Skandapurana 5.226

Yudhiṣṭhira said: / Having heard the nature of the hells, fear has come upon me. / How can there be liberation for these sins, O king, / through vows, observances, oblations, or resort to sacred fords?

Bhīṣma said: / For those men whose bones happen to be cast into the Gaṅgā here, / the fire of hell cannot overpower them, even if they dwell in its midst.

Those in whose name a śrāddha is performed in the Gaṅgā by their own sons / board an aerial chariot and go above hell.

If, having committed a sin, they perform expiation as prescribed, / or give gold, O king, hell does not befall them.

The rest experience heaven or hell as appropriate, O ruler of men, / through the attainment of [the fruits of] their own actions.

Those who die in the sacred ford of the sword's edge, standing before their master, / go to the supreme abode, far away from the hells.

He who casts off his own body in Vārāṇasī, Kurukṣetra, Naimiṣa, the city of the Nāgaras, / Prayāga, or Prabhāsa, / does not see hell, even if possessed of great sins.

He whose son employs a dark-blue bull at his [ceremonial] marriage / does not behold hell, even if he is a slayer of a brahmin.

A man who casts off his vital breaths by undertaking a fast unto death, / with Janārdana situated in his heart, does not see hell.

And those who undertake a fast unto death in the abode of Citreśvara / never go to hell at all.

He who always gives food, in season or out of season, / to the distressed, the blind, the wretched, / to those fatigued by the road, and to those intent on pilgrimage, does not see hell.

And he who gives a water-cow when the sun is in Taurus, / and a sesame-cow when it is in Capricorn, does not see hell.

On a Monday, and especially during a lunar eclipse, by darśana of Somanātha / and bathing in the ocean and the Sarasvatī, one does not go to hell.

He who goes on a Sunday to the Sannihitī [pool] in Kurukṣetra / when the sun is seized by Rāhu does not see hell.

He who performs circumambulation in silence of Tripuṣkara / on the full moon of Kārttika under the conjunction with Kṛttikā does not see hell.

Those who behold Caṇḍīśa at the Makara-saṅkrānti / when it occurs on a Sunday do not go to hell.

And those who deliver a cow from mud, a brahmin woman from servitude, / good people from a thief, and a twice-born from murder, O king, do not go to hell.

All this has been explained to you, as I was asked, O ruler of men: / how a person does not go to hell by his own action, / and how a man, even with slight sin, goes to hell.

Thus ends the two hundred twenty-seventh chapter, entitled 'Description of the Means to Avert the Torments of Hell' in the dialogue between Bhīṣma and Yudhiṣṭhira, in the Rules for Śrāddha, in the Māhātmya of the Hāṭakeśvara Sacred Field, in the Nāgarakhaṇḍa, the sixth [part] in the Mahāpurāṇa of eighty-one thousand verses, the glorious Skandapurāṇa.