The Puranas

The word purāṇa means “ancient,” “of old.” A traditional explanation plays on it as purā api navam, “old, yet always new” Popular tradition — and that is a fair description of what these books do. If the Vedas are the tradition’s highest authority, the Purāṇas are its storytellers: the source of most of the tales a grandmother tells, the images on a temple tower, and the reasons behind many festivals and vows.

“The fifth Veda”

Purāṇa is an old word. In one of the earliest Upanishads, the sage Nārada lists everything he has studied, and after the four Vedas he names a fifth:

Here “itihāsa-purāṇa” probably means a body of oral lore recited beside the ritual, not the books we now call Purāṇas, which were composed many centuries later. But the phrase gave those later books their claim: they are the Veda retold for everyone, including those — women and śūdras, in the classical rules — who were barred from Vedic study. Several Purāṇas say exactly this about themselves.

The five marks

A classical definition, repeated in several Purāṇas and in the Sanskrit lexicon Amarakośa, says that a Purāṇa has five subjects:

Tap each mark:

• 1सर्गCreationHow the universe first unfolds from the divine and from primal matter.
• 2प्रतिसर्गRe-creationDissolution and renewal — the worlds re-made at the start of each new cycle.
• 3वंशGenealogyThe family trees of gods, sages and the first kings.
• 4मन्वन्तरAges of ManuThe great periods ruled over by each of the fourteen Manus.
• 5वंशानुचरितRoyal deedsThe histories of the solar and lunar dynasties — the lines of Rama and of Krishna.

The cosmology these marks describe — yugas, manvantaras, kalpas and the four kinds of pralaya — is explained on Time & Cosmology.

Here is the honest surprise: very few Purāṇas actually fit this definition. The Viṣṇu Purāṇa comes closest. Most of the others give the five marks only a small share of their pages, and fill the rest with what people needed most — the glories of pilgrimage places (tīrtha-māhātmya), vows (vratas), gifts, ancestor rites, image-making and temple worship, even medicine and grammar. The Bhāgavata itself offers a different list of ten marks (2.10.1), ending with liberation and the divine as the final refuge. The five marks describe an ideal; the books grew to serve life.

The eighteen great Purāṇas

Tradition counts eighteen Mahāpurāṇas, “great Purāṇas,” all attributed to the sage Vyāsa. The number is fixed; the list is not quite. Some lists name the Vāyu in place of the Śiva Purāṇa, and Śākta tradition counts the Devī Bhāgavata, not the Bhāgavata, among the eighteen.

One famous arrangement comes from the Padma Purāṇa, which sorts them by the three guṇas: six “pure” (sāttvika) Purāṇas that praise Vishnu and lead to liberation, six “passionate” (rājasa) linked with Brahmā, and six “dark” (tāmasa) linked with Shiva and Agni. Vaiṣṇava view This is plainly a Vaishnava ranking — a Shaiva would not call the Liṅga Purāṇa “dark” — but it is a handy way to shelve them. Tap any spine:

Many modern books give the same three groups simply as Vaiṣṇava, Brāhma and Śaiva Purāṇas. Either way, remember that most Purāṇas are not narrowly sectarian: Vishnu, Shiva and the Goddess appear in nearly all of them.

The best-loved: the Bhāgavata

If one Purāṇa is read, sung and acted more than any other, it is the Bhāgavata: twelve books and some 18,000 verses on devotion (bhakti) to Vishnu as Krishna. Its closing book praises itself:

For the Gauḍīya Vaishnavas — the tradition of Caitanya, and of ISKCON today — this “spotless Purāṇa” is the supreme scripture, the natural commentary on the Vedānta itself. Gauḍīya view Most historians think the Bhāgavata was composed in the Tamil south, perhaps in the 9th or 10th century, because its devotion echoes the hymns of the Āḻvārs. Its framing story — the sage Śuka telling it to King Parīkṣit in the seven days before his death — gave rise to the Bhāgavata saptāha, a seven-day public recitation still held across India and the diaspora.

The Goddess within a Purāṇa

Some of the most important Purāṇic texts live inside larger Purāṇas. The greatest example is the Devī Māhātmya, “The Glory of the Goddess,” thirteen chapters (81–93) of the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa, probably composed around the 5th–6th century. Here, for perhaps the first time in Sanskrit, the Goddess is the supreme reality itself, not a god’s consort — and her battle with the buffalo demon is recited in temples during Navaratri. In the same way, the Lalitā Sahasranāma, the thousand names of the Goddess chanted by many family and temple prayer groups in Malaysia and elsewhere, sits within the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa.

Upapurāṇas and temple Purāṇas

Beyond the eighteen are the Upapurāṇas, “secondary Purāṇas” — traditionally also eighteen, though the lists disagree even more, and far more than eighteen exist. They include the Gaṇeśa and Mudgala Purāṇas of Gaṇapati’s devotees, the Kālikā Purāṇa of Assam’s Goddess temples, and the Devī Bhāgavata, which Śāktas rank as a great Purāṇa.

Then there are the sthala-purāṇas, “Purāṇas of a place”: the sacred history of one temple or town — how the deity appeared there, which sage or king worshipped, what miracles followed. Tamil Nadu has hundreds of these talapurāṇams, many composed in Tamil verse. The Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam tells the sixty-four “sacred sports” of Shiva in Madurai, beloved by every Madurai Meenakshi devotee.

For Malaysian Hindus the most important is the Kanda Purāṇam, Kacciyappa Civācāriyar’s Tamil epic of Murugan, composed at the Kumarakōṭṭam temple in Kanchipuram. It retells material from the Skanda Purāṇa: Murugan born from sparks of Shiva’s third eye, raised by the six Kṛttikā maidens, and sent with his spear (vēl) to defeat the demon Sūrapadman — who, struck down, becomes Murugan’s peacock and rooster banner. That victory is re-enacted as the Sūrasamhāram on the sixth day of Kanda Ṣaṣṭhī in temples from Tiruchendur to Malaysia. The belief that Thaipusam marks the day Pārvatī gave Murugan his vēl is widespread. Popular tradition So, too, is the story that Murugan himself supplied the poem’s first line.

How Purāṇas were heard

Purāṇas were made to be heard. Most are framed as a recitation: a bard, the sūta — Lomaharṣaṇa or his son Ugraśravas — tells the stories to sages gathered for a long ritual in the Naimiṣa forest. That frame mirrors real life. For centuries, professional reciters and storytellers performed Purāṇas in temples, courtyards and royal halls, often explaining as they went.

That tradition of kathā — sacred storytelling — is very much alive: the Bhāgavata saptāha, the Tamil kathākālakṣepam that mixes song and story, the Garuḍa Purāṇa read in a house of mourning, the Kanda Purāṇam expounded during Kanda Ṣaṣṭhī, and today, the Purāṇic television serials and YouTube discourses watched in Malaysian homes. Many people who have never opened a Purāṇa know dozens of its stories.

Tradition and history

The tradition and historians tell two different stories about where the Purāṇas came from:

The two views need not fight. A Purāṇa can be a recent book and an ancient story at once — which is, after all, what purāṇa means.

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Sources & further reading

• Ludo Rocher, The Purāṇas (A History of Indian Literature, vol. 2, fasc. 3, Harrassowitz, 1986).
• Cornelia Dimmitt & J. A. B. van Buitenen, Classical Hindu Mythology: A Reader in the Sanskrit Purāṇas (Temple University Press, 1978).
• F. E. Pargiter, The Purana Text of the Dynasties of the Kali Age (Oxford University Press, 1913).
• R. C. Hazra, Studies in the Upapurāṇas (2 vols, Sanskrit College, Calcutta, 1958–63).
• Friedhelm Hardy, Viraha-Bhakti: The Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India (Oxford University Press, 1983) — on the Bhāgavata’s southern origins.
• Thomas B. Coburn, Encountering the Goddess: A Translation of the Devī-Māhātmya and a Study of Its Interpretation (SUNY Press, 1991).
• David Dean Shulman, Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Śaiva Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1980) — on the Tamil talapurāṇams.
• Fred W. Clothey, The Many Faces of Murukaṉ: The History and Meaning of a South Indian God (Mouton, 1978).