13. The six books of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa

Book One: Creation

Book One describes the creation and peopling of the world. Parāśara first tells Maitreya how his own father was eaten by a rākṣasa and how he subsequently acquired knowledge of this purāṇa. He describes how Viṣṇu created the world out of emptiness by agitating spirit and matter, and how the elements and senses combine to form the cosmic egg that contains the whole universe. Chapter Two includes a difficult abstract passage on the interaction of the cosmogonic properties known as the Seen (vyakta) and Unseen (avyakta), Individuation (ahaṃkāra) and Greatness (mahat). Parāśara interrupts his account of creation to describe the units of time, which range from one nimeṣa or blink of the eye, to one para, the lifespan of the deity Brahmā. In the form of a boar, Viṣṇu catches the earth on the tip of his tusk and raises it from the floor of the cosmic ocean, to the delight of the onlooking sages. The earth is then divided into seven continents and is filled with plants, animals and humankind in four communities.

People build houses and raise crops, and the first patriarchs and a legendary ruler known as Manu populate the earth. The irascible sage Durvāsas curses the gods, who then churn the Ocean of Milk to win the nectar of immortality. The princeling Dhruva is elevated to become the Pole Star through his devotion to Viṣṇu. King Pṛthu is born from the hand of his dead father. Sages praise the deity from the bottom of the ocean. A stunning apsaras seduces an unsuspecting yogi and a girl is born from drops of sweat. Prahlāda, the son of the demon king, becomes a devotee of Viṣṇu and undergoes terrible tortures, but sticks to his beliefs and finally achieves liberation. We are reminded by Parāśara that Viṣṇu is brahman, the ineffable Absolute.

Book Two: The World

This book falls into two parts, the first of which deals with what we might call geography and astronomy. The world within the cosmic egg consists of the middle realm, which constitutes ‘our’ world, with lower realms below us and other realms above. This middle realm includes seven continents in the form of concentric rings, with each successive ring being twice as wide as the one within it. The seven continents are poetically named Rose-Apple, Pipal, Cottonwood, Kuśa-Grass, Crane, Teak and Banyan. They are separated by oceans of saltwater, syrup, wine, ghee, whey, milk and freshwater, respectively.

Each continent is divided into seven regions by seven mountain ranges and is watered by seven major rivers. Every land has one sovereign with seven sons, each of whom rules a region. A society of four communities—not coincidentally analogous to the four orders in ‘our’ world—inhabits each continent. The central continent, Rose-Apple or Jambūdvīpa, has the cosmic Mount Meru at its centre. One of Jambūdvīpa’s regions, Bhārata—named after its regent, Bharata—is now known as India. The Viṣṇu Purāṇa says: ‘More fortunate than the gods are those who live in Bhārata, the land that leads to heaven and beyond’ (2.3.24), as this is the only region where sacrifice, the precursor to liberation, is possible.

Below us are seven realms inhabited by Dānavas, Daityas and nāgas, which are even more splendid than those above. But below them lie twenty-eight hell realms, each with its own exquisite tortures. All classes of sinners are catered for: those whose crimes range from killing their guru to starting dinner before their father, selling cochineal or feeding cats. Special hells are reserved for actors, fishermen and vandals who upset beehives. Students of religious studies who ejaculate while napping are in for a torrid time. Fortunately, meditation on Viṣṇu is prescribed as the atonement for all these crimes.

Above us are the upper realms, including the orbits of the sun, moon, planets and seven higher spheres. A challenging technical passage on the apparent annual movement of the sun and calendrical science is followed by a more readable chapter about rain.

The second half of this book, consisting of four chapters, contains a philosophical narrative delivered by the wise fool Bharata (no relation to the king of the same name above). This Bharata teaches the king of Sauvīra about the nature of reality, in which he recounts a snappy and amusing dialogue between two sages, Ṛbhu and Nidāgha.

Book Three: Society

This book is largely about the Vedas, their origin, arrangement, rituals and efficacy. The first few chapters describe the Manus, the legendary rulers who reign over vast intervals of cosmic time called Manvantaras or Manu-periods. Six Manus have already passed. We are in the period of the seventh, Vaivasvata, and there are seven more to come. In addition to its own Manu, each Manvantara has its own set of deities and seven sages who will ‘hear’ the Vedas anew. The fourteen Manus reign for a total of one thousand cycles of four ages—Kṛta, Tretā, Dvāpara and Kali—which together make one aeon or kalpa. In every Dvāpara age, a Veda-vyāsa (literally, a ‘Veda-arranger’) appears to divide the primeval and ever-existent Veda into four parts. Each of the four Vedas is further split into branches that are entrusted to various sages.

In Chapter Seven, Maitreya asks how one may escape hell. The answer is given in a lively dialogue in which Yama, the lord of death, instructs his servants to ignore the pious devotees of Viṣṇu when collecting souls for punishment. The rest of this book describes various Vedic life rituals pertaining to birth, marriage, daily practices, conduct in the bedroom, death and sacrifices for the ancestors known as śrāddha. Nine chapters (Eight to Sixteen) are in the form of an embedded dialogue between the sages Aurva and Sagara.

Book Three includes sections on how to choose a wife and name a son. Chapter Eleven describes a day in the life of a brahmin gentleman, and Chapter Twelve provides dos and don’ts for the wise, including such good advice as, ‘Avoid animals with tusks and horns’ and ‘Don’t blow your nose at mealtimes’.

This book ends with an episode in which Viṣṇu creates a phantom. This being closely resembles, first, a Jain ascetic and, then, a Buddhist monk, to trick the demigods into abandoning the Vedas. Once the demigods have strayed from the path of true religion, the gods easily defeat them. This last section offers a glimpse into the types of religious debates and tensions that may have been experienced during the period of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa’s development.

Book Four: The Royal Dynasties

The fourth book is largely ‘historical’, as it describes the kings of the Solar and Lunar dynasties. This topic, like the description of the Manvantaras in Book Three, is one of the five themes, or pañca-lakṣaṇa, that define a purāṇa. Book Four represents a significant change of pace as it is nearly all in prose, except for several embedded songs of praise and verses quoted from other sources. It is worth reading this book carefully, even the long genealogical lists, as doing so will ‘wash away all misdeeds’, we are assured.

After the creator deity Brahmā arose from the cosmic egg, the patriarch, Dakṣa, was born from his right thumb. Dakṣa’s daughter was Aditi, who gave birth to the Sun. The Solar Dynasty begins with the son of the Sun, Manu Vaivasvata. This book detours through many subnarratives as it describes the Solar lineage, including many folk etymologies to explain the origins of various names. We read of King Yuvanāśva, the man who gave birth to a son. The sage Saubhari lived underwater, where he made friends with a fish but abandoned his vows to have children. Sagara’s sixty thousand sons excavated the ocean while searching for a missing horse. A king named Kalmāṣapāda, like a modern vampire, turned into a rākaṣasa and dined on human flesh at night. This section includes the legend of King Nimi, which explains why all animals blink.

Included in the Solar Dynasty is Rāma, hero of the Rāmāyaṇa, whose story appears here in highly abbreviated form. Vālmīki’s hegemonic version of the epic ends with Rāma’s consort Sītā in miserable exile and her return to Mother Earth. The Viṣṇu Purāṇa’s potted version, by contrast, concludes on a happy note, with Sītā safely lodged in Ayodhyā. This raises the interesting possibility that this section of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa may have been composed before Vālmīki’s orthodox and anticlimactic narrative swamped most other versions.

Like the Solar Dynasty, the Lunar Dynasty also originated with Brahmā. This deity had a son, Atri, whose son was Soma, the Moon personified. Soma’s first son, Budha (no relation to the Buddha with two ds), was abandoned in a reedbed, just like Moses of the Old Testament. This section also contains dozens of iconic subnarratives: King Purūravas’s ill-starred affair with an apsaras who kept two pet sheep in her bedroom; King Jahnu, who drank the Gaṅgā River dry; a mother-and-daughter pair who swapped bowls of magic porridge; King Raji, who did a deal with deities and won sovereignty over the gods; and Yayāti, who convinced his son to trade his youthfulness for his own old age. Chapter Thirteen includes the strange and somewhat inconsequential narrative of how Kṛṣṇa acquired the magnificent Syamantaka jewel. As mentioned above, this story seems out of place as it recounts this famous episode in the life of Kṛṣṇa, even though we do not reach his birth until a later chapter.

Book Four includes the ancestors of the Pāṇḍavas and Kauravas, the heroes of the Mahābhārata, and their descendants, including King Parīkṣit, ‘who rules all the world today in accord with virtue’ (4.20.13). Parāśara names the kings who will rule in future and foretells the existence of some of India’s well-known early dynasties, including the Mauryas, Śuṅgas and Guptas. This is as close to verifiable history as the Viṣṇu Purāṇa gets. As the last-named dynasty ruled until the middle of the sixth century CE, we may assume that this passage of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa was composed during or after the Gupta Empire.

The age of Kali will come to an end with these lineages, and the Viṣṇu Purāṇa gives a damning description of this period of decadence. Parāśara closes the book with a pithy observation on the futility of human endeavour and the mercilessness of time: ‘Bhagīratha, Sagara, Kakutstha and Rāvaṇa, Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa, Yudhiṣṭhira and the others—there’s no doubt they all existed, but where are they now? We just don’t know’ (4.24.68).

Book Five: Kṛṣṇa

Book Five is really the heart of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, as, in the broadest sense, the preceding four books have all been building towards this climax: the advent, exploits and eventual withdrawal of Viṣṇu’s manifestation in the form of Kṛṣṇa. The book opens in the city of Mathurā with the wedding of Kṛṣṇa’s parents, Vasudeva and Devakī. This happy event is spoiled when a disembodied voice from the heavens warns Kaṃsa, the king of Mathurā, that Devakī’s eighth child will eventually destroy him. The king keeps the couple under lock and key for years and murders each infant as it is born. Vasudeva, with divine intervention, smuggles the eighth baby, Kṛṣṇa, out of the city and delivers him to the cattle-herders’ camp across the river. There he places the baby in the bed of Yaśodā, the head herder’s wife.

Kṛṣṇa and his elder brother Balarāma enjoy a bucolic childhood in the camp, and exhibit prodigies such as overturning a fully laden wagon and uprooting two huge arjuna trees. Kaṃsa sends a succession of demons to kill Kṛṣṇa, including the ogress Pūtanā, and others in the forms of a donkey, a bull and a horse. This book includes many other well-known episodes, such as the subjugation of the serpent Kāliya, the raising of Mount Govardhana and Kṛṣṇa’s lovemaking with the cowherding girls. It includes a delightful episode in which the girls, playing detective, discover Kṛṣṇa’s lovemaking by interpreting his footprints on the sandy forest floor (5.13).

Now a young adult, Kṛṣṇa leaves the cattle camp for the nearby city of Mathurā, where his adventures continue. He confronts and kills his nemesis, Kaṃsa, and becomes the leader of the Yādava clan. Kṛṣṇa leads his people across India to establish a new capital at Dvārakā in the west. He abducts and marries Rukmiṇī, and sires a vast tribe, the foremost of whom are his son Pradyumna and grandson Aniruddha, whose exploits are described. In accordance with a brahmin’s curse, the Yādava clansmen eventually fall on one another in a murderous spree, leaving Kṛṣṇa alone alive. One day he is reclining in the forest when a passing hunter mistakes his foot for a deer and shoots him with an arrow. Thus, Viṣṇu’s manifestation as Kṛṣṇa and Book Five draw to a close.

Book Six: Dissolution

Just as the Viṣṇu Purāṇa begins with the creation of the world, it now concludes with its multiple forms of dissolution. While the text states explicitly that there are three types of destruction—causal, elemental and final—it actually begins with another, the destruction that takes place at the end of each Kali age. It prefaces this with a description of this decadent time itself, some aspects of which may be disturbingly familiar. At the end of the age of Kali, the world is destroyed, only to be recreated in the Kṛta, and the cycle of four ages begins again.

The second type of cosmic destruction, causal dissolution, takes place at the end of each aeon or kalpa, which consists of one thousand cycles of four ages, or 4.32 billion years. The world is then consumed by fire, which is extinguished by a cosmic deluge leaving nothing but a vast ocean on which the deity rests until the universe is created again.

A kalpa is but a single day for the deity Brahmā, who is said to live for one hundred of his own years, after which the elemental dissolution of the world takes place. The very elements from which the universe is composed—earth, air, fire, water and space—are reabsorbed into the Absolute in this process.

The so-called final form of destruction is a hybrid of this concept of cosmic destruction and the idea of liberation from cyclical existence. Liberated beings achieve a state of union with the Divine and are never reborn. The Viṣṇu Purāṇa seeks to convince us of the desirability of this state with a gruelling description of the horrors of birth, life and death. The antidote to existential suffering and the means of achieving this final dissolution is total surrender to the deity, which, after all, is the Viṣṇu Purāṇa’s take-home message.

The latter part of Book Six offers a reflection on an age-old debate in Hindu traditions: is it better to seek perfection through ascetic practices such as yoga or social practices that include the Vedic sacrifice? This ill-fitting and anticlimactic appendix compares the twin paths known as pravṛtti and nivṛtti. The contest is put into the mouths of two kings, Khāṇḍikya and his cousin Keśidhvaja. With this, the Viṣṇu Purāṇa limps towards a conclusion.

Like many major Sanskrit texts, the Viṣṇu Purāṇa finishes with a section called the phalaśruti, the ‘fruits of listening’. Anyone who hears this narrative with devotion, recites it or calls it to mind will be freed from all their sins, we are promised.