Purana-based Hinduism

• The eighteen Mahapuranas layered, c. 300-1000 CE

  Roughly 400,000 verses in total, conventionally grouped into six each associated with Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. The tradition also lists five defining marks: creation, dissolution and re-creation, divine genealogies, the cosmic ages of the Manus, and dynastic history.

• Bhagavata Purana c. 9th-10th century CE

  Krishna's childhood and youth plus a full devotional theology. The most recited, most translated and most commented-upon of the eighteen, and the text that fuelled the northern bhakti movement.

• Skanda Purana layered, c. 7th century CE onward

  The longest of them all, functioning largely as a sacred gazetteer: it attaches stories to specific hills, rivers, towns and temples, which is how the mythology got welded onto actual Indian geography.

• c. 10,000–8,000 BCEBaghor stone shrineOne of the oldest discovered worship sites, in India, associated with Shakti (goddess) worship.
• c. 2600–1900 BCEIndus Valley religionMature Harappan phase yields the Pashupati seal (interpreted by some as proto-Shiva), female figurines, and Great Bath structures suggesting ritual purification — though the undeciphered script keeps interpretations contested.
• c. 1500–1200 BCERigveda composed; Vedic period beginsIndo-Aryan pastoralists compose the Rigveda's 1,028 hymns to Indra, Agni, and Varuna, preserved orally; yajña fire sacrifice is central, without idols or temples.
• c. 800–300 BCEUpanishads composedVedic texts articulating brahman, atman, karma, and liberation — the earliest emergence of central concepts of Hinduism and Buddhism; the Chandogya Upanishad contains the earliest mention of Krishna.
• c. 327–325 BCEGreek encounter with Indian asceticsAccompanying Alexander's expedition, Pyrrho of Elis engages Indian gymnosophists and adopts suspension of judgment, seeding Pyrrhonist skepticism — an early East-West religious exchange.
• c. 788–820 CEAdi Shankara consolidates AdvaitaShankara systematizes Advaita Vedanta non-dualism, revitalizing Hindu philosophy and monastic organization across India.
• 1001–1025 CEMahmud of Ghazni's raids into IndiaSeventeen Ghaznavid raids defeat the Hindu Shahis and capture Punjab and Multan, introducing Islam as a ruling force in the subcontinent.
• 1017–1137 CERamanuja and VishishtadvaitaRamanuja's qualified non-dualism makes bhakti devotion to Vishnu a path of salvation through grace, shaping Sri Vaishnavism and the wider Bhakti movement.
• c. 1105–1167 CEBasavanna founds the LingayatsThe Virashaiva (Lingayat) sect in Karnataka rejects image worship and caste, promoting egalitarian devotion to Shiva through vachana poetry.
• 1206 CEDelhi Sultanate establishedQutb ud-Din Aibak consolidates Muslim rule over northern India; Sufi orders and administration foster gradual conversion.

Learn to think with characters instead of arguing with propositions.

1. Module 1

   What a Purana Is

   You know the five conventional marks of the genre and why the form is so gloriously baggy.

   Do: Skim the contents of any Mahapurana and map three of its sections onto the five marks.

2. Module 2

   Reading Symbolically

   You can read a myth for structure and meaning without either literalism or dismissal.

   Do: Take one episode and write two readings, literal and symbolic, then say which you would defend.

3. Module 3

   Characters as Arguments

   You see how Bhishma, Karna, Draupadi and Yudhishthira encode competing theories of duty.

   Do: Take a real decision you face and argue it out loud in two of their voices.

4. Module 4

   Contradiction on Purpose

   You understand why the same story exists in incompatible versions across texts and regions.

   Do: Find two versions of one episode and write what each version's community gains from it.

5. Module 5

   Living Lore

   You can see how katha, festival and television keep the corpus alive and quietly mutating.

   Do: Attend or stream one katha or Ramlila and write down everything the performer added.

• Navaratri September or October

  Nine nights of the Goddess, when the Devi Mahatmya from the Markandeya Purana is recited and Ramlila is staged in the north.

• Janmashtami August or September

  Krishna's birth, when the relevant Bhagavata episodes are recited, enacted and, in Maharashtra, turned into human pyramids.

• Kartik month readings October or November

  A month when Bhagavata and Skanda passages are read publicly by river ghats, often at dawn, in many towns.

If the Puranas have always been rewritten to fit each region and century, is fidelity to them even a coherent goal, and is a television serial's version genuinely less legitimate than a Sanskrit manuscript's?