Garuda Purana is one of the Vishnu Purunas. This abridged version of Garuda Purana contains a conversation between Vishnu and his vehicle, Garuda about death, afterlife, sin, life in hell, location of hell, Yama, the Lord of the Underworld, his assistant Chitragupta, description of the City of Yama, the various kinds of punishments meted out to the sinners, how to avoid sin upon earth, expiation of sin, what types of funeral rites should be performed for the departed and what happens when they are not performed and so on.
The Hindu concept of heaven and hell described in this scripture has some similarities with the descriptions of heaven and hell in other religions such as Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism. However unlike in these religions, souls who go to these worlds do not stay there eternally. Once the punishment is over, they return to earth and take birth again. This Purana also deals with the subject of liberation and how it can be attained through the practice of yoga and devotion.
The Garuda Purana is a Vaishnava Purana and has, according to the tradition, 19,000 shlokas (verses).However, the manuscripts that have survived into the modern era have preserved about eight thousand verses. These are divided into two parts, a Purva Khanda (early section) and an Uttara Khanda (later section). The Purva Khanda contains about 229 chapters, but in some versions of the text this section has between 240–243 chapters.The Uttara Khanda varies between 34 and 49 chapters. The Uttara Khanda is more often known as Pretakhanda or Pretakalpa.The Venkatesvara Edition of the Purana has an additional Khanda named Brahma Khanda.
The Garuda Purana was likely fashioned after the Agni Purana, the other major medieval India encyclopedia that has survived.The text's structure is idiosyncratic, in that it is a medley, and does not follow the theoretical structure expected in a historic Puranic genre of Indian literature. It is presented as information learned from Vishnu by Garuda (the man-bird vehicle of Vishnu), and then narrated by Garuda to sage Kashyapa, which then spread in the mythical forest of Naimisha reaching sage Vyasa.
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