If the Vedas are the roots of Hinduism and the Upanishads its deepest thought, the Puranas are the branches on which most of the fruit actually grows. Ask where the story of Prahlada comes from, or what Krishna did as a child in Vrindavan, or why pilgrims bathe at Prayag, and the answer is almost always: a Purana. Most Hindus who have never opened one have nevertheless absorbed hundreds of its stories from grandmothers, temple priests, festival plays and television.
This is not an accident. The Puranas were meant to be the Veda of everyone: the teaching of the schools carried out of the schools and into kitchens and courtyards.
What a Purana is
The word purana means "ancient", and the texts present themselves as ancient lore handed down from the sage Vyasa through the bard Suta, who recites it to an assembly of sages in the Naimisha forest.
A traditional definition, found in the Puranas themselves, says a Purana has five marks, the pancha-lakshana:
- Sarga: the creation of the universe.
- Pratisarga: its dissolution and re-creation, cycle after cycle.
- Vamsha: the genealogies of gods, sages and the first humans.
- Manvantara: the ages of the world, each presided over by a Manu.
- Vamshanucharita: the histories of the royal dynasties, solar and lunar.
In practice the Puranas go far beyond this skeleton. They are encyclopaedias: hymns, rules for worship, temple lore, the merits of pilgrimage sites, the duties of the stages of life, and above all stories about the gods. They belong to smriti, the remembered tradition, rather than the revealed shruti of the Vedas, and that is their freedom: smriti can grow, and the Puranas kept growing. Scholars place most of their composition between the early centuries CE and about the tenth century, with material added long after; the tradition regards their core as far older.
The eighteen Mahapuranas
Tradition counts eighteen great Puranas (Mahapuranas) and eighteen lesser ones (Upapuranas), though the lists vary a little by region and sect. The eighteen are usually given as: Brahma, Padma, Vishnu, Shiva (or, in some lists, Vayu), Bhagavata, Narada, Markandeya, Agni, Bhavishya, Brahmavaivarta, Linga, Varaha, Skanda, Vamana, Kurma, Matsya, Garuda and Brahmanda. The Skanda is by far the largest; the Markandeya contains the Devi Mahatmya, the hymn of the Goddess recited at Navaratri; the Matsya and Vayu are among the oldest.
The Padma Purana sorts them into three groups of six according to the three gunas, the qualities of nature, and the deity they centre on:
- Sattvika, associated with Vishnu: Vishnu, Bhagavata, Narada, Garuda, Padma, Varaha.
- Rajasika, associated with Brahma: Brahma, Brahmanda, Brahmavaivarta, Markandeya, Bhavishya, Vamana.
- Tamasika, associated with Shiva: Shiva, Linga, Skanda, Agni, Matsya, Kurma.
The labels are sectarian and should not be taken too seriously: a Shaiva reader will not accept that the Shiva Purana is "tamasic", and every Purana praises all the gods somewhere in its pages. What the grouping does show is that the Puranas are where the great devotional streams of Hinduism, Vaishnava, Shaiva and Shakta, found their voice.
The Bhagavata and the Krishna stories
Of all the Puranas, the Bhagavata is the most loved. It is framed by a story of death: King Parikshit, grandson of Arjuna, has been cursed to die in seven days, and spends them on the bank of the Ganga listening to the sage Shuka, Vyasa's son, tell him what a person should do when death is near. The answer, over twelve books, is to hear about God.
The tenth book, the longest, is the life of Krishna, and it is this book that gives Hinduism its most tender images. Krishna is born in Kamsa's prison in Mathura and carried across the Yamuna at night to the cowherd village of Gokula. The demoness Putana comes to poison him and he drinks her life out instead. He steals butter and is tied to a mortar by his exasperated mother Yashoda. He opens his mouth and Yashoda sees the universe inside. He dances on the hoods of the serpent Kaliya, lifts Mount Govardhana on one finger to shelter the villagers from Indra's rain, and on an autumn night multiplies himself so that each of the gopis, the cowherd women, dances with him alone in the rasa lila. Then he leaves for Mathura, kills Kamsa, and never returns. The grief of the gopis, who loved him without any claim on him, becomes the Bhagavata's model of bhakti, love of God that wants nothing back.
The Bhagavata also tells of the avatars of Vishnu; of the elephant Gajendra calling on God when the crocodile has him by the leg; and of Prahlada, whose father Hiranyakashipu tried to kill him for his devotion and was torn apart by Narasimha, the man-lion, at twilight on a threshold, neither inside nor out, in the one gap the father's boon had left.
The Devi's Bhagavata
The Shakta tradition, which worships the Goddess as the supreme reality, has its own Bhagavata. The Devi Bhagavata Purana, also in twelve books, retells creation and the stories of the gods with the Devi at the centre: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva act only by her power, shakti. For Shaktas it, and not the Vaishnava Bhagavata, is the true Bhagavata among the eighteen; most other lists count it among the Upapuranas. With the Devi Mahatmya it supplies the theology of Durga Puja and Navaratri, where the Goddess slays Mahishasura, the buffalo demon no male god could defeat.
Why stories and not treatises
The Chandogya Upanishad already calls itihasa-purana, epic and ancient lore, the fifth Veda, and the Mahabharata says that the Veda should be expanded by means of them, because the Veda is afraid of a person of little learning who might misunderstand it. A Vedic mantra needs initiation and years of training. A story needs only ears.
But the choice of stories is not a dumbing-down. A story can hold a paradox a treatise must resolve. Prahlada's devotion to a God his father hates teaches more about where loyalty belongs than a chapter on ethics could. Gajendra, praying with his last strength, shows surrender rather than defining it. Krishna stealing butter asks what it means for God to want our love. Stories can also be retold: every Harikatha performer and every grandmother adjusts the tale to the listener, and the Puranas invite this by their own loose, generous form. A doctrine ends an argument; a story starts a conversation that can last a lifetime.
How the Puranas shape everyday Hinduism
Nearly every festival in the Hindu calendar rests on a Puranic story. Holi's bonfire is Holika, Prahlada's aunt, consumed by the fire she thought would spare her. Janmashtami is Krishna's midnight birth; Diwali, in many regions, remembers his killing of Narakasura as well as Rama's return. Shivaratri, Ganesh Chaturthi and Navaratri draw on the Shiva, Linga, Skanda and Markandeya Puranas. The Kumbh Mela marks, by tradition, the four places where drops of the nectar of immortality fell during the churning of the ocean.
Pilgrimage too is Puranic. The Puranas contain mahatmyas, praises of particular places, telling what merit is gained by bathing in this river or seeing that image, and every old temple has its sthala purana, a local legend explaining why the deity chose to live there. The vratas, the vows and fasts kept by millions of households, come with Puranic stories read aloud at their close; the Satyanarayana katha heard at countless housewarmings is traditionally placed in the Skanda Purana. The week-long public reading of the Bhagavata, the saptaha, is itself modelled on Parikshit's seven days.
Where to begin
Read the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana in a good translation, even just the childhood chapters. Then the Devi Mahatmya, which is short enough to read in an evening. Then ask the oldest person in your family which stories they were told as children, and listen; you will find you have been reading the Puranas all along.