Vishnu Purana (Taylor)

by McComas Taylor | 2021 | 157,710 words | ISBN-13: 9781760464400

The Vishnu Purana is an ancient Sanskrit text composed around 1500 years ago. The text details the universe's history, creation, and the essence of Hindu theology. It highlights the roles of gods, human origins, and ideals of Brahminical society. The Purana further narrates stories of devotion, cosmic battles, and Krishna’s famed romantic exploits....

4. Authorship

Modern readers generally like to know who wrote the text they are reading, but the master works of the Sanskritic scriptural archive are all anonymous or, more accurately, pseudonymous. Not only are successive generations of individual originators, authors, editors and scribes unnamed, they also usually attempt to conceal all evidence of the human hand. The closest we come to a human author may be a legendary sage such as Vyāsa, but even then, he is often just an intermediary between gods and mortals. Most of the classics are ascribed to one or other deity. Texts like this one are said to have been passed down orally through glittering lineages of gods and semi-divine seers until they descended to the human realm.

A more prosaic account of authorship must acknowledge the fact that the Viṣṇu Purāṇa was composed in Sanskrit, so the creators, as we have seen, are likely to have been male members of the brahmin community, who were the literary elite. Not surprisingly, they are clearly exponents of the Vaiṣṇava tradition and have access to an encyclopedic archive of Sanskritic mythology and dogma.

While academics are concerned with the age and authorship of this and other Sanskrit texts, and the historical context in which they arose, these questions are largely irrelevant for traditional audiences and members of the faith community, for whom scriptures like these are of divine origin and are more or less eternally present and ageless.

Like what you read? Consider supporting this website: