What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionSeeing reality as it actually is — the transformation the path bends toward.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Buddhism and The Rajneesh Movement (Osho) 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 across10 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderJainism · c. 550 BCE
Newest holderDave Stevism · 2026 CE
Turns up as20 tenets · 7 figures · 5 storys · 4 experiences
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 — 17 of 171 faithsVedic Religion
— 8 faiths of this family hold it
Suffering has a cause, and therefore an end.
Craving conditions dukkha; the eightfold path is the treatment plan.
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Liberation is available in this life.
Nirvana is not a place but an extinguishing — the end of the fires of greed, hatred, delusion.
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The arhat completes the path.
Liberation is won individually — the noble person who has done what needed doing.
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The Pure Land receives the faithful.
Rebirth there, where awakening is easy — grace, in a Buddhist key.
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Buddhahood is reachable in one lifetime.
Tantra accelerates the path — the poison, rightly handled, becomes the medicine.
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The Lotus Sūtra is the Buddha's complete teaching.
All previous sutras were preparation; the Lotus is the point — and it declares buddhahood open to everyone, now.
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Chanting the daimoku awakens buddhahood.
Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō — the title of the sutra, chanted, is the practice entire: cause and effect of awakening in one act.
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Awakening is sudden, not gradual.
Satori breaks in all at once; practice prepares the ground but cannot manufacture it.
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Ordinary mind is the way.
No special state to attain — walking, eating, chopping wood are the way itself.
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Every soul is already omniscient.
Not potentially — actually, and buried. The soul in its own nature has infinite knowledge, infinite perception, infinite bliss and infinite energy, and karma is the dirt on the lamp. Nothing is added by the path; something is removed.
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T
The Siddhas.
Every soul that has ever got free, at the crown of the universe, without body, form, or any relation to what is below. They are drawn as an empty human outline because shape is all that is left of the last body. They will never return and cannot be asked for anything.
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Knowledge liberates.
Not ritual, not even devotion: the direct recognition of what you already are.
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Aum Shinrikyo
— one faith of this family holds it
Liberation can be engineered.
Aum's pitch was that meditation has measurable stages, that a competent teacher can tell you which one you are on, and that the sequence can be accelerated. It is precisely this promise of technical certainty that drew engineers, doctors and physicists, and it is the shape of the group's whole later behaviour.
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Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Anyone can become a sage.
Not by birth, not by blood, not by revelation — by study and practice. This is the tradition's most consequential claim, because it made a moral aristocracy that anyone could in principle enter, and then built an examination system on the premise.
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The pleasure of it.
The first line of the Analects is that to learn and to return to it at intervals is a pleasure. Not a duty, not a discipline — enjoyable. It is a striking thing to put first, and everything demanding that follows in the book depends on the claim being true.
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Eckankar
— one faith of this family holds it
T
The Mahanta, the Living ECK Master.
One man holds the office at a time — Twitchell to 1971, and Harold Klemp since 1981. Members write to him and report meeting him in dreams; he is the teaching's point of entry.
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Heaven's Gate
— one faith of this family holds it
The twenty-two years were a classroom.
The group dated itself from 1975 and described everything after as coursework. The final statements use the language of a term ending — graduation, closure, the crew arriving — and members recorded farewell videos in which they say, repeatedly and cheerfully, that nobody is making them do this.
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Judaism
— one faith of this family holds it
God became human so that humans might become god-like.
Theosis — salvation as transfiguration, not acquittal.
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Pantheism
— one faith of this family holds it
Buddhahood is reachable in one lifetime.
Tantra accelerates the path — the poison, rightly handled, becomes the medicine.
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Liberation happens while you are alive.
Jivan mukti — free while breathing, working and raising children, not after death. Sikh scripture has strikingly little to say about heaven and hell, and treats both mostly as descriptions of a mind.
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The five khands.
Japji closes by mapping five realms the mind passes through: duty, knowledge, effort, grace, and truth. Nanak describes the first four and then says that describing the fifth is like chewing steel, which is the only honest thing to do with it.
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The Neo-American Church
— one faith of this family holds it
Life is a dream, and enlightenment is noticing.
Kleps's doctrine is solipsist rather than theist: what is ultimate is the dreaming consciousness, and the world is its content. He held that this is not a metaphor and not consoling.
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A
Art Kleps, the Chief Boo Hoo.
A psychologist who joined Timothy Leary's circle at Millbrook, founded the church there in 1965, excommunicated Leary from it, testified before a Senate subcommittee in 1966 and wrote everything the church holds. He maintained to his death in 1999 that the satire and the sincerity were the same act.
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The Rajneesh Movement (Osho)
— one faith of this family holds it
The modern body has to be exhausted before it can be still.
Dynamic Meditation exists because a person carrying a century of suppression cannot simply sit down. An hour of chaos first, then the silence works.
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