Fwd: Free Download of Skanda purana in English
V Subrahmanian
From: V Subrahmanian <v.subra...@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Feb 19, 2021 at 12:03 PM
Subject: Free Download of Skanda purana in English
To: BHARATIYA VIDVAT <bvpar...@googlegroups.com>
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. Download the free PDF e-books here (large files up to 60MB and 600 pages each):
Subu S
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V Subrahmanian
On Fri, 19 Feb 2021, V Subrahmanian via Advaita-l wrote:
> Writes the Uploader, of the efforts:
>
> The Skanda Purana is a huge compilation of ancient Hindu scriptures
> 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.
This requires some clarification. The Skandapurana was certainly not
discovered in 1898. What Haraprasad Shastri discovered was an early
manuscript of an earlier stage of development of the Purana.
Unlike some shastras like the Vedas which whose transmission was very
meticulously guarded, in the Puranas there has been a lot of
interpolation of other material. (Not necessarily newer material.) At
one extreme we have e.g. the Bhagavata Purana. Of its' 338 adhyayas there
is doubt about only 3. On the other side we have e.g. the Skanda Purana
which is voluminous and contains everything from Shaiva and Advaita
leaning works such as Kashi Khanda and Suta Samhita to Vaishnava leaning
ones such as Vasudeva Mahatmya and Satyanaraya Katha. Many other tirtha
mahatmyas and sthala puranas are also considered part of it.
In recent years there has been a German-Nepali joint venture that has
been cataloguing and preserving manuscripts in the Kathmandu valley and
they have discovered serveral more early manuscripts of the Skandapurana.
This isn't that. It looks like the uploader is not aware of such things
and merely copied some text from the wikipedia article on skanda purana
which like most wikipedia articles on Hinduism is rather mediocre.
--
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jal...@braincells.com>