On the Strategy of Reuse Employed in the Puranic Texts

There appears to be extreme fluidity in the Puranic texts in defining entities. The same anatomical entities may be referred to by different names and described differently based on the different characteristics present in them. For example, the pulmonary vein may be depicted sometimes as an "ocean" due to it being a store-house of "water" (oxygenated blood), sometimes as a "fruit-tree" due to its nourishing nature and sometimes as the ray of the “moon” (left atrium). In this manner one is represented as many. It is this reuse and recycling that gives rise to the almost blinding variety of entities and characters in the Puranic stories.