The Puranas

Tradition reckons 18 Mahapuranas ("great" Puranas) and a further 18 Upapuranas ("minor" Puranas), totalling roughly 400,000 verses across the corpus. The Mahapuranas are themselves classically grouped into three sets of six — Vaishnava, Brahma, and Shaiva — according to which deity each holds as supreme.

पुराण (purāṇa) means "of ancient times" — old lore. A Purana is traditionally said to touch five subjects, the pañca-lakṣaṇa: sarga (the universe’s first creation), pratisarga (its periodic dissolution and re-creation), vaṃśa (the genealogies of gods and sages), manvantara (the cosmic ages, each ruled by a Manu), and vaṃśānucaritam (the dynastic histories of the solar and lunar royal lines). Most open with the same frame: the sage Suta Goswami reciting these ancient stories to a gathering of sages in the forest of Naimisharanya.

The Skanda Purana is by far the largest of all eighteen Mahapuranas — and the largest single text in the entire Puranic corpus. This edition runs to 102,621 verses across 1,918 chapters, organised into eight khandas (books), each centred on a major tirtha or sacred region: Kashi, Prabhasa, Avanti (Ujjain), Dvaraka, and more.

The Bhagavata Purana (Srimad Bhagavatam) is widely regarded as the crown of the Puranic literature, devoted above all to Krishna — its tenth of twelve skandhas narrates his life in full, from birth at Mathura through his years in Vraja to the establishment of Dvaraka. Many traditions consider it the natural conclusion of Vedic study.

No — the Puranas belong to smriti ("what is remembered"), composed and transmitted by sages, rather than shruti ("what is heard"), the directly revealed Vedas. They are traditionally attributed to Vyasa and function as the accessible counterpart to Vedic ritual literature: the same cosmology, genealogy, and dharma carried in story form for everyone, not only those initiated into Vedic study.