Abstract
The Purāṇas make a major contribution to Brahmanical writing on gifting, primarily because they contain descriptions of numerous specific gifting rites that texts of other genres generally fail to discuss. Although largely unstudied, these Purāṇic gifting rites provide unique evidence of a historically significant, yet hitherto ignored, development in gifting in medieval India, namely, the incorporation of the increasingly popular ethos of bhakti (devotional theism) into the much older practice of dāna (gifting), wherein gods traditionally played no prominent role. This article will argue that Purāṇic authors strove to incorporate bhakti into dāna via two fairly distinct strategies. The first and apparently more mainstream of these is the straightforward inclusion of rather superficial Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava elements in various gifting rites. The essence of the second strategy is a belief that donors should in some way offer their gifts as a sign of respect—in other words, dedicate their gifts—to certain major Hindu deities, even if in most cases they would actually give their gifts to ordinary human beings. This strategy appears to have been less popular, but to reflect an attempt to more thoroughly integrate bhakti into dāna.
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