Vishnu Purana is one of the most widely read, consulted and quoted texts. Our Dharmasastras quote it quite often, more frequently than even Bhagavatam. It is one of the most favourite texts of Sri Ramanuja who refer to it frequently in his Bhasya and other works. In its relatively short corpus of 6,300 verses it contains a lot of material on the views of our ancestors on the origin and progress of creation (sarga), traditional account of the dynasties that ruled over Bharatavarsa with legends and anecdotes connected with them which had been handed down through oral tradition since remote past till that time, the formation of the cosmos (bhuvana-vinyasa) of which our globe is a part just one of the many lokas the division of time and space, the process of the dissolution of the universe (pralaya) and, most importantly, a separate section containing very extensive account of the exploits of Krsna as a child and thereafter as a king of Dvaraka.