Kurma Purana

The Kurma Purana (IAST: KūrmaPurāṇa) is one of the eighteen Mahapuranas, and a medieval era Vaishnavism text of Hinduism. The text is named after the tortoise avatar of Vishnu.

The manuscripts of Kurma Purana have survived into the modern era in many versions. The number of chapters vary with regional manuscripts, and the critical edition of the Kurma Purana has 95 chapters. Tradition believes that the Kurma Purana text had 17,000 verses, the extant manuscripts have about 6,000 verses.

The text, states Ludo Rocher, is the most interesting of all the Puranas in its discussion of religious ideas, because while it is a Vaishnavism text, Vishnu does not dominate the text. Instead, the text covers and expresses reverence for Vishnu, Shiva and Shakti with equal enthusiasm. The Kurma Purana, like other Puranas, includes legends, mythology, geography, Tirtha (pilgrimage), theology and a philosophical Gita. The notable aspect of its Gita, also called the Ishvaragita, is that it is Shiva who presents ideas similar to those found in the Bhagavad Gita.

The original core of the text may have been composed about the start of the 8th-century CE, and revised thereafter over the centuries.

The Kurma Purana, like all Puranas, has a complicated chronology. Dimmitt and van Buitenen state that each of the Puranas is encyclopedic in style, and it is difficult to ascertain when, where, why and by whom these were written:

As they exist today, the Puranas are a stratified literature. Each titled work consists of material that has grown by numerous accretions in successive historical eras. Thus no Purana has a single date of composition. (...) It is as if they were libraries to which new volumes have been continuously added, not necessarily at the end of the shelf, but randomly.

The Kurma Purana exists in many versions, but all of them consist of two parts - the Purva-vibhaga (older part) and Upari-vibhaga (upper part). The number of chapters vary with the manuscripts. The critical edition of the different manuscripts contains fifty one chapters in Purva-vibhaga and forty four in Upari-vibhaga.

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