Udaya

Vishnu Purana

विष्णुपुराणम्

Also Vishnupurana.

Purana Sanskrit Probably between the fourth and the ninth century CE, with older material in it

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What it is#

The Vishnu Purana is the shortest and tidiest of the major puranas and the one usually recommended to somebody who wants to know what a purana is. It is cast as the sage Parashara answering his pupil Maitreya, and it does in about seven thousand verses what the larger puranas do in forty thousand: creation, the ages of the world, the genealogies of kings, the duties of the castes and the stages of life, the geography of the earth and the heavens, the dissolution of everything, and the life of Krishna. It is also the clearest statement in the puranic literature of the position that Vishnu is not one god among many but the one from whom the others proceed.

Its shape#

Six books, called amshas, of about seven thousand verses together, which makes it a fifth the length of the Bhagavata and a tenth of the Skanda. The first book is creation and the story of Prahlada; the second is cosmography and geography, including the account of the seven continents that later Indian geography argues with; the third is the Vedas, the castes and the ages; the fourth is the dynasties of the sun and the moon, which is the nearest thing in Sanskrit to a chronicle; the fifth is the life of Krishna from birth to death, which the Bhagavata would later expand; and the sixth is the end of the world and release from it.

What it argues about#

These are not settled texts

The text is arguing for Vishnu as the whole, and its method is to absorb rather than to deny: Brahma and Shiva are not rejected, they are made functions of Vishnu. This is the same move the Shiva Purana makes in the other direction, and reading the two together is the quickest way to see that a purana is a position rather than a neutral record. Its second argument is about what the world is worth. The Vishnu Purana is unusually bleak about the Kali Yuga, and its description of the present age, in which the powerful are thieves and learning is for sale, is quoted far more often than anything else in it. What it offers against that is not reform but remembrance, which is why it closes on release.

Episodes worth knowing#

Prahlada and his father

Hiranyakashipu rules the three worlds and his son Prahlada will not stop saying the name of Vishnu, who is his father’s enemy. The boy is thrown from a cliff, trampled by elephants, given poison and burnt, and survives each because he is not afraid. The Vishnu Purana tells it as a lesson in devotion rather than as the setup for a rescue, and it spends more words on what Prahlada says to his teachers than on the arrival of Narasimha. Later retellings reverse that proportion and the lion is what everybody remembers.

The age we are in

In the fourth book Parashara describes the Kali Yuga: kings will be of no birth and will tax without protecting, wealth alone will be the measure of worth, learning will be sold, outward marks will stand in for conduct, and men will be judged by what they own. The passage is specific and sour and reads as topical in any century, which is why it is the most quoted part of the text. Then the purana says something stranger: that this is the best age to be born in, because in no other is so little required to reach release.

Whose telling#

There is no single text

H. H. Wilson’s translation, 1840
The first full English version, and still the one most often cited, though its notes argue with the text more than a reader may want.
The Bhagavata Purana
Takes the fifth book’s life of Krishna and makes a whole work of it, with the childhood and the gopis expanded enormously.
The Shiva Purana
Makes the mirror argument, with Shiva as the whole and Vishnu as a function, using much of the same material.

Where the regions differ#

  • Tamil
  • Kerala
  • Telugu
  • Kannada
  • North
  • Maharashtra
  • Bengal
  • Punjab
  • Assam
  • Sri Lanka
  • Nepal
  • Gujarat
  • Odisha
  • Mithila
  • Kashmir
  • Tulu Nadu
  • manipur
  • rajasthan
  • konkani
  • sindhi
  • jharkhand
  • himalayan
  • kodava
Where it is kept: 4 of the 23 traditions this app follows. The filled one is where it is from.
North India
The standard purana of the Vaishnava households of the north and the usual text for a purana recitation.
Odisha
Read at Puri in the Jagannath tradition, where the Krishna material of the fifth book is the common ground.
Tamil Nadu
Known through the Vaishnava acharyas rather than directly; Tamil Vaishnavism argues its case from the Divya Prabandham and uses the purana as support.
Gujarat
The Dwarka material and the end of the Yadavas are read here as local history as much as scripture.

All the works