The Vishnu Purana stands among the eighteen Mahapuranas as a central scripture of the Vaishnava tradition, presenting Vishnu as the supreme deity and cosmic preserver. It arises from the broader Puranic movement, which sought to render Vedic wisdom accessible through narrative, genealogy, and devotional teaching. In this sense, it reflects a religious world in which bhakti, or personal devotion, was becoming a primary mode of spiritual life, and where myth, cosmology, and ethical instruction were woven into a single sacred tapestry. Its stories of creation, its accounts of dynasties and sages, and its theological reflections all bear witness to a maturing Vaishnava vision that had taken firm shape within the classical Hindu milieu.

From a historical perspective, the Vishnu Purana is not the product of a single moment, but of a gradual process of composition and redaction. Scholarly opinion generally places the core of the text between roughly the 4th and 6th centuries of the common era, with many views clustering around the 4th–5th centuries. This period corresponds to a time when Vaishnavism had clearly emerged as a major, organized religious current, and when Puranic literature was crystallizing shared cosmological and theological frameworks. At the same time, the text shows signs of later shaping, with additions and revisions extending over several centuries, so that what is now read represents a layered tradition rather than a single authorial voice.

The internal character of the Vishnu Purana mirrors this layered history. It draws upon earlier Vedic and epic materials, especially the Mahabharata, while integrating philosophical currents associated with systems such as early Vedanta and Samkhya. Its sixfold structure encompasses cosmology, genealogies of gods and sages, royal lineages, the life of Krishna, and eschatological visions of future ages and the dissolution of the universe. Through this wide-ranging content, it functions both as a devotional scripture centered on Vishnu and as an encyclopedic repository of religious and cultural knowledge from the classical Hindu world. In contemplating its historical background and approximate date, one is led not to a single fixed point in time, but to a living tradition unfolding over generations, steadily shaping and reshaping its understanding of the divine preserver.