Puranas...

April 30, 2009

Here is very nice information about Puranas....

The oldest Purana is believed to date back to 300 AD, and the most recent ones

to 1300 - 1600 AD. Although they have been composed at different times, all the

Puranas seem to have been revised at a later date. This is apparent because all

of them state that the total number is 18. The Puranas vary greatly in length:

the Skanda Purana is the longest with 81,000 couplets, while the Brahma Purana

and Vamana Purana are the shortest with 10,000 couplets each. The total number

of couplets in the Puranas collectively is 400,000.

Scholars regard the Puranas in general as having been compiled by many hands

between the 4th and the 16th centuries AD.

The oldest of the Puranas, Vayu Purana, may date back to about the sixth

century. and some of the others may be as recent as the thirteenth century.

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Further.....

Swami Dayananda Saraswati founded the Arya Samaj in 1875 as a social/political

reform movement within Hinduism. He sought to reestablish the Vedas as the

primary scriptural source.....

He was also convinced that Puranic literature relating the stories of Gods and

devas was fiction. Here, he stood on better ground against opposition. His

argument was that such unfounded myths, as he regarded them, lead to

superstition not conducive to intelligent religious culture. He said, " Just as a

grain of poison is sufficient to vitiate several pounds of food-stuff, similarly

the poison of mythology has vitiated the whole Puranic literature. "

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