What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionA cosmic order holds the world together, and a life should move in step with it.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and Vedic Religion 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 across9 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderVedic Religion · c. 1500 BCE
Newest holderThe Brahma Kumaris · 1937 CE
Turns up as16 tenets · 5 figures · 4 storys · 3 codes
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 — 12 of 171 faithsVedic Religion
— 4 faiths of this family hold it
Hinduism is a name that came from outside.
No founder, no creed, no council, no single book. The word comes from the Persian for the people living beyond the Sindhu river, and the -ism was added by British administrators who needed a column to count subjects in; what the traditions inside it call themselves is sanatana dharma, vaidika dharma, or simply the name of their own sampradaya.
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Dharma sustains the cosmos; to live rightly is to live in accord with it.
Order is not imposed on the world — it is the world; conduct, ritual, and law participate in it.
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No one made this, and no one is running it.
Buddhism has gods and no creator. The universe is beginningless and moves by cause and condition rather than decree — which is why there is no problem of evil here, and no one to appeal to.
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The first sermon at Sarnath.
To five old companions in a deer park: four truths, and a wheel set turning that has not stopped since.
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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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Time is a wheel with no beginning.
Six ascending ages and six descending ones, turning forever. We are in the fifth descending age; things are getting worse, liberation from here is no longer possible, and the next Tirthankara is a very long way off. The tradition's account of the present is unusually bleak and it does not soften it.
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Ritual sustains the order of the world.
The fire altar kept rta — cosmic order — turning; sacrifice was cosmology in practice.
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Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Mandate of Heaven can be taken away.
Heaven authorises a dynasty to rule and withdraws the authorisation when it misgoverns — and the evidence of withdrawal is that people rebel and succeed. It is simultaneously a doctrine of legitimacy and a licence for revolution, and every Chinese dynasty has had to live with both halves.
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Heaven ordains a moral order.
Tian is less a person than a direction — history itself grades rulers on virtue.
held by most
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Cynicism
— one faith of this family holds it
The cosmos is a single rational animal, and you are a part of it.
Providence is not a plan made for you; it is the fact that the whole is ordered. Living well means agreeing with how it is already going.
held by most
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Judaism
— one faith of this family holds it
Creation is good, and it was made out of nothing.
God made matter and pronounced it good six times before pronouncing it very good. The claim was aimed squarely at the Gnostics, who held the physical world to be the botched work of a lesser god, and it is why Christianity never produced a doctrine that the body is a prison.
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Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
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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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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Heaven, earth and the human correspond.
The same five phases, the same seasons, the same cycles run through the cosmos, the state and the body, so what happens in one can be read in the others. A drought is a governance problem, a fever is a seasonal one, and the calendar is a medical document.
held by most
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The Brahma Kumaris
— one faith of this family holds it
The cycle is 5,000 years and it repeats exactly.
World history is a wheel of four ages that comes round identically, and the present moment is the confluence just before it turns. Every teaching in the system depends on this timing.
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Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
You chose your head before you were born.
Ori Inu, the inner head, is selected in heaven before birth and then forgotten — and it sets the shape of the life that follows. It is a personal divinity, it is fed and addressed directly, and the tradition holds that no orisha can bless a person whose own Ori has not agreed.
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Cultivate iwa pele — gentle character.
Good character is the whole point of the system: destiny is chosen before birth, but iwa pele is how you live up to the one you picked.
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Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Asha — truth, rightness and the order of things, in one word.
It covers the truth of a statement, the rightness of an act and the regularity of the seasons at once, because the tradition takes these to be the same thing. Its opposite, druj, is the lie — which is likewise a moral failure and a disorder in the world, not merely a false sentence.
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