The Garuda Mahapuranam: Sanskrit Text with English Translation and Notes (In 2 Volumes)

The present English translation by M.N. Dutt was written and published hundred years before. Shri M.N. Dutt translated into English many Purans and the Garuda Purana was one of them. It was first published in the year 1908. Then it was re-printed. Now the book is publishing its English translation with Sanskrit text. It is a medium size Purana consisting eight thousand verses. According to M.N. Dutt the book comprises three Samhitas viz. the Agastya Samhita, the Brhaspati Samhita (Nitisara) and the Dhanvantari Samhita. Each one of those Samhitas would give it a permanent value, and accord to it an undyeing fame among the works of practical ethics or applied medicine. The Agastya Samhita deals with the formation, crystallisation and distgisestive. Traits of the different precious gems and enumerates the names of the countries from which our fore-fathers used to collect these gems. The cutting, polishing, setting and apprecising etc. of several kind of gems and diamond, as they were practiced in ancient India, cannot but be interesting to artists and lay men, and the scientific traders unbedded in the highly poetic accounts of these original gems.  In his translation of Garuda Purana, M.N. Dutt has abandoned the Preta Khanda of the Purana which has been appended. It is a later addition to the Purana. He says ‘Garuda-Purana’ is one of the scriptured Puranas of Vaisnavism, and the Preta Khanda which we find in variously appended to the Purana in many of the manuscripts does not reflect the necessity of subsequently adding to it a treatise on funeral rites or on punishment and reward after death. It is only to enhance the utility of the work as a book of reference in everyday life. It requests nothing more than an average intellect to detect that the part under reference (Preta-Khanda) is manifestly an interpolation, in as much as the subject had already dealt with in the chapters on. Thus the insertion of a more detailed and elaborate dissertation on the subject under style of Preta-Khanda, is an unnecessary repetition, which is bad in reason and rhetoric.