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c. 4th century BCE-1000 CE (composed and compiled over centuries)Reputable source · 2 sourcesDebated

The Puranas Make Hindu Mythology Accessible to Everyone

Cosmic encyclopedias of gods, genealogies, and pilgrimage sites, open to people the Vedas excluded

On the timeline · around c. 4th century BCE-1000 CE (composed and compiled over centuries) · Classical HinduismClassical HinduismPuranic and Bhakti HinduismThe Puranas Make Hindu Mythology Accessible to Everyone100 CE200 CE300 CE400 CE500 CE600 CE700 CE

Quick facts

Corpus size
18 Maha-puranas, 18 Upapuranas, 400,000+ verses
Composition window
c. 4th century BCE-1000 CE
Bulk of material
Coalesced during and after the Gupta era (4th-6th c. CE)
Key trait
Accessible to all, unlike Vedic study

What happened

The Puranas are a body of Sanskrit-verse texts, eighteen Maha-puranas and eighteen minor Upapuranas comprising more than 400,000 verses combined, that Columbia University's South Asia collections describe as ranging in composition from the 4th century BCE to about 1000 CE, with the bulk of surviving material coalescing during and after the Gupta Empire of the 4th to 6th centuries CE. Their special subject, in the words of UCLA's South Asia program, is the powers and works of the gods: genealogies of gods and kings, cosmology, sacred geography, and stories of Vishnu, Shiva, and the goddess Devi, with six of the eighteen major Puranas centered on each. Unlike the Vedas, whose study was historically restricted to the twice-born upper varnas, the Puranas were, in UCLA's phrasing, accessible to everyone, including women and members of the lowest social order, and their stories entered what the same source calls the common currency of popular Hinduism.

Why it matters

The Puranas did more than the Vedas to shape the Hinduism practiced day to day by ordinary people: they are the source of most of the mythology, festival stories, and pilgrimage traditions still followed today, and their openness to everyone regardless of caste or gender made them, in effect, Hinduism's most widely read scripture even though they rank below the Vedas in formal religious authority.

How we know

The Puranas survive as a large, named corpus of Sanskrit texts; scholars date individual Puranas relative to each other and to datable historical references within them, such as the genealogies of kings, though the texts grew through accretion over centuries, making a single fixed composition date impossible for any of them.

Sources

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Part of a timelineHistory of Hinduism26 events · Hymns memorized for three thousand years without writing them down, a philosophy that a self and the universe are the same thing, and a religion with no founder that became the world's third largestView all →
The Puranas Make Hindu Mythology Accessible to Everyone · History of Hinduism · SourcedStory