The Puranas and the Agamas: Hindu Texts of Story and Temple Worship

The Puranas are the overview for everything that follows: eighteen Mahapuranas plus many subordinate and local temple Puranas, composed over roughly the third to the sixteenth centuries CE and addressed to everyone rather than to Sanskrit specialists.

The Vishnu Purana is among the most systematically organized Mahapuranas, setting out Vaishnava cosmology, the cycles of time in kalpas, manvantaras and yugas, and royal genealogies, with a shorter account of Krishna that later Puranas expand.

The Bhagavata Purana expands that Krishna story, especially in its tenth book on his childhood and life, and its insistence that loving devotion is the whole of the path shaped the bhakti movements that followed.

The Markandeya Purana is framed as the sage Markandeya answering the sage Jaimini on difficulties in the Mahabharata, and it embeds the Devi Mahatmya, the hymn cycle of Durga defeating the buffalo demon Mahishasura.

The Agni Purana, spoken by the god Agni to the sage Vasishtha, is the most encyclopedic of the Mahapuranas, reaching from temple architecture and image consecration to statecraft, medicine, grammar and poetics.

The Garuda Purana is best known for its later section on the soul after death, funerary and memorial rites, and the hell realms and the judgment of Yama, and reciting that section remains a living funerary custom.

The Skanda Purana is by far the longest Mahapurana and survives as sprawling regional recensions, dominated by extended praises of pilgrimage sites across the subcontinent.

The Shaiva Agamas turn from story to practice: a corpus traditionally reckoned at twenty eight scriptures held to be revealed by Shiva, setting out Shaiva Siddhanta theology together with initiation, temple worship and daily rites that still govern many Shiva temples in South India.

The Kamika Agama is one of the twenty eight Shaiva Siddhanta Agamas, valued in South Indian temple practice for its detailed prescriptions on temple construction, image consecration and daily worship, and studied from several regional manuscript recensions.

The Vaikhanasa Agamas carry the same temple ritual idea into Vaishnavism: ritual manuals presenting themselves as a continuation of Vedic sacrifice, and the system followed at the Venkateswara Temple at Tirupati.