Almost everyone knows about the Bible and the Qur'an as the sacred texts of the two most common denominations. However, few have heard of the Garuda Purana prevalent in India.
What this sacred text is, what religion it belongs to, and what it is about, you will learn from this article.
What it is?
Garuda Purana is a sacred text belonging to Hinduism. It touches on many topics, but the most fully disclosed:
- Reasons for reincarnation.
- The meaning of the existence of a circle of rebirths.
- The fate of the human soul depends on life.
- Rites for the deceased.
Garuda Purana is still used by Hindus as a book of the dead. During funeral rites, people read texts from it. Also, according to the Garuda Purana, the rites and rules of burial are followed, which are described in the book.
The peculiarity of this book is that it teaches a person the "right" death with all the relying rites and rituals. Through the skill of deliberate demise, Vishnu promises in the book, a person learns not only to know life, but also builds a spiritual connection with many mysterious creatures who are ready to help the student. Also, through "right death" a person gets the opportunity to know the meaning and power of evolution.
Name Meaning
Garuda is the name of the Wahana Vishnu, a huge bird. Crow supposedly.
"Wahana" in Sanskrit translates as "saddle," "go." Used to denote a mount, so Garuda is the mount of God.
Purana is a text from ancient India, written in Sanskrit. Basically it is the life 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-telling to Garude, the riding raven of the highest god Vishnu.
Story
The book during its existence has received many positive reviews. Garuda-purana-sarodhara, according to the compiler, can be considered the core of the wisdom of the Vedic scriptures.
The current version of the Puranas was Navanidhirama. He did a tremendous job so that even those who do not understand anything in the Vedic worldview could understand what the work says. To compile this version of the ancient Purana, it took a long study of the sacred texts and their processing.
This is one of the most recent Vedic books, the earliest parts of it were formed in the fourth century AD. The decoration lasted until the tenth century AD.
Volume of work
Calculation of the volume of Puranas is made not by the pages familiar to us, but by slokas.
Sloka is the size of a verse. Includes thirty two syllables. It looks like a couplet with sixteen syllables in each line. The famous Mahabharata, Indications and many others are written in slokas.
Garuda Purana includes 19,000 slokas. Many will think that is a lot. Nevertheless, the Garuda Purana book is considered average in volume.
Content
Garuda Purana consists of three parts:
- Achara-kanda, or Karma-kanda, includes a list of rules and norms of human behavior in life, and also talks about punishments for certain transgressions. It has a chapter in which methods are given for recognizing sinful acts.
- Preta-kanda, or Dharma-kanda, speaks of the soul of the deceased, touches on the subject of gifts for him and rites.
- Brahma-kanda, or Moksha-kanda, tells of the ultimate goal of reincarnation, the exit from the cycle of rebirth. He also talks about how souls are distributed during reincarnation, about the differences of a new life for a sinner with negative karma and for a righteous with positive.
The book also covers the following topics:
- Astronomy.
- The medicine.
- Grammar of Sanskrit.
- Physics of precious stones: their qualities, properties, structure.
Therefore, one cannot consider the work 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 torment of sinners in all worlds.
- The path of the Pit - a god who renounced immortality.
- The story of the torment in the world of the Pit.
- List of sins leading to hell.
- How to recognize sin.
- The birth of a sinner and his torment.
- Sacrament of Babhruvahan for the deceased.
- Gifts for those on their deathbed.
- Rites for those on their deathbed.
- Collecting bones from a flame.
- The ceremony is 10 days long.
- The ceremony for the 11th day.
- 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 a semi-poetic form and in the form of prose. You can also find books in which the prosaic translation is adjacent to the 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:
- The final break, point, completion. After death, a person enters a world completely alien to him, he is unfamiliar with him and is afraid of him.
- Transfiguration, rebirth. In this case, death is no longer presented as something frightening, it is 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 not helpless in her; he has nothing to fear.
It is here that Garuda Purana manifests its significance as a book of death. She teaches a person how to behave in the afterlife, how to pass for "their own" and not be confused after death.
The book also contains the rituals that must be performed by the living so that the souls of the dead do not get lost, do not go astray. Thus, the living remains 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 speaks of what happens to a person’s soul after death.
The fact is that with the spread of atheism the moral norm has shifted. People ceased to believe not only in gods and a blissful life after death, but also in mandatory punishment for evil deeds. Atheists can rely solely on their own concepts of “good” and “bad”, which do not always agree with the opinions of other people. Above atheists there is not a single spiritual book in which the norms of behavior are spelled out in advance.
The Vedic book of Garuda Purana recalls the need for morality. It contains a clear list of sins for which the soul may go to hell.
An interesting feature of Hinduism can be considered that the presence in the hell of the soul has its own term. For each sin a certain number of days or years is added, just as in the laws customary to us. A soul that has served its punishment in hell is freed, is admitted to a new cycle of rebirth to accumulate karma.
Reincarnation - what is it?
What does Garuda Purana write about reincarnation?
In the book of Vishnu it is narrated that the soul should strive to break out of the circle of rebirth. The cycle of reincarnation is presented as a kind of prison for an immortal spirit, fetters that only he can throw off.
In Purana, methods are given for breaking the chain of rebirths. In fact, the book provides a full report and instructions 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. For this, the principles of the karma and the karmic wheel are given in Garuda Purana. The book also talks about what happens to souls after death, how their new life is determined.
Most of the Puranas are reserved for descriptions of sinful acts and punishments for them. According to Vishnu, a person should have an idea of what they can punish and for which they will praise.
However, even the most beautiful gifts for positive karma are presented as “wounded,” since they are all temporary. And having lost these gifts, a person will be forced to suffer again. And the only way to get rid of this is to get out of the circle of rebirths.