page_title: Garuda Purana
section_title: Structure
hierarchical_section_title: Garuda Purana / Structure
caption_attribution_description: English: Vishnu and Lakshmi on Garuda. Hoysala, 12th century, from Halebid. Delhi National Museum, India.
context_page_description: The Garuda Purana is one of 18 Mahāpurāṇ of texts in Hinduism. It is a part of Vaishnavism literature corpus, primarily centering around Hindu god Vishnu praises all gods. Composed in Sanskrit, the earliest version of the text may have been composed in the first millennium BCE, but it was likely expanded and changed over a long period of time.
  The Garuda Purana text is known in many versions, contains 16000 verses. Its chapters encyclopedically deal with a highly diverse collection of topics.
context_section_description: The Garuda Purana is a Vaishnava Purana and has, according to the tradition, 19,000 shlokas (verses). However, the manuscripts that have survived into the modern era have preserved about eight thousand verses. These are divided into two parts, a Purva Khanda (early section) and an Uttara Khanda (later section). The Purva Khanda contains about 229 chapters, but in some versions of the text this section has between 240–243 chapters.  The Uttara Khanda varies between 34 and 49 chapters. The Uttara Khanda is more often known as Pretakhanda or Pretakalpa.
  The Garuda Purana was likely fashioned after the Agni Purana, the other major medieval India encyclopedia that has survived.  The text's structure is idiosyncratic, in that it is a medley, and does not follow the theoretical structure expected in a historic Puranic genre of Indian literature. It is presented as information learned from Vishnu by Garuda (the man-bird vehicle of Vishnu), and then narrated by Garuda to sage Kashyapa, which then spread in the mythical forest of Naimisha reaching sage Vyasa.
caption: The text revolves around Vishnu, as recited by Garuda. Above: Vishnu and Lakshmi on Garuda (Delhi National Museum).
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