Vayu Purana

The Vayu Purana (Sanskrit: वायु पुराण, Vāyu Purāṇa) is a Sanskrit text and one of the eighteen major Puranas of Hinduism. It belongs to the Shaivism literature corpus.

Vayu Purana is mentioned in the manuscripts of the Mahabharata and other Hindu texts, which has led scholars to propose that the text is among the oldest in the Puranic genre. However, the identity of this text, particularly from the Shiva Purana or Vayaviya Purana, has long been a source of confusion since the 19th-century. Later scholarship has established that Vayu and Shiva Puranas are two different texts, but regionally only one of them was considered as a Maha-purana. Vayu and Vayaviya Puranas do share a very large overlap in their structure and contents, possibly because they once were the same, but with continuous revisions over the centuries, the original text became two different texts, and the Vayaviya text came also to be known as the Brahmanda Purana.

The Vayu Purana, according to the tradition and verses in other Puranas, contains 24,000 verses (shlokas). However, the surviving manuscripts have about 12,000 verses. The text was continuously revised over the centuries, and its extant manuscripts are very different. Some manuscripts have four padas (parts) with 112 chapters, and some two khandas with 111 chapters. Comparisons of the diverse manuscripts suggest that the following sections were slipped, in later centuries, into the more ancient Vayu Purana: chapters on geographic and temples-related Mahatmya (travel guides), two chapters on castes and individual ashramas, three chapters on Dharma and penances, eleven chapters on purity and Sanskara (rite of passage) and a chapter on hell in after-life.

The text is notable for the numerous references to it, in medieval era Indian literature, likely links to inscriptions such as those found on the Mathura pillar and dated to 380 CE, as well as being a source for carvings and reliefs such as those at the Elephanta Caves – a UNESCO world heritage site.

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