The Puranas

The length and breadth of India is strewn with temples that have a startling commonality of themes. Increasingly, I do not believe the Puranas, the books that describe these themes, are merely fictions of men of old. Rather, they seem to describe a human history more primal than the one of a few thousand years to which we habitually think of ourselves as belonging. In the Puranas, we see reflections of a cosmic history, when this earth was open to the universe. The beings we meet in the Puranas are godlike, grandly demonical and incomprehensible when we compare them to our-selves. They live for thousands of years, fly in sky chariots and com¬mand great astras:

In the Puranas, we find this description of time...: The basic unit of life is the nime-sha, the instant. Fifteen nimeshas make one kastha, thirty kasthas one kaala, thirty kaalas one muhurta and thirty muhurtas one day. Thirty days is a maasa, a month, which is one day of the gods and ancestors; six maasas make an ayana, two ayanas a year. One human year is a day and a night for the celestials, uttarayana being the day and dakshinayana the night Three hundred and sixty-five human years make a divine one.

Four are the yugas in the land of Bharata: the krita, treta, dwapara and kali. The pristine krita lasts 4,800 divine years, the less perfect treta 3,600 years, the half-cor¬rupt dwapara 2,400 and the almost entirely evil kali 1,200. A chaturyuga, one cycle of four ages, is 12,000 godly years long, 12,000 x 365 human years. 71 chaturyugas make a manvantara, 14 manvantaras a kalpa. A kalpa, of 1,000 chaturyugas, 12 million divine years, is one day of Brahma, the Creator. 8,000 years of Brahma make one Brahma yuga; 1,000 Brahma yugas make a savana. Each Brahma lives for 3,003 savanas. A day of Brahma's has 14 lndras, his life 54,000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. One day of Siva is the lifetime of Vishnu...

Can it be that our past was more than what we think? Was it, in its way, inconceivably superior to the present? By the Puranic calendar, we live today at the outset of a kali yuga. Thus, Rama lived in the world more than 800,000 years ago and Krishna 5,000, at least: the first in the treta yuga and the sec¬ond at the end of the last dwapara yuga. According to the Puranas, it is natural for men of the kali yuga to be puny and short-lived and for them to forget the Sanatana Dharma and the eternal Gods. For this is the very nature of the evil age. It is the time when our darkling planet is sealed from the rest of the universe. The sacred Puranas have come down to us in the great oral tradition of the rishis, the sages of Bharata¬varsha. Once, the peerless Vyasa composed them from 'ancient mate¬rial': ancient for him. Traditionally, a Purana deals with five subjects, called panchalakshana: the primary creation of the universe; secondary creation after periodic destruction; the genesis of the devas and rishis; great epochs of time, the kalpas, manvantaras, yugas; and the history of some royal dynasties of the earth.

More recently, after 4000 BCE,until 1000 CE, roughly, a lot of other material has grown around the central Purana. These concern rituals for sacrifices, other customs, festivals, caste customs, specifications for temple construction, etcetera. There are 18 principal surviving Mahapuranas. The Siva Purana is one of these. They are collections of revelations, in the form of stories, or otherwise, usually narrated to some rishis by a suta, who heard them from Vyasa, who heard them from Narada, Brahma or another fabulous raconteur, in time out of mind. They have come down, invariably, in Sanskrit couplets. The Puranic tradition is mainly lost to those of us that do not know Sanskrit... The days when we would hear them at our grand¬mothers' knees are over. We know less of them than our parents did and our children shall know even less than we do. These luminous stories are our race's very soul.

Excerpted from the Introduction to Ramesh Menon's book, The Siva Purana: a modern rendering