Almost everyone knows about the Bible and the Koran as the sacred texts of the two most common denominations. However, few people have heard of the Garuda Purana, widespread in India.
What is this sacred text, what religion does it belong to, what does it tell, you will learn from this article.
What is this?
Garuda Purana is a sacred text belonging to Hinduism. It touches on many topics, but is most fully revealed:
- Reasons for reincarnation.
- The meaning of the existence of the circle of rebirths.
- The fate of the human soul depends on life.
- Rites for the deceased.
Garuda Purana is still used by Hindus as the book of the dead. During funeral rites, people read texts from it. Also, according to the Garuda Purana, they follow the rites and rules of burial, which are described in the book.
The peculiarity of this book is that it teaches a person the "correct" death with all the proper rites and rituals. Through the skill of conscious death, promisesVishnu in the book, a person learns not only to know life, but also builds a spiritual connection with many mysterious beings who are ready to help the student. Also, through the "right death" a person gets the opportunity to know the meaning and power of evolution.
Meaning of the name
Garuda is the name of Vishnu's vahana, a huge bird. Presumably a crow.
"Vahana" is translated from Sanskrit as "to saddle", "to ride". Used to refer to a mount, so Garuda is the mount of the god.
Purana is a text from ancient India, written in Sanskrit. It mainly represents the lives of heroes, monks and kings, a description of physical phenomena and an attempt to explain them, philosophical and cosmological reflections. Such texts were written in the form of informative and instructive stories.
So it turns out that this book is a story-admonition to Garuda, the riding crow of the supreme god Vishnu.
History
The book has received many positive reviews during its existence. Garuda Purana Sarodhara, according to the compiler, can be considered the core of the wisdom of the Vedic scriptures.
The current version of the Purana was compiled by Navanidhirama. He did a tremendous job so that even people who do not understand anything in the Vedic worldview could understand what the work says. Compiling this version of the ancient Purana required a long study of the sacred texts and their revision.
Thisone of the later Vedic books, the earliest parts of which were compiled in the fourth century AD. Decoration lasted until the tenth century AD.
Volume of product
The calculation of the volume of the Purana is made not according to the pages we are used to, but according to the slokas.
Shloka is the size of the verse. Includes thirty-two syllables. It looks like a couplet with sixteen syllables in each line. The famous Mahabharata, Narayaniyam and many others were written in slokas.
Garuda Purana includes 19,000 slokas. Many people think that this is a lot. However, the Garuda Purana is considered medium in size.
Contents
Garuda Purana consists of three parts:
- Achara-kanda, or Karma-kanda includes a list of rules and norms of human behavior during life, and also speaks of punishments for certain sins. Has a chapter in which ways are given for recognizing sinful deeds.
- Preta-kanda, or Dharma-kanda speaks about the soul of the deceased, touches on the topic of gifts for him and rituals.
- Brahma-kanda, or Moksha-kanda tells about the ultimate goal of reincarnations, exit from the cycle of rebirths. He also talks about how souls are distributed during reincarnation, about the differences between a new life for a sinner with negative karma and for a righteous person with positive karma.
The book also covers the following topics:
- Astronomy.
- Medicine.
- Sanskrit grammar.
- Physics of gemstones: their qualities, properties, structure.
Therefore, the work cannot be considered exclusively spiritual, because this Purana may have served as an unusual textbook in many disciplines.
Garuda Purana Sarodhara: Selected Chapters
The book contains the following chapters:
- About the torments of sinners in all worlds.
- The path of Yama, the god who renounced immortality.
- A story of torment in the Yama world.
- List of sins that lead to hell.
- How to recognize sin.
- The birth of a sinner and his torment.
- The sacrament of Babhruvahan for the deceased.
- Gifts for those on their deathbeds.
- Rites for those on their deathbed.
- Collecting bones from flames.
- A 10-day ceremony.
- Ceremony for Day 11.
- Ancestral Remembrance Ceremony.
- About the city of the King of Justice.
- The fate of the souls of the righteous.
- How to get out of the chain of rebirths.
There are several translations of this Purana: in semi-poetic form and in prose form. You can also find books in which prose translation is adjacent to explanations and comments from the translator. Such a work is ideal for those who are not familiar with Vedic literature at all.
Two-faced death in India
According to the Indian worldview, death has two "faces", two meanings:
- Final break, full stop. After death, a person finds himself in a world completely alien to him, he is unfamiliar with him and is afraid of him.
- Transformation, rebirth. In this case, death is no longer presented as something frightening,it's just a threshold. A person is already familiar with the rules of the afterlife, because he knew her time allotted to him. He is not a baby and is not helpless in it, he has nothing to fear.
This is where the meaning of the Garuda Purana as the book of death comes into play. She teaches a person how to behave in the afterlife, how to pass for "one's own" and not be confused after death.
The book also contains rituals that the living must perform so that the souls of the dead do not get lost, do not go astray. Thus, the living still have the opportunity to help their departed relatives.
Purana: Meaning
Garuda Purana presents death as a threshold state for the transition to another world. The book contains all the rituals that people must go through for successful reincarnation and a comfortable life in the afterlife before it.
The Purana also talks about what happens to the human soul after death.
The fact is that with the spread of atheism, the norm of morality has shifted. People stopped believing not only in gods and a blissful life after death, but also in mandatory punishment for bad deeds. Atheists can rely solely on their own concepts of "good" and "bad", which do not always agree with the opinions of other people. Not a single spiritual book stands above atheists, in which norms of behavior are predetermined.
Vedic book Garuda Purana recalls the need for morality. It gives a clear list of sins, forwhich the soul can go to hell.
An interesting feature of Hinduism can be considered that the stay in hell of the soul has its own term. For each sin, a certain number of days or years are added, just like in the laws we are used to. The soul that has served its punishment in hell is released, allowed to a new cycle of rebirth to earn karma.
Reincarnation - what is it?
What does the Garuda Purana say about reincarnation?
In the book, Vishnu says that the soul must strive to break out of the circle of rebirth. The cycle of reincarnation is presented as a kind of prison for the immortal spirit, fetters that only he himself can throw off.
The Purana gives methods for breaking the chain of rebirth. In fact, the book provides a full account and instruction on how to achieve this in the last chapters.
However, in order to want to break out of the cycle of reincarnation, a person must first understand that this is necessary. To do this, the principles of the work of karma and the karmic wheel are given in the Garuda Purana. The book also talks about what happens to souls after death, how their new life is determined.
Most of the Purana is devoted to descriptions of sinful deeds and punishments for them. According to Vishnu, a person should have an idea of what they can punish and what they will praise for.
However, even the most beautiful gifts for positive karma are presented as "hurting", since they are all temporary. And having lost these gifts, a person will be forced to suffer again. Andthe only way to get rid of it is to get out of the cycle of rebirth.