History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v7.c90.65.3

v7.c90.65.3

Hazra), where while admitting (p 14) that in the Upapurāṇa litarature there are works of comparatively late dates, he boldly states that the age of the Upapurāṇas began approximately from the Gupta period (p. 16) For this last statement there is absolutely no evidence whatever. A detailed discussion of the dates of all the Upapurāṇas would demand a large space and would be somewhat irrelevant in this section. We must hold fast by the facts that even when the 18 principal purāṇas assumed their present form, the number of Upapurāṇas was small, that they were looked upon as no more than abridgments or summaries of the principal Purāṇas, that the Purāṇas that mention upapurāṇas do not state that they were composed by the divinely inspired Vyāsa (but only by some sages as the Kūrma says) and that originally they had not the status or authority of the 18 purāṇas The Saura, an Upapurāṇa itself, speaks of Upapurāṇas as *khilas* (9 5). It is only the late medieval dıgests like the Smṛtitattva (1520-1570 A D.) or the Vīramitrodaya (first half of 17th century) that were separated by several centuries from the Mahāpurāṇas as well as the Upapurāṇas and the writers of which had practically lost all sense of the distance in time between the two sets of Purāṇas, that say that the mention of Purāṇas¹³⁶¹ as a source of dharma in Yāj must be deemed to include Upapurāṇas also This last may be the opinion of such late writers as Mitramiśra, but no scholar is bound to accept it.