A section from the journey

What a Purana Is

The word purana means "that which is ancient." The Puranas are great books of old stories. They tell how the world is made, how the gods and kings come down the ages, and how to love the divine. The tradition says they have five marks, like five threads woven through them all. Vyasa is named as the one who gathered them.

We have walked through the Vedas, sung by the fire. We have walked through the great epics, the long tales of Rama and of the Bharatas. Now a new kind of book opens before us. Warm, sweeping, full of story. The tradition calls it the Purana.

The word itself is a quiet teaching. means "that which is ancient." Old lore. The wisdom of long ago, kept alive by telling it again and again. Hold this word, for a whole age of this story takes its name from it.

A Purana is not a list of rules or a wall of hymns. It is a book you can sit and listen to. It tells how the world was made, and how it will end and be made once more. It names the gods and the great sages, and the long lines of kings. And through it all runs love for the divine.

The tradition has an old way of saying what a Purana should hold. It speaks of five marks. Five threads that ought to run through such a book. The Sanskrit name for them is , which simply means "the five marks."

An old Sanskrit word-book, the lexicon of Amara Sinha, even gives "the five-marked" as another name for a Purana. Here is how the first scholar to bring a Purana into English set those five marks down.

"1. Primary creation, or cosmogony; 2. Secondary creation, or the destruction and renovation of worlds, including chronology; 3. Genealogy of gods and patriarchs; 4. Reigns of the Manus, or periods called Manwantaras; and 5. History, or such particulars as have been preserved of the princes of the solar and lunar races..."

Let us walk through the five gently. First, the making of the world. Second, its unmaking and its making again, for the world turns in great cycles. Third, the family-lines of the gods and the ancient sages. Fourth, the vast ages ruled by the Manus, the fathers of humankind. And fifth, the histories of the kings, of the line of the sun and the line of the moon.

Now, an honest word. If you open a real Purana, you will find far more than these five things. There are hymns, and pilgrimages, and rules for worship, and long praises of one god or another. The five marks do not cover it all. The very scholar who first listed them said as much himself.

So we hold the five marks lightly. They are not a full map of any Purana. They are the tradition's own answer to a simple question: what is this kind of book for? It is for telling, from the world's first dawn to the kings of yesterday, the whole long story in which a person finds their place.

And who made these great books? The tradition gives one name above all: . He is the same sage said to have arranged the four Vedas, and to have given us the Mahabharata. To call Vyasa the maker of the Puranas is to say they belong with the Veda and the epic, in the great chain of remembered wisdom.

Think of an old story your family tells, one that has been passed down and grown a little with each telling. It holds a truth that a plain fact could not. The Puranas are that, for a whole tradition. What story have you been given that means more than its words?