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CHAPTER V SOME LOST SAURA AND VAISNAVA UPAPURANAS For more than two thousand years the Puranas have constituted a living literature in India, being intended to guide the common people in their religious and social life in different ages and also sometimes in different localities. The political changes and religious movements, which ancient and mediaeval India experienced not infrequently, could not be expected to allow the life of the people to remain static, but great care was taken by the Brahmins to preserve as far as possible the Vedic basis of religion and society under changed circumstances. As it was not possible for these leaders of the Hindu society to ignore totally the environments and the influence of the age, they had often to make a compromise between the old and the new life, and this spirit of compromise was responsible for the total extinction of some of the Puranic works and for changes and modifications in others. Among the principal Puranas the genuine Brahma, Brahmavarivarta and Garuda-purana are still untraceable, the present Puranas of the same titles being spurious works of later dates. The loss sustained by the Upapurana literature also is not negligible, and this will be evident from the number and nature of the extinct works treated of in the following pages and in the other Volumes of the present work. Of these extinct Upapuranas, not a single is now found to exist in manuscripts or printed forms. Isolated verses or extracts from some of these Upapuranas have been preserved as quotations in the Smrti Nibandhas, but the rest are known merely by name either from the lists of Upapuranas contained in the Puranic and other works, or from the treatises on Vrata, Mahatmya, etc. which claim to be parts of these. It is, however, not quite impossible that manuscripts will be discovered some day of one or more of these Upapuranas which we now take to be extinct. Our highly imperfect knowledge of the vast area of India and the literary activities of her people in the different ages of her history, stands seriously in the way of our preparing an exhaustive list of the

SOME LOST SAURA AND VAISNAVA UPAPURANAS 347 lost Upapuranas. So, we have been compelled to limit our treatment of these lost works only to those few Upapuranas which have been named, described or drawn upon in various works, especially in those of the Purana and the Smrti literature. Of these few works, again, we supply information, in the following pages, only about those which have been known to have belonged definitely to the Sauras and the Vaisnavas. The former sectaries, as the Bhavisya-purana indicates, began their literary activity quite early, but their output was very scanty unlike that of the Vaisnavas, whose numerical strength has been balanced by their zealous literary activity in all ages. We shall now record our information about the extinct Saura and Vaisnava Upapuranas separately in two groups (A) and (B).