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Shiva Purana

Religious text in Hinduism

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The Shiva Purana, like other Puranas in Hindu literature, was likely a living text, which was routinely edited, recast and revised over a long period of time. The Shiva Purana asserts that it once consisted of 100,000 verses set out in twelve Samhitas (Books); however, the Purana adds that it was abridged by Sage Vyasa before being taught to Romaharshana. The surviving manuscripts exist in many different versions and content, with one major version with seven books (traced to South India), another with six books, while the third version traced to the medieval Bengal region of the Indian subcontinent with no books but two large sections called Purva-Khanda (Previous Section) and Uttara-Khanda (Later Section). The two versions that include books, differ in how they title the books. The oldest manuscript of surviving texts was likely composed, estimates Klaus Klostermaier, around 10th- to 11th-century CE. Some chapters of currently surviving Shiva Purana manuscripts were likely composed after the 14th-century.

The Shiva Purana contains chapters with Shiva-centered cosmology, and relationship between gods, ethics, yoga, tirtha (pilgrimage) sites, bhakti, rivers and geography, and other topics. The text is an important source of historic information on different types and theology behind Shaivism in early 2nd-millennium CE. The oldest surviving chapters of the Shiva Purana have significant Advaita Vedanta philosophy, which is mixed in with theistic elements of bhakti.

In the 19th and 20th century, the Vayu Purana was sometimes titled as Shiva Purana, and sometimes proposed as a part of the complete Shiva Purana. With the discovery of more manuscripts, modern scholarship considers the two texts as different, with Vayu Purana as the more older text composed sometime before the 2nd-century CE. Some scholars list it as a Mahapurana, while some state it is an Upapurana.

Date

The date and authors of Shiva Purana are unknown. No authentic data is available. Scholars such as Klostermaier estimate that the oldest chapters in the surviving manuscript were likely composed around the 10- to 11th-centuries CE, which has not stood the test of carbon dating technology hence on that part we must rely on the text itself which tells when it was composed. Certain books and chapters in currently surviving Shiva Purana manuscripts were likely composed later, some after the 14th-century. The Shiva Purana, like other Puranas in Hindu literature, were routinely edited, recast and revised over the centuries.

Hazra states that the Bombay manuscript published in the 19th-century is rarer, and is likely older than other versions published from eastern and southern India.

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PinyinRomanization scheme for Standard ChineseHindusAdherents of HinduismTraditional Chinese charactersStandardized set of Chinese charactersLiteral translationWord-for-word translation of a textReligionSocial-cultural systemTheologyStudy of the nature of deities and religious beliefs