page_title: Brahma Vaivarta Purana
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: Brahma Vaivarta Purana / Reception
caption_attribution_description: English: Krishna-radha ardhanari
context_page_description: The Brahmavaivarta Purana is a voluminous Sanskrit text and a major Purana of Hinduism. It centers around Krishna and Radha, is a Vaishnavism text, and is considered one of the modern era Purana.
  Although a version may have existed in late 1st millennium CE, its extant version was likely composed in the 15th or 16th-century in the Bengal region of Indian subcontinent. Another text, with a similar-sounding title, called Brahmakaivarta Purana also exists, is related, but was likely revised somewhere in South India. Numerous versions of this Purana exist, in up to 274 or 276 chapters, all claiming to be either part of, or manuscripts of the Brahmavaivarta Purana or the Brahmakaivarta Purana.
  The text is notable for identifying Krishna as the supreme Reality and asserting that all gods such as Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma, Ganesha are same, and all are incarnations of Krishna. All goddesses such as Radha, Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Savitri are also asserted by the Brahmavaivarta Purana to be equivalent and all incarnations of Prakruti, with legends similar to those found in the Mahabharata and the Devi Mahatmya.
context_section_description: The Brahmavaivarta Purana focuses on Vishnu and in particular Krishna like the Bhagavata Purana, but its stories and legends have been far less popular than the Bhagavata text. Its style has been called "insipid, puerile", and its content and layout of a form so different from the other Puranas that Wilson wrote, "the Brahmavaivarta Purana has not the slightest title to be regarded as a Purana".
  In contrast to Wilson's views, Parmeshwaranand states that this a bhakti text oriented towards a mystical experience, and the text in its own way, tries to discuss religious and philosophical questions as in other religious works, that is of duality and non-duality between God and the world.
  The Brahmavaivarta Purana emphasizes the unity, interdependence and inseparability of the feminine and the masculine, through Radha and Krishna, across its various chapters, and through the concept of Ardhanari-Krishna (also called Ardha-radha-venudhara-murti), a concept similar to Ardhanarishvara in Shaivism. This idea of Purana has been traced to an art work found in Maharashtra where Krishna murti is sculpted as half man and half woman. The first part, Brahma-khanda of the Brahmavaivarta Purana was translated into Assamese, and this manuscript has been dated to the early 19th century.
  The text is part of the Vaishnavism literature in Bengal, but is not considered a canonical scripture, states Edward Dimock.
caption: Ardhanari-Krishna.
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