Scholars generally approach the differences among the Puranas not as simple errors, but as signs of a living, evolving tradition. The Puranas are understood as composite works, layered over many centuries, with earlier and later strata reflecting changing theological, social, and political circumstances. This historical stratification, combined with ongoing redaction and interpolation, naturally produces divergent cosmologies, genealogies, and narrative details. Manuscript evidence itself shows that even a single Purana can exist in multiple recensions, suggesting continuous editorial activity rather than a fixed, closed canon. From this perspective, contradictions become clues to the history of ideas rather than problems to be eliminated.

A major key to these variations lies in sectarian and regional perspectives. Many Puranas are shaped by particular devotional communities—Vaishnava, Shaiva, Shakta, and others—each elevating its chosen deity as supreme and reconfiguring shared mythic material accordingly. At the same time, regional traditions, local cults, and specific geographies leave their mark, so that lists of sacred places, dynasties, or ritual practices may differ from one text to another. Scholars read these divergences as evidence of localization: a common mythic framework adapted to the needs and sensibilities of distinct communities, audiences, and spiritual orientations.

Attention is also given to the functions the Puranas serve. Beyond cosmology and myth, they act as encyclopedic repositories of dharma, ritual, pilgrimage, and social norms, and different compilers emphasize different aims—ethical instruction, liberation, kingship, or temple worship. This functional diversity helps explain why the same theme can be treated in multiple, even conflicting ways: each text addresses a particular context and audience, highlighting what it deems most spiritually or socially pressing. Rather than forcing a single harmonized system, scholars often treat these multiple perspectives as complementary windows into a broad and plural religious world.

Finally, many interpreters note that Puranic narratives work as symbolic and didactic vehicles more than as strictly literal accounts. Stories that diverge in detail can still converge in purpose, conveying dharma, devotion, and metaphysical insight through different images and plotlines. In this light, contradictions are not necessarily obstacles to understanding but invitations to look beneath the surface, to discern how varying forms express related spiritual intuitions. The Puranic corpus thus appears as a fluid, many-voiced tradition, where multiplicity and variation are intrinsic features rather than flaws.