Vishnu Purana

The Vishnu Purana is among the oldest and most orderly of the eighteen Mahapuranas — Vishnu’s cosmology, avatars, and royal genealogies in six books of some seven thousand verses.

Content

Book one gives creation and the mantvanteras; books two and three the geography of the world (the bhuvana-kosha, with its Jambudvipa maps) and the Vedas’ transmission; book four the great royal genealogies — solar and lunar lines down to the Kali age; books five and six Krishna’s life and the age’s dissolution with the Kalki promise. The whole is framed as Parashara’s teaching to Maitreya, with Vishnu as the one reality underlying the worlds’ cycles.

Significance

The Vishnu Purana is the classic source for the avatar doctrine’s classical shape (the dashavatara list) and for the Puranic cosmology and chronology (yugas, manvantaras, kalpas) that structured Hindu historical imagination. Alberuni drew on it in the 11th century; every later Vaishnava synthesis quotes it.

Verification notes

• Composition is layered; scholars place the earliest core in the first centuries CE and the final redaction before c. 900.
• Audited against Wikipedia (September 2026).