Purāṇa / The eighteen / Brahma Purāṇa

Brahma Purāṇa (ब्रह्मपुराण)

About 10,000 verses in the traditional lists. Rajas in the Padma Purāṇa's sorting. Neither figure is this shelf's own measurement.

The traditional lists give the Brahma Purāṇa about ten thousand verses and, in the Padma Purāṇa's sorting, the quality of rajas. Both figures are list-numbers. Manuscripts do not agree on a census, and the guṇa is that book's Vaiṣṇava polemic, not a rank this shelf assigns.

Brahmā is the speaker the frame uses, talking to the sages about creation, the solar and lunar lines, and the sacred places a pilgrim is told to know. The printed book a modern reader meets is heavily a book of tīrthas. A long stretch praises Puruṣottama-kṣetra, the ground of Jagannātha. Another, often read as its own māhātmya, follows the Godāvarī under the name Gautamī and tells why that river is walked. The five topics of a purāṇa are here, creation and lineage among them, but they sit inside geography. Place is the form the teaching takes.

The signature is not one myth the way the fish or the dwarf is one myth. It is the decision that a river and a city can carry what a cosmology carries. Kings bathe, sages argue, a local god turns out to be the god. The shelf does not extract the bathing lists into a pilgrimage manual. It records that the book is, in large part, a map that believes walking is a form of knowledge.

What it tells

Creation told from Brahmā's side; the solar and lunar dynasties; the māhātmya of Puruṣottama and of the Godāvarī as Gautamī.

The teaching

Dharma is somewhere in particular. A place can be as doctrinal as a verse, which is why the lists and the stories share a book.

What a reader keeps

• A round ten thousand, not a count of the copy in front of you.
• Rajas, in the Padma list only.
• The Godāvarī and Jagannātha's ground are the book's long memories.

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

परम्पराको सूचीले ब्रह्मपुराणलाई करिब दस हजार श्लोक र पद्मपुराणको छनोटमा रजोगुण दिन्छ। दुवै सूची-अङ्क हुन्। यो तहको फैसला होइन। ब्रह्मा वक्ता हुन्। छापिएको पुस्तक तीर्थको पुस्तक हो। पुरुषोत्तम क्षेत्र, जगन्नाथको भूमि, र गौतमी नामले चिनिने गोदावरी यसका लामा स्मृति हुन्। यो पृष्ठले स्नानको सूचीलाई यात्रु-पुस्तिका बनाउँदैन। ठाउँ पनि ज्ञान हुन सक्छ भन्ने पुस्तक हो।

Where it sits

The eighteen are the compendium. The structural portals remain the Bhāgavata, the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, and the Śiva Purāṇa.