Books · Sahitya - Literature

The Skanda-Purana Part 4

Haraprasad Shastri and Cecil Bendall

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ShrutSangam GyanBhandars JainTatvaGyanshala

The Skanda Purana is a huge compilation of ancient Hindu scriptures. They were discovered in a library in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 1898 by Haraprasad Shastri and Cecil Bendall. The manuscripts were written on palm leafs, the oldest one dated to 810 CE. However, earlier versions are likely to have existed. Parts of the text have also been found in Tamil Nadu and other parts of India, indicating that the Skanda Purana has been an important and widespread corpus of texts. The complete Skanda Purana covers many topics. Parts of it describes pilgrim routes and serves as travel guides for monks to important temples and monasteries all over India. Other parts are more devotional and discusses theology, dharma and the absolute. The mythology also takes up large parts of the book, the name Skanda Purana refers to the war God Skanda (Kartikeya) son of Shiva. The Skanda Purana consists of 20 books, here they are in the English translation. This version is the first edition of the English translation published in India in 1950. I have removed blank pages from the scanned books to make the file size smaller and punished my CPU for 14 hours by running OCR. This means that you can do research by text search in the books now with Adobe PDF reader, copy and paste to other formats etc. Read more