The Vishnu Purana
translated by Horace Hayman Wilson
The Vishnu Purana is a primary sacred text of the Vaishnava branch of Hinduism, which today probably has more adherents than any other. It is one of the canonical Puranas, a branch of post-Vedic sacred literature which was first committed to writing during the first millennium of the common era. Like most of the other Puranas, this is a complete narrative from the creation of the current universe to its destruction. The chronology describes periods as long as a hundred trillion (1014) years! It includes extensive sections on the genealogy of the legendary kings, heroes and demigods of ancient India, including those from the epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana. There are fascinating descriptions of ancient Hindu cosmology and geography. Of general interest is a collection of stories about the boyhood adventures of Krishna and Rama, whom the Vaishnavas believe to be avatars of Vishnu. There are also references to Buddhism and Jainism, which help establish the date of composition of the work.
This is the first time that this work has appeared on the Internet in any form. H.H. Wilson was one of the first European scholars to produce a scholarly translation of a major Hindu sacred text. His translation employs clear English which modern readers will find very readable. There is very little of the pseudo-King James style, loved by 19th century orientalists (and loathed by modern scholars). The footnotes are extensive and very helpful, with comprehensive notes correlating the Vishnu Purana with other Puranas and Hindu texts. Unfortunately, good editions of this translation have largely been unavailable in print for many years. There are some re-typeset and heavily edited versions printed in India, of dubious quality, which I can't recommend. The copytext for this etext was a very expensive photographic reproduction of the original 1840 edition. This is part of a reprint series which may be obtainable from some larger urban and academic libraries.
Production notes: As per site policy, I have attempted to match the printed edition's transliteration of Sanskrit exactly. This uses Unicode, so if you have trouble viewing some of the letters in this text, please refer to the Unicode help file. Wilson used a very simple transliteration system, just an acute accent for both long vowels and alternate consonants. He does not distinguish between the dental, palatal and anusvara variants of 'n', but this will only bother the sanscritologists. Although he applied this scheme fairly consistently, there are numerous variations in the transliteration of less-common Sanskrit proper nouns (particularly in the Index). I have not attempted to correct any of these variations except for a few obvious errors, which are indicated in the usual way by links to my errata file.
There were numerous passages and words in the footnotes in Devanagari (the Sanskrit alphabet). I have created image files for these in the Preface. There were far too many of these in the body text to reproduce as images. So I have silently edited Devanagari out from the main text, altering punctuation where necessary. In most cases where he supplies a passage in Devanagari, he translates it in the immediate vicinity, so omitting these does not lose any information. In the rare case where such an omission would change the meaning of a sentence, I have inserted the placeholder '###' to indicate where a word or phrase in Devanagari was positioned.
While proofing the Index, many errors in page references were silently corrected so that the page hyperlinks would work correctly. There are doubtless other remaining page number errors in the Index, some from OCR errors (the OCR software I use, OmniPage, has trouble recognizing digits in older typeset text), some, typically, in the copytext, so this part of the etext should be considered provisional. However, the body text has been subjected to three proof passes, so every effort has been made to produce a very accurate etext.
--John Bruno Hare, March 15th, 2006.