Origin and Growth of the Puranic Text Corpus

The historical examination of Purana literature along the lines of textual criticism was long thought to be an impervious field. In recent years, however, this kind of investigation has received a boost from the publication of several critical editions of Purana texts, among them that of the original Skandapurana. The Purana panel of the 12th World Sanskrit Conference held in Helsinki in July of 2003 was envisaged to explore these new departures and to discuss the provisional results. The papers collected in this volume are the outcome of that panel. They focus on the original Skandapurana, which lends itself well to a study of the origins and growth of the Purana texts and the religious developments that they reflect. This is due to exceptional circumstances: in addition to the earlier available text corpus of Khandas that have been published under the common title of Skandapurana (or assigned to this work), it is now possible to study this Purana in three different recensions. The oldest recension is attested in three 9th-century manuscripts from Nepal. The first exploration of these sources led to the preliminary observations published in 1998 in the Prolegomena to the edition of Adhyayas 1 to 25 of the original Skandapurana. The contents of the present volume may be seen as a continuation of that work.