim is attributed rather than reported as the tradition’s settled view.