Vishnu Purana Findings

Horace H. Wilson translated the Vishnu Purana in 1840, and Manmatha Nath Dutt made a prose English translation from that work some dozens of years later. Both are available online, and recent editions exist too.

The Vishnu Purana is part of Unesco's world heritage of literature. The work is marked by simplicity, and covers topics of long-lived interest too.

A Purana is a text (from centuries ago) and treats these five subjects:

• The creation;
• Destruction and renovation of the world;
• Some royal dynasties;
• Reigns of Manus;
• Genealogies.

The Vishnu Purana is thought to be one of the oldest of the dozens of Hindu Puranas. It was supposedly composed in the first or second century AD - or possibly as late as the 300s AD - and is devoted to god Vishnu, that Krishna is said to be an avatar of.

H. H. Wilson thought the Vishnu Purana was one of the oldest of the Puranas, and dated it to the first century BCE. However, Gavin Flood dates it later, to the fourth century CE. The original version seems to have been written during the later Vedic period (800 BCE-300 BCE)

The work is said to contain some twenty-three thousand slokas, but the actual number of verses it contains is less than seven thousand. It is a dialogue between Parashara and his disciple Maitreya, and divided into six parts. The work abounds in stories. Its author is said to be Vyasa.

More on Vyasa.

Dutt, Manmatha. Vishnupuranam. 2nd ed. Varanasi: Chowkhamba, 1972. Online.

Flood, Gavin. An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Wilson, Horace H., tr. The Vishnu Purana. London: John Murray, 1840. Online. A recent edition was published in 2006 by Read Country Books in Cambridge.