Not formally scripture, the Puranas shaped Hinduism more than the Vedas
The Puranas run to more than 400,000 verses across 36 major and minor texts, covering everything from the birth of the cosmos to grammar, medicine and love stories. They lack the formal authority of scripture, yet scholars argue they moulded everyday Hinduism more deeply than the Vedas, by folding countless local traditions into one fold.
Purana means 'ancient' in Sanskrit, from a root meaning 'before' that shares its Indo-European ancestry with the English word 'fore'. The genre exists in Jainism as well as Hinduism. Tradition credits Vyasa, the narrator of the Mahabharata, with compiling them, and the Vishnu Purana describes a single original Purana passed to his disciple Lomaharshana and split by later pupils. Most scholars instead see the Hindu texts as the work of many hands over centuries, whereas Jain Puranas can usually be dated and assigned to named authors.
The word appears long before the surviving texts. The Atharva Veda mentions the Purana, and the Chandogya Upanishad calls histories and ancient tales 'the fifth Veda'. According to the Indologists van Buitenen and Dimmitt, the Puranas blend two oral streams: priestly recitation descended from the Vedic reciters and bardic poetry kept alive in warrior circles. They were gathered again under the Gupta rulers in the fourth to sixth centuries CE and kept growing for another five hundred to a thousand years, tended by priests at temples and pilgrimage sites.
Dating them is famously slippery. Ludo Rocher argues no Purana as a whole can be pinned to a date, since they lived orally before being written down. Wendy Doniger offers rough estimates, placing the Vayu Purana around 350 CE and the Vishnu Purana around 450 CE, while the Linga Purana spans roughly 600 to 1000 CE. Even the neat division into 18 major and 18 minor texts is contested: Rocher calls the distinction ahistorical, and scholars still debate whether the Devi Bhagavata counts as major.
The Skanda Purana, largest of all at 81,000 verses, captures the synthesising spirit when it declares that Vishnu and Shiva are one and the same. Texts are loosely grouped by the three gunas of purity, passion and inertia, and by favoured deity, though each honours many gods.
Source: Puranas
