What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionNo harm to any living being — restraint as the deepest strength.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and The Compost Rite 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.
ShelfHow to live
Travels across14 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderDave Stevism · 2026 CE
Turns up as21 codes · 13 tenets · 6 storys · 5 figures
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 — 26 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 11 faiths of this family hold it
Turn the other cheek — and the argument about war.
The historic peace churches read the Sermon on the Mount as forbidding violence outright and have paid for that reading in every conscription since. The rest of the tradition uses just war doctrine, which permits force under conditions it then finds ways to satisfy. Both sides quote the same chapter.
⚖ contested within
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The suffering of living things.
The Talmud says Yehuda HaNasi suffered for years because he sent away a calf that came to him for shelter. Jewish vegetarianism has grown fast on this reasoning and has no halakhic obstacle to clear.
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Christians do not take up the sword — including for a just cause.
Schleitheim in 1527 put the sword outside the perfection of Christ, and Mennonites have paid for that in every century: migration to Prussia, then Russia, then the Americas, ahead of each state that decided pacifism was disloyalty. It is not withdrawal from suffering — Mennonite Central Committee has run relief in war zones since 1920.
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No sword, no oath, no lawsuit against a brother.
The oath is refused because Jesus refused it, which cost Mennonites civil office for centuries and won them, eventually, the right to affirm in most Western courts. The refusal to sue is why the church's only sanction is its own discipline, and why abuse handled inside the church stayed inside it.
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Vedic Religion
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Ahimsa — do no harm.
Non-injury as the first discipline: in thought, word, and act. Gandhi took it from here to the world, and the world's protest movements took it from him.
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Compassion extends to all sentient beings.
Metta and karuna are trained, not merely felt — practices, not moods.
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Releasing life.
Birds and fish bought at market and set free, for merit. Also, increasingly, a supply chain — conservationists and Buddhist teachers now argue publicly about whether the animals are trapped in order to be released.
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Non-violence is the highest duty.
Ahimsa extends to every living being — the monk sweeps the path before stepping.
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Life is everywhere, and it is graded.
Souls occupy earth, water, fire, air and plants with one sense; worms with two; ants with three; bees with four; humans, animals and gods with five. The whole ethic follows from the count — you may not avoid killing one-sensed beings, but you may weight your life to kill fewer and lower.
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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
The ox and the bell.
King Xuan saw an ox being led to be killed for the consecration of a bell, could not bear its trembling, and had a sheep used instead. The people said he was miserly. Mencius told him the feeling was exactly right and the reasoning was not — he had seen the ox and had not seen the sheep, and he had not seen his own starving people either.
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Dudeism (The Church of the Latter-Day Dude)
— one faith of this family holds it
Take it easy, and do not preach about it.
The second half does the work. Dudeism's only real prohibition is on evangelism, which it regards as the failure mode of every other religion and the one thing that would make its own advice self-defeating.
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
Which hand you work with.
Practitioners distinguish between serving with the right hand and working with both, and the distinction is theirs rather than an outsider's imposition. There is a market for harm, everyone in a district knows who serves it, and the tradition's stated sanction is consequence rather than prohibition — it comes back, and it comes back on your children.
⚖ contested within
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T
The one who works with both hands.
Vodou has no devil, so wrongdoing has to be attributed to people. A bòkò is a practitioner who will take money to do harm — and the distinction between the oungan who serves with the right hand and the bòkò who uses both is drawn by practitioners themselves, argued about, and not always clear from outside.
⚖ contested within
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Islam
— one faith of this family holds it
Jihad of the pen, not the sword.
Persuasion replaces conquest — categorically.
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Pantheism
— one faith of this family holds it
War is refused outright.
The peace testimony — Friends have gone to prison rather than to the front, in every century since Fox.
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
The sword is legitimate, and it is the last thing you reach for.
The Zafarnama sets the condition in one Persian couplet: when every other means has failed, it is lawful to take up the sword. The tradition treats this as a licence with a lock on it, and argues permanently about who holds the key.
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Dharam yudh — the war with conditions on it.
No revenge, no plunder, no forced conversion, no harm to those not fighting, the sword put down when the injustice ends — and the whole thing licensed only when every other means has been exhausted. The Khalsa is meant to be able to defend anybody, which is precisely why the ninth Guru died for Brahmins.
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
The hundred and eighty precepts.
Attributed to Lord Lao and binding on clergy from the fourth century. Alongside the expected prohibitions on killing, theft and abuse of office sit clauses forbidding draining marshes, burning wild country, felling trees without cause and disturbing birds and animals in their season. They are genuinely ancient, and Taoist environmental argument has leaned on them heavily.
held by most
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The Compost Rite
— one faith of this family holds it
Giving it back well is the last ethical act.
Burial that feeds something is not a preference about funerals. It is the final entry in a life of taking.
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Wicca
— one faith of this family holds it
An it harm none, do what ye will.
The Rede: one line of ethics with a whole cosmology of consequence behind it — many add the threefold return.
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An it harm none, do what ye will.
The Rede compresses the ethics to one conditional — and the Threefold Law adds the accounting: whatever you send out returns three times over.
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Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
The knowledge cuts both ways.
The same herbs, words and workings that heal can be turned to harm, and practitioners do not pretend otherwise. What the tradition asserts instead is that work done to injure returns to the sender, and often to their children — which is a claim about consequences rather than a prohibition backed by an authority.
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Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
The complaint of the ox.
In one of the oldest religious texts anywhere, the soul of the ox goes up to heaven and complains: it is being beaten, herded and slaughtered, and it wants a protector with power. The assembly answers that the only man found is Zarathustra, who has a weak voice. The ox says, in effect, that this is not what it asked for.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
Turn the other cheek — and the argument about war.
The historic peace churches read the Sermon on the Mount as forbidding violence outright and have paid for that reading in every conscription since. The rest of the tradition uses just war doctrine, which permits force under conditions it then finds ways to satisfy. Both sides quote the same chapter.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Which hand you work with.
Practitioners distinguish between serving with the right hand and working with both, and the distinction is theirs rather than an outsider's imposition. There is a market for harm, everyone in a district knows who serves it, and the tradition's stated sanction is consequence rather than prohibition — it comes back, and it comes back on your children.
Go deeper — context →
T
The one who works with both hands.
Vodou has no devil, so wrongdoing has to be attributed to people. A bòkò is a practitioner who will take money to do harm — and the distinction between the oungan who serves with the right hand and the bòkò who uses both is drawn by practitioners themselves, argued about, and not always clear from outside.
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Bahubali's raised hand.
Two brothers avoided a war by settling it in single combat, and the younger won all three contests. His fist was already up when he stopped, seeing what he had been about to do for a kingdom. He used the raised hand to pull out his own hair instead, and then stood still so long that vines grew up his legs and anthills formed at his feet.
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