What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionOpposites need each other; wisdom holds them together rather than picking a winner.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Hinduism and Pyrrhonism (Scepticism) 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.
Travels across15 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderDudeism (The Church of the Latter-Day Dude) · 2005 CE
Turns up as25 tenets · 9 storys · 5 figures · 5 rites
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 — 18 of 171 faithsVedic Religion
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
What the ascetic renounces, the tantric uses.
Tantra takes the body, the senses and desire as the material of practice rather than the obstacle to it — mantra, yantra, mudra, and an energy woken at the base of the spine. Most Hindus absorb its methods through ordinary temple ritual without ever using the word, and the transgressive left-hand rites are practised by very few and disowned by nearly everyone.
⚖ contested within
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Sujata's bowl, and the lute string.
Six years of austerity had reduced him to a skeleton who could feel his spine through his stomach, and he was no closer. A village girl offered him milk-rice and he ate it; his five companions walked off in disgust at the backsliding. A passing musician's remark supplied the image the tradition kept — a string too slack will not sound, a string too tight will snap. He ate, recovered, sat down under the tree, and woke by morning.
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Nobody made the universe.
It has always existed and will not end. There is no creator, no first cause, no sustainer and nobody to appeal to, and Jain philosophers spent centuries arguing the case against Hindu and Buddhist theists in detail — chiefly that a creator would need a motive, and any motive implies a lack.
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Samata.
The state samayika is for: an evenness in which what arrives stops being sorted into for me and against me. It is not tranquillity and not detachment from other people — the formula names friendship with all beings — and the tradition holds that a fast performed without it has achieved nothing at all.
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Judaism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
A person is built with two inclinations, and neither is a devil.
Yetzer hatov and yetzer hara. The rabbis said that without the evil inclination nobody would build a house, marry, or start a business — so they locked it up, and the hens stopped laying. There is no original sin here and no fallen nature, only an appetite that has to be steered.
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Bal tashchit — do not destroy.
Deuteronomy asks whether the tree of the field is a man, that you should besiege it. Samson Raphael Hirsch built an entire environmental ethic out of the verse in nineteenth-century Frankfurt, decades before anybody needed one.
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God is Father and Mother, and so is the leadership.
Because the divine is understood as dual, every level of Shaker government was doubled: two elders and two eldresses, two trustees of each, with women holding authority over women and men over men and neither over the other. This was in place from the 1780s, a century before American women could vote.
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Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
The mean, and the timing.
Not compromise and not moderation as a temperament — the exactly appropriate response to this situation, which may be extreme. The tradition's highest praise for Confucius was that he was the sage of timeliness: the one who knew when to serve, when to leave, and when to say nothing.
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The Yijing.
A Zhou divination manual with a philosophical commentary attached centuries later, which converted a book about casting lots into a book about change. It is shared with Taoism and with everyone else in the Chinese world. Confucius is said to have worn out the leather cords binding his copy three times.
⚖ contested within
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Discordianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Order and disorder are both things you are doing.
The Sacred Chao is drawn with a pentagon on one side and a golden apple on the other — the Aneristic and Eristic Principles, order and disorder. Neither is a property of the world. Both are grids people lay over an undivided reality, and the grid is not the thing.
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The Original Snub.
Eris was left off the guest list for a wedding on Limbo Peak, so she rolled a golden apple marked KALLISTI — to the prettiest one — into the hall and left. The goddesses fought over it, the judgement fell to Paris, and the Trojan War followed. Discordians read it as a story about hosts, not about gods.
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Dudeism (The Church of the Latter-Day Dude)
— one faith of this family holds it
Taking it easy is a moral position.
Not laziness and not resignation. Dudeism holds that most striving makes its object worse, that the demand to be productive is a recent and local superstition, and that refusing it takes more nerve than complying.
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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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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
The lwa have nations.
They are grouped into nanchon. Rada are cool, ancient, Dahomean in origin, patient and correct; Petwo are hot, quick, created in the Caribbean out of the conditions there, and effective. It is not good against evil — the same person serves both, and there are situations that only a Petwo lwa will deal with.
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There is no devil in this.
No adversary of Bondye, no principle of evil, no hell. There is harm, and harm has a source — a person who paid for it, a neglected obligation, an ancestor who was not fed. The problem is always somebody's conduct, which is a considerably more uncomfortable theology than a devil.
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Jediism
— one faith of this family holds it
T
The Force.
Taken from a film and then taken seriously. Jedi do not claim the films are scripture; they claim the films described something the tradition had already noticed, in the same way a novel can describe grief accurately without inventing it.
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Pyrrhonism (Scepticism)
— one faith of this family holds it
For every argument, an equal argument.
Isostheneia: set the case against the case until neither outweighs the other. What follows is not a conclusion but a stop.
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Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
Kami are not omnipotent, and not necessarily kind.
They have territories, tempers and specialities. Susanoo wrecks his sister's rice fields; a neglected kami causes epidemics. The relationship is one of attention and reciprocity rather than obedience, and a kami that is ignored is understood to be dangerous rather than absent.
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Musubi — things generate.
The word means tying or binding, and names the generative force behind growth, fertility and the linking of people. It is as close as the tradition gets to a first principle, and it is a verb rather than a being: the world is understood as producing itself rather than as having been made.
held by most
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Countless worlds, and nobody has counted them.
Asked how many earths and heavens there are, Japji refuses the question: there are lakhs upon lakhs, and searching for the limit exhausts the searcher. Punjabi commentators have made a great deal of this since the Hubble images; it was written around 1500.
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Dao bore one, one bore two, two bore three.
And three bore the ten thousand things. It is not a creation story — nobody decides anything and nothing is made from outside. It is a description of how differentiation happens, and the ten thousand things means everything without needing to list it.
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The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.
The source and current of all things escapes every definition — the first line of the Tao Te Ching is a warning about all the lines that follow.
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Wicca
— one faith of this family holds it
The divine is Goddess and God.
Polarity at the center: the Great Goddess of moon and earth, the Horned God of sun and wild — most Wiccans read all deities through these two.
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The sabbats.
Samhain to Mabon, the wheel's eight spokes: the circle cast, the season's story enacted, cakes and wine to close.
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Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
Ebo is an exchange, not an apology.
Divination identifies an imbalance and names what will settle it. The orisha are not angry and are not being placated; something is owed and is being paid. And the commonest thing Ifa prescribes is not an animal at all but that the client change how they are behaving.
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There is no devil.
Eshu is the messenger, the opener of roads, the one who carries offerings and who tests people — and the missionaries translated his name as Satan, which is now printed in Yoruba Bibles. Practitioners have been objecting for a century. There is no evil principle in this cosmology and nothing that opposes Olodumare.
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Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
The world is good, and enjoying it is correct.
Matter is not a trap and the body is not a prison. There is no fasting from food, no celibacy, no monasticism and no virtue in poverty. The tradition treats gloom as collaboration with the enemy and holds that a person who weakens themselves has removed a soldier from the field.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
What the ascetic renounces, the tantric uses.
Tantra takes the body, the senses and desire as the material of practice rather than the obstacle to it — mantra, yantra, mudra, and an energy woken at the base of the spine. Most Hindus absorb its methods through ordinary temple ritual without ever using the word, and the transgressive left-hand rites are practised by very few and disowned by nearly everyone.
Go deeper — context →
The handing over of the land.
Heaven sends envoys to demand the country and Ōkuninushi agrees, on condition that a shrine be built for him with pillars deep in the bedrock. His son Takeminakata refuses, is defeated in what the text describes as a wrestling match, and is chased to Suwa. The chronicle is written by the side that won, and Izumo tells it with different weight.
Read it in full — context →
The Yijing.
A Zhou divination manual with a philosophical commentary attached centuries later, which converted a book about casting lots into a book about change. It is shared with Taoism and with everyone else in the Chinese world. Confucius is said to have worn out the leather cords binding his copy three times.
Open the book — context →