Purāṇa / The eighteen / Agni Purāṇa
Agni Purāṇa (अग्निपुराण)
About 15,400 verses in the traditional lists. Tamas in the Padma Purāṇa's sorting. Neither figure is this shelf's own measurement.
About fifteen thousand four hundred verses in the lists, a slightly less round number than the others and still a list-number, not a census. Tamas in the Padma sorting. Agni is the speaker, and the book he speaks is an encyclopedia wearing a purāṇa's name. Cosmology, the avatāras, epitomes of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata, a brief Gītā, iconography, architecture, law, medicine-names, the arts. A reader looking for one story will find a library catalogue that sometimes tells a story on the way to the next subject.
The signature is the form. Where the Viṣṇu Purāṇa holds five topics cleanly, the Agni Purāṇa holds everything a court or a temple might ask a learned man. That is a real genre of Sanskrit book, the nibandha's cousin inside a purāṇa frame. It is also the reason this page is stern about use. The catalogues include worship, images, and remedies. This shelf does not extract them into instructions, measurements, or a medical practice. Naming the encyclopedia is the point. Opening it as a manual is not.
The teaching, insofar as a catalogue has one, is that knowledge is a fire's gift, distributive, useful, and dangerous when a list is mistaken for a permission. The memorable takeaway is negative and firm. An epitome of the epics in this book is not a substitute for the epics. A paragraph of medicine is not a treatment. A description of an image is not a workshop.
What it tells
Agni as encyclopedist; short retellings of the two epics and of a Gītā; catalogues of images, law, and the arts.
The teaching
A purāṇa can be a library. A library is not a set of permissions. This page names the catalogues and does not open them into use.
What a reader keeps
- About 15,400, as a list-number.
- Tamas only in the Padma list.
- No measurements, no remedies, no rite-list leave this page.
A line
A line people recite from this book is not sat here. The shelf does not print a verse it has not checked.
नेपालीमा
सूचीले करिब पन्ध्र हजार चार सय श्लोक भन्छ, तर यो सूचीको अङ्क मात्र हो, गणना होइन। पद्मको तमस् यो तहको राय होइन। अग्नि वक्ता हुन्, र पुस्तक विश्वकोश हो। यसमा सृष्टि, अवतार, रामायण र महाभारतको संक्षेप, मूर्ति, वास्तु, कानुन, औषधिको नाम छन्। यो पृष्ठले ती सूचीलाई निर्देशन, नाप, वा उपचार बनाउँदैन। संक्षेप महाकाव्यको विकल्प होइन।
Where it sits
The epics have their own chronicles. This book's epitomes are pointers, not the poems.