The Padma Purana is one of the eighteen Mahapuranas, devoted chiefly to Vishnu and named for the lotus from which, in its telling, the world arose and Brahma was born. Sage Suta, sent by his father, a disciple of Sage Veda Vyasa, tells it to the sages at Naimisharanya, who ask him how the lotus came to be and how Brahma appeared in it. By its own count it holds fifty-five thousand verses in five khandas, Srishti, Bhumi, Svarga, Patala and Uttara; of its two main recensions the eastern has five khandas, while the western, the one printed and studied, has six.
Its Srishti Khanda tells how Brahma, seeking a place on earth for his sacrifice, cast a lotus down from his hand, and where it fell the tirtha of Pushkar came to be. In the Uttara Khanda, eighteen chapters praise in turn the eighteen chapters of the Bhagavad Gita, and six praise the Bhagavata Purana: Sage Narada finds Bhakti, devotion, young again at Vrindavan while her sons, knowledge and detachment, lie old and spent, and when the four sage Kumaras begin to tell the Bhagavata by the Ganga near Haridwar, Bhakti appears with her sons young once more. There too Parvati, about to recite Vishnu's thousand names before she eats, hears from Shiva that the name of Rama equals the thousand; that verse is recited at the close of the Vishnu Sahasranama.
The week-long reading of the Bhagavata that these chapters set out, the Bhagavata Saptah, is still held in many parts of India. In this collection, the Brahma temple at Pushkar stands by the lake revered as the tirtha the Srishti Khanda tells of, and pilgrims gather there for the fair that ends on Kartik Purnima, the day on which, by tradition, Brahma's sacrifice ended.