was transmitting the text (e.g. the Ku ̄rmaappears to be a Pa ̄s ́upata reworking
of what was originally a Pa ̄ñcara ̄tra text). To quote Giorgio Bonazzoli, “the
pura ̄n.a-s grow like trees: old branches are pruned, things are transformed
or removed, new blossoms appear, things are added and the result is a continu-
ously changing living reality, always equal to itself although always different”
(Bonazzoli 1983: 101).
Yet however much one may stress their oral origins or the fluidity of their
transmission, the Pura ̄n.as in their present form undoubtedly exist as books.
Some of them contain passages (e.g. Matsya53) which praise such activities as
making copies of them in whole or in part, or giving away such copies to others,
so it is obvious that this transition from oral to written transmission met with
no suspicion or disapproval. There is no information as to when it took place.
Indeed the whole question of dating the Pura ̄n.as in their earliest oral or written
forms, is attended by daunting uncertainties. It is not a question which interests
the Pura ̄n.as themselves: as far as they are concerned, they all come into being
at the same time as a result of Vya ̄sa’s work in each dva ̄parayugaas it rolls round
(Vis.n.u3.3.5–21). If one looks to texts other than the Pura ̄n.as, the earliest known
appearance of the word pura ̄n.a, as a name for a literary genre, is in Atharvaveda
11.7.24, and it occurs several times, both in the singular and the plural, in the
Maha ̄bha ̄rata, but there is little to indicate the nature of these pura ̄n.asor to link
them with those which exist today.
Rocher’s examples of attempts to date the Pura ̄n.as show how twentieth-
century scholars have tried to put specific dates upon texts in spite of appreciat-
ing the difficulties involved. He himself concludes: “I submit that it is not possible
to set a specific date for any pura ̄n.a as a whole” (Rocher 1986: 103). Maybe one
need not be totally agnostic. It would be hard to disagree, for instance, with
Hardy’s view that “the most reasonable date” for the Bha ̄gavatais “the ninth or
early tenth century” (Hardy 1983: 488). Yet Hardy shares Rocher’s general view
in that he declares “On the whole it is meaningless to speak of ‘the date’ of a
Sanskritpura ̄n.a, because many generations of bards, etc., have been involved in
the accumulation of material which at some stage has been given a name.. .”
(1983: 486).
The Great Eighteen
Several of the essays in Pura ̄n.a Perennisspell out the diversity of pura ̄n.ic litera-
ture. John Cort gives “An Overview of the Jaina Pura ̄n.as” (Doniger 1993:
185–206), saying that “a list of all the known Jaina Pura ̄n.as would total about
several hundred” (1993: 185). A. K. Ramanujan discusses what he calls the
“folk Pura ̄n.as,” of which he says the best known are the Tamil sthalapura ̄n.as
studied by David Shulman (Doniger 1993: 101). Shulman himself draws
attention to vernacular Pura ̄n.as by comparing an episode from the Sanskrit
Bha ̄gavatapura ̄n.awith the same episode as told in the fifteenth-century Telugu
132 freda matchett