Garuda Purana

The Garuda Purana is one of the eighteen major Puranas of Hindu tradition, a primary Sanskrit text especially associated with death rites and the afterlife, describing the hell realms called Naraka, funeral and memorial rites known as antyeshti, and the judge of the dead, Chitragupta. As a primary scripture it is the correct source for what this text itself teaches about death and the afterlife within its tradition. Its limit is exactly that primary character, it presents doctrine as scripture states it, compiled and expanded over an uncertain span of centuries by unknown authors, not a modern scholarly account of how death rites are actually practiced by Hindus today, so a claim about contemporary practice needs an ethnographic or sociological source in addition to the text itself.