The Agni Purāṇa and Brahma Vidyā Of the eighteen Mahāpurāṇas of the Sanskrit tradition, the Agni Purāṇa occupies a distinctive position: it is one of the most encyclopaedic, ranging across cosmology, ritual, kingship, grammar, metrics, medicine, and the science of liberation in a single vast compilation attributed to the sage Agni — the divine fire — who is said to have transmitted it to the sage Vasiṣṭha, and through him to the broader Vedic tradition. Its opening section — traditionally read as the thirteen foundational verses — establishes the text's central claim: that all knowledge, properly understood, converges on Brahma Vidyā, the science of the ultimate reality. This is not a narrow claim. Brahma in this context is not the…