The Garuda Purana

PREFACE.

A few preliminary remarks on the history, scope and contents of the Garuda Purana Garuda Puranam One of the eighteen Mahapuranas, a genre of ancient Indian texts covering diverse topics from mythology to medicine. may be necessary. The Garuda Purana may be safely described as a sister work to the Agni Purana Agni Puranam. Each of them treats of Supreme Knowledge Para Vidya and Lower Knowledge Apara Vidya—secular knowledge and metaphysical truths—and partakes more of the nature of a catechism of the then prevailing Brahmanism A historical stage of Hinduism centered on the authority of the Vedas and the rituals conducted by the priestly class., or of what a Brahmin Brahmana was required to know at the time, than of the Purana Ancient Tale proper, at least if we may be allowed to look upon the Ramayana or the Mahabharata as the model of that class of literature. Superficially conforming to the rules of the Five Junctions Pancha Sandhis The traditional structural divisions used in Sanskrit literary composition to organize a plot., etc., the Garuda Purana, like its sister work, reflects the collective knowledge of the Brahminical world at the time, and had its uses then as it has even now.

Without doing violence to the antiquarian instinct, we must say that it is quite futile to attempt to lay down the precise date of the composition of the Garuda Purana. Its name occurs in Halayudha’s Everything for a Brahmin Halayudha's Brahmana Sarvasvam. Chakrapani Datta Original OCR: Chakrpani Dntta. A famous 11th-century commentator on Ayurvedic texts. has quoted many a recipe from it, and the Highest Duty of Vishnu Vishnu Dharmottaram, according to several eminent authorities, originally formed a portion of the Garuda Purana. All these factors emphatically demonstrate the fact that the Garuda Purana was in existence even before the tenth century of the Christian Era. On the contrary, we have reasons to believe that hosts of Ancient Tales Puranas and Secondary Tales Upapuranas were composed in the age of Brahminical renascence, which immediately followed the overthrow of Buddhism in India. The Garuda Purana, like the Shiva, Padma and similar Puranas, were the exponents of this victorious Brahmanism, which, being inevitably divided into various sects, tried to invest the tutelary deity of each sect with—