THE GARUDA PURANAM

The author has made a good attempt to explore new avenues in the context of the Garuda Puranam. A few preliminary remarks on the history, scope and contents of the Garuda Puranam may be necessary. The Garuda Puranam may be safely described as a sister work to the Agni Puranam. Each of them treats of Para Vidya and Apara Vidya, secular knowledge and metaphysical truths, and partakes more of the nature of a catechism of the then prevailing Brahmanism, or of what a Brahmana was required to know at the time, than of the Puranam proper, at least if we may be admitted to look upon the Ramayana or the Mahabharata as the model of that class of literature. Superficially conforming to the Rules of Pancha Sandhis, etc., the Garuda Puranam, like its sister work, reflects but the knowledge of the Brahmanical world at the time, and had its uses then as it has even now. Without doing violence to the antiquarian instinct, we must say that it is quite futile to attempt to lay down the precise date of the composition of it. It was in existence even before the tenth century of the Christian Era. On the contrary, we have reasons to believe that, hosts of Puranas and Upapuranas were composed in the age of Brahmanic renaissance, which immediately followed the overthrow of Buddhism in India. The Garuda Puranam, like the Agni, Shiva, Padma, and the like Puranas, were the exponents of the victorious Brahmanism, which, being inevitably divided into schisms, tried to invest the tutelary deity of each sect with the attributes of supreme divinity or Brahma, and to equip its members with a complete code of rituals, law and other necessary information regarding the incidents of everyday life, subservient to, and in conformity with, the Vedas and the Vedic literature. This book is the product of extensive study of it which illuminates readers and researchers.