Purāṇa / The eighteen / Matsya Purāṇa
Matsya Purāṇa (मत्स्यपुराण)
About 14,000 verses in the traditional lists. Tamas in the Padma Purāṇa's sorting. Neither figure is this shelf's own measurement.
About fourteen thousand verses in the lists, tamas in the Padma sorting, a Vaiṣṇava rank on a book whose frame is Viṣṇu as a fish. The mismatch is worth noticing and then walking past. Manu finds a small fish in the water he is offering. The fish asks to be saved from the larger fish, and then it grows, pot to vessel to river to sea, and it tells him the flood is coming. Manu builds a boat. The fish, now vast, tows it to the one peak still above the water. The Vedas, in one telling, have been stolen by the asura Hayagrīva, and the fish recovers them. A world ends. A memory does not.
Around the flood the book does the ordinary purāṇic work at length: the lineages of kings, the geography of the earth, the duties it expects of the varṇas, stories of Śiva and Satī in versions that belong to this recension. This page records Satī as giving up her body and does not go further. It does not turn the duty-lists into a law for a modern reader. The signature is the boat.
The teaching is what you save when saving the whole is no longer possible. A boat, a man, a teaching, a fish that was small enough to be pitied and large enough to pull. The memorable takeaway is the sequence of the vessels. Care that starts with a tiny life becomes the care that outlives an age. The shelf does not sit a śloka from the scene.
What it tells
Manu and the fish; the flood and the boat; the recovery of the Vedas; the lineages.
The teaching
An age can go under. What was pitied when it was small may be what tows the remnant.
What a reader keeps
- About fourteen thousand, as a list-number.
- Tamas in the Padma list, despite a Viṣṇu frame. The label is the list's.
- The boat is the image. No śloka is sat.
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 चौध हजार श्लोक भन्छ। पद्मको तमस् मत्स्य रूपमै विष्णु भएको पुस्तकमाथि परेको छ। लेबल सूचीको हो। मनुले सानो माछा भेटे, ठूलाबाट बचाए, माछा बढ्यो, प्रलय आउने खबर दियो। डुङ्गा बन्यो। माछाले तान्यो। एउटा कथनमा हयग्रीवले वेद चोरेका थिए, माछाले फर्काए। युग डुब्छ। स्मृति डुब्दैन। सतीले शरीर त्यागेको प्रसङ्ग आउँछ। तरिका लेखिँदैन।
Where it sits
The avatāra, named among others, is on the Viṣṇu hub.