ABSTRACT
Purāṇa is a general term used to refer to a large number of religious texts, most of them composed in Sanskrit, which defy ready description, classification, authorship, or dating. Despite this obvious difficulty, efforts to assign authorship, classify, date, and describe them have been made both within the Hindu tradition and outside the tradition by modern scholars. This chapter is an effort to present the indigenous concepts of the Purāṇa and to provide a brief overview of modern scholarship on the Purāṇas.
