Itihāsa and Purāṇa

Lesson 4 named the difference between śruti, what was heard, and smṛti, what is remembered. Śruti is a closed and carefully guarded set. Smṛti is the enormous, open remainder. This lesson is about the two bodies of text that fill most of it, and that Sanskrit almost always names in one breath: itihāsa and purāṇa.

Itihāsa is traditionally analysed as iti ha āsa — "so, indeed, it was." Monier-Williams' dictionary keeps that analysis, and then gives the range the word actually covers: talk, legend, tradition, history, traditional accounts of former events, heroic history. It also notes that the word is older than the epics that now carry it, appearing already in the Brāhmaṇa literature.