What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionRenouncing comfort on purpose, stripping life down until only what matters remains.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and The Twelve Tribes are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
ShelfThe practices
Travels across20 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderJainism · c. 550 BCE
Newest holderAnalog Sabbath · 2026 CE
Turns up as27 codes · 20 rites · 19 figures · 14 tenets
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 43 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 17 faiths of this family hold it
Lent — the forty days.
Ash on the forehead, something given up, forty days matching the desert fast: the calendar's built-in season of subtraction before the feast.
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Fasting — the long kind.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church keeps seven fasting seasons and asks around 180 days a year of laypeople, up to about 250 of clergy and the devout: no animal products, and often nothing at all before the ninth hour. Western Lent asks for one meatless Friday and a bad mood.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
also here 16 more faiths of this family hold it
Oriental OrthodoxyThe Coptic Orthodox ChurchThe Maronite ChurchThe Church of the NazareneThe Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo ChurchThe Syro-Malankara Catholic ChurchThe International Churches of ChristThe HutteritesThe Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (the Exclusive Brethren)The BruderhofThe Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing)The Branch DavidiansThe Brethren in ChristThe Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of GodThe Salvation ArmyThe Twelve Tribes
Vedic Religion
— 5 faiths of this family hold it
Bringing down the river.
Bhagiratha performs austerities for generations to bring the Ganga down and give his burnt ancestors rest. Her fall would shatter the earth, so Shiva takes it in his hair and lets her out slowly. Bhagirath prayatna is still ordinary Hindi for an enormous undertaking.
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The Yoga Sutras.
Patanjali defines yoga in his second line as the stilling of the mind's movements, and spends the rest on concentration, ethics and the strange powers that arrive on the way. Posture gets three aphorisms out of 196.
Open the book — context & 1 source →
Cynicism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Virtue is enough, and everything else is weight.
Diogenes threw away his cup after watching a child drink from cupped hands — not a gesture but an audit, one item off a list he was trying to empty.
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Askesis — training the body to need less.
Not fasting for purity or penance for sin. The Cynic trained as an athlete does, courting cold and hunger in advance so that when they arrived unchosen they found nothing to work on.
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also here
Stoicism
Islam
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
The greater struggle.
Returning from battle, the tradition reports, the Prophet named the harder war: the one against the self. Jihad's first meaning is interior.
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Do not waste, even at a river.
A hadith has the Prophet find Sa'd using too much water for wudu and object. Even at a running river, Sa'd asks. Even there, he is told. Another has a woman condemned over a cat she shut in until it starved, and a prostitute forgiven for pulling water up for a dog.
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also here
Sufism
Taoism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Simplicity is strength.
The uncarved block: return to what you were before ambition. Empires fall; valleys endure.
held by most
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Immortality is a physical project.
Not the soul surviving — the body refined until it does not die. Outer alchemy tried it with cinnabar and mercury and killed several emperors; inner alchemy relocated the same furnace, ingredients and process inside the practitioner. The vocabulary of neidan is chemistry, used deliberately.
⚖ contested within
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also here
The Attention Order
Aum Shinrikyo
— one faith of this family holds it
Asana, breath, mantra — and the stage you were certified at.
Long standing postures, breath retention, mantra, and sleep deprivation, against a published ladder of attainments. Progress was conferred rather than claimed, which put every practitioner in permanent debt to the person doing the conferring.
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Shukke — leave the household.
Renunciates handed over their assets, cut contact with their families, took a religious name and moved into the communes at the foot of Mount Fuji. About 1,100 people did it. Japanese families had no legal instrument to reach an adult child inside, and the campaign to build one is what put the lawyer Sakamoto Tsutsumi in the group's way.
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Cao Đài
— one faith of this family holds it
Refrain, and refine.
Five precepts (no killing, stealing, lying, luxury, adultery) and vegetarian days each month — the adept's ladder rises by subtraction.
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Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Three years of mourning.
Undyed hemp, no meat, no wine, no music, no marriage, no office — and officials were required to resign and go home for it. Confucius grounds it in the three years a child is carried before it can leave its parents' arms. Asked whether one year would do, he told the disciple to do that if he would be comfortable with it, and remarked afterwards that the man was not humane.
⚖ contested within
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Out of food between Chen and Cai.
The party was cut off, the provisions ran out, the followers were too ill to stand. Zilu came to him angry and asked whether a gentleman also has to endure this. Confucius said that a gentleman endures it — and that the difference is that the small man, in the same position, gives way completely.
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Epicureanism
— one faith of this family holds it
Bread, water, and a friend.
Bread and water give the highest pleasure to someone who needs them. Everything past that is optional, and the trouble starts when the optional is mistaken for the necessary.
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Heathenry (Ásatrú)
— one faith of this family holds it
Odin on the tree.
Nine nights wounded and hanging on the windswept tree, himself sacrificed to himself, until he saw the runes and seized them screaming. Whoever wants what the depths hold must hang for it.
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Heaven's Gate
— one faith of this family holds it
The body is a vehicle. You are the deposit inside it.
A member's body was spoken of as a car, a suit, a container issued for the duration of the class. Gender, hunger and family feeling belonged to the vehicle, not to the student, and the whole discipline was aimed at loosening the identification between the two.
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Give up sex, family, name and opinion.
Members took names ending in -ody, cut their hair the same way, wore the same clothes, ate the same food at the same time, and did not choose their own tasks. Several men, Applewhite among them, were surgically castrated in the mid-1990s; the operation was elective and members sought it out.
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Pyrrhonism (Scepticism)
— one faith of this family holds it
P
Pyrrho of Elis — who wrote nothing.
His pupil Timon preserved him in satirical verse, and Diogenes Laertius collected the anecdotes. He is a school's founder in the way a saint is: by having been watched.
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Russian Cosmism
— one faith of this family holds it
N
Nikolai Fyodorov — who gave his salary away.
He lived in a rented corner, slept on a chest, ate almost nothing, refused promotion and declined to publish. The most ambitious project ever proposed for the human species was worked out by a man who owned one coat.
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Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
Misogi — standing under the water.
Cold water directly on the body, in a river or under a waterfall, often in midwinter, with breathing exercises first and someone experienced watching. It follows Izanagi, who washed after the underworld; the account has Amaterasu born from his left eye, Tsukuyomi from his right, and Susanoo from his nose.
⚖ contested within
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Haumai is the disease; the five thieves are the symptoms.
Kaam, krodh, lobh, moh and ahankar — lust, rage, greed, attachment, pride — are described as thieves already living in the house. Haumai, the I-am, is what unlocked the door: nothing external is blamed for the human condition.
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Amrit vela — the hours before dawn.
The scripture names the last watch of the night as the time to sit with the Name, and Sikh discipline takes it literally: up at three or four, cold bath, then Japji. It is the single hardest thing the tradition asks of an ordinary person, and the thing lapsed Sikhs most often say they miss.
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The Brahma Kumaris
— one faith of this family holds it
Purity, including celibacy inside marriage.
The demand is unusual and stated plainly: brahmacharya for committed students, married or not, with a strict vegetarian diet cooked in remembrance. Many households negotiate it for years.
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The Church of Scientology
— one faith of this family holds it
The Sea Organization signs for a billion years.
Founded in 1967 aboard three ships, the Sea Org is the religious order that staffs the senior organisations. Members sign a symbolic billion-year contract, wear uniforms and work under naval-style ranks.
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The Church of the SubGenius
— one faith of this family holds it
Pursue Slack.
The only obligation. What follows from it is negative: do not take the job that eats you, do not mistake the Conspiracy's approval for your own, do not become normal. Ordination costs a fixed fee and confers the right to say all this to other people.
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The Order of the Solar Temple
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Order of the Solar Temple
The Rajneesh Movement (Osho)
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Rajneesh Movement (Osho)
Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
Fasting — the long kind.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church keeps seven fasting seasons and asks around 180 days a year of laypeople, up to about 250 of clergy and the devout: no animal products, and often nothing at all before the ninth hour. Western Lent asks for one meatless Friday and a bad mood.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
The dark night.
Prayer goes dry and stays dry. John of the Cross read it as progress — the senses being weaned off spiritual reward — rather than as failure or as absence. Teresa of Calcutta's letters, published in 2007 against her wishes, record about fifty years of it alongside the work.
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Hal and maqam.
A hal is a state that arrives and leaves; a maqam is a station you have actually reached and can stand on. Sufi psychology insists on the difference because confusing the two is the standard way people deceive themselves — a good hour of prayer is not a changed character, and the literature says so repeatedly and unkindly.
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Misogi — standing under the water.
Cold water directly on the body, in a river or under a waterfall, often in midwinter, with breathing exercises first and someone experienced watching. It follows Izanagi, who washed after the underworld; the account has Amaterasu born from his left eye, Tsukuyomi from his right, and Susanoo from his nose.
Go deeper — context →