World Religions curriculum

Substantive definitions name a content, such as E. B. Tylor's “belief in spiritual beings”; functional ones name a role, such as Emile Durkheim's binding people into one moral community. The two sort cases differently, and a functional definition can count nationalism or Marxism as religion. Polythetic approaches give up the single defining feature and treat religion as a family-resemblance concept.

A committed participant can know one tradition deeply, but Max Muller argued that someone who knows only one religion cannot see what religion is in general. Ninian Smart's method “brackets” questions of truth while describing practice in enough depth to convey what taking part is like; stepping back from any single commitment, he held, lets a scholar describe and compare many religions.

Some philosophers propose comparing traditions in their own terms, such as dharma or dao, instead of through the English word “religion”, which critics call a tool invented at a particular time and place rather than a concept every culture shares. Premodern Daoist texts use neither “philosophy” nor “religion”, so importing those labels silently draws boundaries the tradition itself does not draw.

Comparative religion was long accused of treating one form of Protestant Christianity as the model and asking how far other traditions measured up, using categories such as God, creation, sin and redemption. Critics answer that adding more traditions is not enough: the categories themselves have to be reshaped to fit beliefs and practices organized differently.

Reasoning from within a faith starts from its authorities: the Advaita teacher Shankara accepted nonduality on the authority of the Upanishads rather than trying to prove it by argument alone. A descriptive or phenomenological study sets such truth questions aside to classify and compare, while a normative inquiry asks whether the claims are true.

Each approach explains something different. Durkheim's sociology defines religion by the solidarity it creates; cognitive science of religion argues that ordinary mental tendencies, such as readily seeing agents behind events, make religious ideas natural to hold. Whether an account of where a belief comes from bears on whether it is true is itself debated, as arguments over evolutionary “debunking” show.

Seven named traditions long served as the model cases, yet unnamed forms of life, such as the religion of ancient Rome or of the Yoruba, are just as clearly religious and harder to label. Tomoko Masuzawa traced the list to European universalism, and scholars of Sikh thought argue that colonial scholarship mapped Sikh teaching into “world religions” built on Christian theology and secular humanism.

Emile Durkheim argued in 1912 that splitting the world into sacred and profane domains is the distinctive mark of religious thought. Sacred meant set apart and protected by prohibitions, not simply divine, so a rock, a tree or a house could qualify. Crossing from one domain to the other takes ritual, such as the initiation that moves a young person into religious life.

For the archaic Greeks a muthos was a true story revealing how the world and human beings began; the everyday modern sense, a popular belief that is false, reverses that. The ethnographer James Mooney used “sacred myths” for Cherokee accounts of creation and of the origin of life and death, stories with a constant bearing on prayer and observance.

Durkheim sorted rites by what they do: initiation moves a person into religious life, commemorative rites re-enact a group's past, mourning rites answer loss, and periodic feasts renew the bond with what the group holds sacred. In each, he argued, people acting and crying out together become conscious of their moral unity.

Some traditions mark membership mainly by correct belief, others by correct practice. By Luther's time Christian catechisms organized religious life as creed, cult and code, while Roman public religion centered on keeping the “peace of the gods” through sacrifice, prayer, vows and divination. Judging the second kind by its creed misreads it, which is why accounts that overlook practice draw criticism.

Monotheism treats what is ultimate as single, polytheism as many. Pantheism identifies God with the cosmos, while panentheism holds that the cosmos depends on God but God does not depend on it, so God is more than the world. Durkheim pointed to religions without gods, which is why definitions built on belief in spiritual beings strain to fit them.

Durkheim argued that a society's calendar grows out of its religious life: divisions into days, weeks and years track the recurrence of rites, feasts and public ceremonies. Feast days stand against working days, when people deal only with ordinary things. Space is marked the same way: a 1996 US executive order recognizes Native sacred sites as specific places tied to ceremonial use.

Max Weber distinguished three ideal types of legitimate authority: charismatic, resting on a leader's personal qualities and followers' devotion; traditional, resting on custom made routine; and legal-rational, resting on rules and office. Weber called these ideal types: deliberately one-sided constructs that, by his own account, are never found in pure form in reality.

Many traditions live in recitation and ceremony rather than a fixed written canon, and oral does not mean open to all. James Mooney reported in 1900 that Cherokee myth-keepers and priests met at night to recite traditions, and that the sacred myths were heard only by those who kept the proper form and ceremony.

In many Native American traditions particular places matter in their own right, not as interchangeable settings. A 1996 US executive order defines a sacred site as a specific, discrete location that a tribe identifies by its religious significance or ceremonial use, and tells federal land agencies to allow ceremonial access and, where appropriate, keep such sites confidential.

In many African traditions ancestral spirits are held to care about the welfare and moral life of the society they left behind, so honoring them is part of ethics, not only family memory. Nineteenth-century writers such as E. B. Tylor grouped practices toward the dead under outside labels like “manes-worship”, a reminder to ask how a community describes the relationship itself.

Nineteenth-century writers stretched “shaman”, a word they knew from Siberian accounts, to ritual experts in Lapland, among the ancient Huns and far beyond. Yet an 1892 study of Apache medicine-men notes that Oregon tribes had both spirit doctors and medicine doctors, two different roles a single blanket word would merge.

E. B. Tylor used “animism” in 1871 for the doctrine of spiritual beings, his minimum definition of religion, and set it in a ranking of peoples that began with what he called “low races”, a framing of his era. He deliberately grouped very different practices under one heading, so the word works as an observer's comparative label: useful for spotting likenesses, misleading as a description of any one people's tradition.

Ceremony often follows the year and the life course. Cherokee custom, as Mooney recorded it, held the first new corn until after the Green Corn dance; Arunta ceremonies in Central Australia, described by Durkheim, visited sacred places to assure the increase of a clan's totem species; and initiation rites widely move the young into religious life.

A 2022 Interior Department report found that federal Indian boarding schools discouraged or prevented Native languages, religions and cultural practices, and that about half may have had support from religious organizations. In 1978 Congress set a policy to protect Native freedom to believe and to worship through ceremonies, and the report calls for revitalizing Tribal languages and practices.

Roman public religion aimed to keep the “peace of the gods” for the whole community through sacrifice, prayer, vows, purification and divination, overseen by priestly colleges such as the pontiffs and augurs. When a pestilence would not abate, the remedy was more rites, even new ones, and Augustus revived old ritual to restore that peace as part of his political program.

Cults such as those of Cybele and Mithras spread through the Roman world alongside the civic gods. The historian Franz Cumont argued that they made religion a personal obligation rather than a public duty, promising initiates purification and happiness after death on condition that the sacred ceremonies were performed accurately.

Most Norse myth reaches you through Icelandic manuscripts made after Christianity was accepted in Norway and Iceland early in the eleventh century. The Codex Regius of the Eddic poems is a copy made about a century after the twelfth-century collections it preserves, and the prose handbook is tied to Snorri Sturluson, born in 1178. The poems likely circulated orally long before.

The fullest written account of the druids comes from a Roman general describing his own war in Gaul, an outsider and the conqueror of the people he describes. He reports that druids oversaw sacrifices, judged disputes and trained students for up to twenty years, and that they would not commit their teachings to writing, so you are reading their opponent's summary.

Conversion could work by adapting old forms rather than erasing them. Pope Gregory the Great, in a letter preserved by Bede, advised that English temples be kept and consecrated as churches with only the idols destroyed, and that sacrificial feasts be replaced by Christian feasting on saints' days, so that keeping familiar outward forms would ease inward change.

Present-day pagan religions are living communities that governments count. Iceland's Asatruarfelagid, described as Icelandic paganism, held about 1.5 percent of the population in State Department figures; Denmark recognizes followers of the Norse belief system Forn Sidr; and about 33,000 Australians report a nature religion such as Paganism, Druidism or Wicca.

The word “Hinduism” began as a foreign label, imposed during British rule, for traditions that had developed over millennia with great internal variety. Even Shankara's own allegiance is disputed: Advaita tradition calls him a devotee of Shiva, while some scholars think he followed Vishnu. Hindus are about 79.8 percent of India's population in the 2011 census.

Tradition counts four Vedas, the Rig, Yajur, Sama and Atharva, with the Rig-veda the oldest layer. Each holds a large portion on ritual and ends in a wisdom portion, the Upanishads. Schools disagreed about why the Veda is authoritative: Mimamsa held that its words were never composed by anyone, while most Nyaya thinkers treated them as composed.

The Upanishads form a late layer of the Vedic canon that shows disaffection with priestly ritual and turns to the self and ultimate reality. Two of their “great sayings” are “That thou art” and “I am Brahman”. Shankara's commentaries on ten principal Upanishads read them as teaching nonduality, but rival Vedanta schools read the same texts differently.

Shruti, “what is heard”, names texts regarded as revealed, such as the Upanishads; smriti, “what is remembered”, names traditional works of human origin. The line decides authority but is not rigid: the Bhagavad Gita sits in an epic, yet some orthodox schools classify it as an Upanishad.

The Mahabharata, a vast epic of a dynastic war, says of itself that whatever is not in it is found nowhere, and it treats virtue, wealth, pleasure and salvation. The Ramayana, attributed to Valmiki, tells the story of Rama, whom later tradition lists among the incarnations of Vishnu.

The Gita is a dialogue set inside the Mahabharata: on the eve of battle a warrior prince sinks down in despair, and Krishna answers him. Its chapters name paths such as action, knowledge and devotion, and it discusses rival views of the self. It became one of the most famous and influential sacred books of India.

The Vishnu Purana itself names eighteen Puranas, and these later compendia carry much of the deity lore of popular practice. The Bhagavata Purana, probably from around the tenth century, dwells on Krishna's childhood and casts him as fully divine, whereas the Vishnu Purana treats him as an incarnation of a portion of Vishnu.

Advaita Vedanta holds that the self, atman, is numerically identical with Brahman, the reality of all things, and that the many-seeming world is appearance. Ramanuja kept the identity of the whole but treated the cosmos as real, Brahman's body; dualist schools hold God and cosmos eternally distinct. Advaita is well known in the West but not dominant in India.

On the doctrine of karma every action has a consequence, good for good and bad for bad, and the agent who acted is the one who reaps it. Because saintly people plainly suffer while wrongdoers prosper, rebirth was joined to the doctrine: present fortune traces to your own earlier actions, in this life or another, rather than to an external decree.

Samsara is the round of birth and rebirth in which, according to most classical Indian philosophers, all living beings are caught, and it is marked by suffering. Rebirth was understood to range across humans, animals, gods and the inhabitants of hells. Religious practice aims at release from the round, not at a better place within it.

Most classical Indian schools name liberation, moksha, as the highest goal of life. They differ on what it is: for Shankara's Advaita it is a direct, liberating recognition of nonduality reached through listening, reflection and contemplation, while devotional schools stress loving devotion to God, and some hold that one can be liberated while still alive.

Dharma, often rendered virtue or duty, asks different things of different people depending on their role and stage of life. The Gita says it is better to do your own work imperfectly than another's work well, and the Mahabharata lists dharma first among the aims of life. Because duties are tied to role and stage, no single rule applies to everyone alike.

The Mahabharata names four aims of life: virtue, wealth, pleasure and final liberation, which most classical schools rank highest. An older scheme divided an orthodox man's life into three stages, student, married householder and forest hermit, and a fourth was later added: the homeless renunciant awaiting release.

Vedanta, the “end of the Vedas”, has been the dominant one of six traditional Hindu philosophical systems for at least five centuries; Mimamsa, by contrast, interprets the Vedas to guide ritual. Within Vedanta, Ramanuja was the first comprehensive critic of Shankara's Advaita: he kept a real world and a personal God within Brahman.

Puja is worship through offerings, and a puja ends with aarti, an offering made with a lit lamp; many Hindu families also light lamps as part of weekly rituals. Darshan is seeing that runs both ways: Ramanuja's school describes it as visual contact with the divine through the eyes of images, and counts it as a source of religious knowledge, not mere looking.

Murti means a form: one teaching form of Shiva is called Dakshinamurti. An image's details carry meaning; the weapons in Durga's festival image represent her power against evil, and at the festival's end the image is immersed in holy water. The English “idol” brings an outsider's verdict with it: an 1881 writer addressing European readers called the songs of Durga's devotees idolatrous.

Vishnu is worshiped through his incarnations, which one early list gives as the Boar, the Man-lion, the Dwarf, Rama and Krishna among others, and his consort Sri is said to assist him in each one. Shiva has his own devotees, and the goddess is worshiped in many forms, among them Durga. Ganesha is honored with Lakshmi at Diwali and has a festival of his own, Ganesh Utsav.

Vaishnavas are devoted to Vishnu and his incarnations, Shaivas to Shiva, and Shaktas to the goddess as the female principle. Each stream favors its own texts: the Vishnu Purana has its narrator bow to Vishnu as the supreme soul and Lord of all. The labels can be disputed: Advaita tradition calls Shankara a Shaiva, while some scholars think he was a Vaishnava.

The Bhagavad Gita lists four methods of overcoming ignorance, and its chapters are named for paths such as action done without seeking its fruit, knowledge, and devotion. Schools weight them differently: dualist Vedanta is strongly devotional, while Advaita stresses knowledge. Each path is presented as a route to the same goal of release.

Each festival honors a deity or a story. Diwali runs four or five days, and its main day, Lakshmi Puja, is when Lakshmi and Ganesha are worshiped. Navaratri, “nine nights”, honors the goddess, and Bengal's five-day Durga Puja falls within it. Dussehra burns effigies of Ravana to mark Rama's victory over him, and Holi is the festival of colors.

A tirtha is a holy spot in shallow water, a crossing place where bathing is held to purify sins, and rivers are prime examples: the Vishnu Purana describes the Ganges as flowing from Vishnu's foot and removing all sins. India's largest periodic gathering, the Kumbh Mela, rotates every twelfth year among four river sites, including the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna, where pilgrims bathe.

The classical scheme has four orders, and classical karma theory tied the caste you are born into to past deeds. Yet in the Gita Krishna says he made the four castes according to qualities and gifts, and that devotion opens the highest path even to the Shudra. The present-day Advaitan Anantanand Rambachan argues that seeing every person as infinite consciousness can help heal the caste system.

Jains hold that in every cosmic cycle the teaching is taught by 24 omniscient Jinas, also called tirthankaras or ford-makers, after the holy crossing places in shallow water. Mahavira, traditionally dated 599 to 527 BCE, was an older contemporary of the Buddha with a strikingly similar life story; one notable difference is that he followed a tradition already long established rather than founding one.

Jains hold that every living being embodies a permanent self, so harm is weighed very widely: responsibility covers harm you delegate or merely permit, and harm by word or thought. Lay followers avoid harming beings with two or more senses, while monastics also avoid harming one-sensed beings, which is why acting harmlessly comes close to not acting.

Jain thinkers hold that every existing thing is at once persistent and changing, so any single statement about it captures only one aspect. From this came their realist epistemology of many-sidedness and a doctrine of perspectives that classifies the standpoints from which a complex object can be known, so a single claim holds from its standpoint and stays partial.

Non-attachment sits with non-violence and non-absolutism among the core Jain ethical practices. For monastics it reaches non-possession, up to the nudity of some monks; lay followers, who keep households and must do some harm to live, support the monastic community with the means to live.

Jain metaphysics is dualist and atomist: each self, jiva, is eternal consciousness, and karma is a kind of matter that flows in and binds to it. Penances stop the influx and purify bound karmic matter. That makes Jain karma a physical entanglement to be removed, unlike Buddhist teaching, which denies a permanent self altogether.

The Digambara, “those whose robe is the atmosphere”, regard monastic nudity as the necessary sign of holiness; the Svetambara, “they who are clothed in white”, hold that clothed holy ones may also reach the goal. Digambaras have also held that women cannot reach liberation. Do not read the split as north versus south: Georg Buhler's older study found Digambaras across the north as well.

Jain ethics sets a stricter standard for monastics than for lay people. Monks and nuns avoid harming even one-sensed beings, so they cannot cook or do much needed for survival; lay people, who must do some harm to live, earn merit by supplying the monastic community with what it needs.

Tradition says Gautama of the Shakya clan, born near today's India-Nepal border, left a householder's life, tried the wandering ascetics, reached awakening and taught for 45 years until dying at 80. His dates were long given as about 560 to 480 BCE, but many scholars now place his death around 405 BCE, and the texts were written down centuries later.

The truths state that there is suffering, that it arises from causes, that it can cease, and that a path leads to its cessation. Suffering here means existential frustration rooted in impermanence, not the claim that every moment feels bad. Most of the weight falls on the second truth: identify the causes correctly and the rest follows.

The path is the fourth truth in practice. Its eight factors were traditionally summed up as three trainings, in precepts, meditation and wisdom, so ethical conduct, mental discipline and insight are trained together. Right mindfulness, for example, is staying focused without confusion, attachment or distraction.

Buddhist teaching names three characteristics of sentient existence: suffering, impermanence and non-self. Ignorance of them leads you to treat some passing elements as “I” and “mine”, which breeds attachment, aversion and further rebirth. The cure is realizing all three, which is hard because those habits are already entrenched.

Non-self does not deny that there is rebirth. Buddhist philosophers explain a person as a causal series of impermanent physical and mental elements, so nothing needs to move from one life to the next; the person in one life and the next is described as neither the same nor different. Rebirth without a transmigrating self is logically possible.

The causes of suffering are traditionally laid out as twelve links, beginning with ignorance and ending with old age, disease and death. Modern scholarship treats the twelvefold list as a later compilation, since the texts give two slightly different versions and shorter ones, but the core idea is that suffering arises from conditions and ends when they end.

Nirvana is the cessation of suffering. In his first sermon the Buddha rejected two extremes, a life devoted to sensual pleasure and a life of self-mortification, as both profitless, and taught a middle path that avoids them. Nirvana comes from ending the conditions that produce suffering, so neither indulgence nor austerity is the route.

Taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha is spoken in the three-refuge formula, recited at ordinations and beside the dying. Lay people also undertake five precepts, among them refraining from killing, from stealing and from strong drink. They are commitments a person accepts, not commands from a god.

The canon's “three baskets” hold monastic discipline, the Buddha's discourses, and the Abhidharma's systematic analysis of experience. The discourses were probably preserved orally before being written down centuries after the Buddha, and they survive mainly in Pali and in Chinese translations of Sanskrit, versions that sometimes disagree.

Theravada is the dominant Buddhism of Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and lowland Laos; about 88 percent of Burma's population is Theravada Buddhist in the 2014 census. Thailand's monastic order has two main Theravada schools. Its ideal, the arhat, comes from the early tradition, and in Laos many pre-Buddhist animist beliefs are part of Theravada practice.

Mahayana makes buddhahood itself the goal, pursued as a bodhisattva who vows over countless lifetimes to bring all beings to awakening. It recasts the path as six perfections, from giving and moral conduct to meditation and wisdom, and recognizes many present buddhas presiding over their own buddha-fields. Renouncing lay life is valued but not strictly required.

Esoteric Buddhism works through mantra, mandala and initiation received from a master; Kukai, founder of Japan's Shingon school, was initiated in China into two mandala lineages. In Tibet the Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya and Gelug schools all follow the same Madhyamaka line of thought, yet debated fiercely among themselves.

Chan developed in China from the sixth century and spread as Zen in Japan and Son in Korea. Meditation was not what set it apart within Chinese Buddhism; its distinctive marks were new uses of language, new forms of story and a stress on embodied awakening. In Japan, the Rinzai school is mainly associated with the koan and the Soto school with “just sitting”.

Pure Land practice seeks birth in a buddha-field, above all the Pure Land of Amida Buddha, a teaching on which a continuous commentarial tradition grew. Sutras about Amida were among the earliest Buddhist scriptures brought to China, and in Japan the Pure Land tradition has been at least as pervasive as Zen though far less noticed in the West.

In the early tradition monastic life was the norm, and leaving lay life was itself a step toward release. The monastic order lives on what lay people give, and an 1889 account quotes the saying that by almsgiving people lay up treasures for themselves. Mahayana widened giving into the bodhisattva's sharing of merit with all beings.

Buddhist training uses meditation to sharpen observation of your own mental states and then cultivates insight with that sharpened attention; traditions disagree on whether insight, meditation or both bring release. Programs such as mindfulness-based stress reduction adapt mindful meditation for health settings, and US health researchers note that many meditative techniques began in Eastern traditions.

Guru Nanak's teaching emerged in fifteenth-century South Asia as sikhi, “the path of learning”, and Sikh thought is generally considered a distinct tradition. An 1812 British account read it as an attempt to reconcile Hindus and Muslims in one religion, and modern Sikh thinkers contested readings that folded it into Hindu orthodoxy. Langar, the shared meal he began, was meant to promote equality and oneness.

Leadership passed from Nanak through a line of successors: Angad; Amar Das, under whom eating langar became expected of every visitor; Ram Das, remembered for his work at Amritsar; then Arjan, who compiled the scripture in 1604. Gobind Singh, the tenth, armed and reshaped the community, and important parts of the composite Dasam Granth, “the text of the tenth Guru”, are his work.

Sikhs call the scripture's contents gurbani, the utterance of the Guru, and hold that it comes from beyond human imagination; the book itself bears the title Guru and is honored as one, so at langar the first plate of food is offered to the Guru Granth Sahib. Compiled by Guru Arjan in 1604, its 1,431 pages are arranged by musical measure and include hymns by Hindu and Muslim mystics such as Kabir.

The symbol ik oankar stands at the start of the scripture and expresses one reality whose creative vibration sounds through all beings. Sikh thinkers agree this oneness admits no ultimate dualisms and cannot be pictured, so the Gurus wrote in poetry set to music. Its practice is nam simaran, meditation on the divine name.

Guru Gobind Singh formed the Khalsa, a community in which, an 1812 British account records, a Brahmin had no higher claim than anyone else. Observant Sikhs keep five articles of faith, among them the kara, an iron bracelet, and the kirpan, a small blade that symbolizes a commitment to defend truth and moral values. The turban is not one of the five; it is worn in addition.

A gurdwara is a Sikh place of worship, where the congregation gathers to pray and to prepare and share langar, a free vegetarian meal begun by Guru Nanak to promote equality. Everyone eats together, on the floor or at tables with no seating order, regardless of wealth or rank, and cooking and serving the meal count as seva, selfless service.

Sikh teaching sums up daily life in three principles: earning honestly (kirat karo), sharing generously (vand chakko), which includes selfless service or seva, and remembering God (naam japo). Seva is practical work done for others, such as preparing langar in the gurdwara, and studies have linked it with well-being and a sense of community cohesion.

Confucius, traditionally dated 551 to 479 BCE, was born in the domain of Zou, south of the larger kingdom of Lu, and has been portrayed as teacher, adviser, editor, philosopher, reformer and prophet. The Analects collects dialogues with his disciples; the historian Sima Qian counted 77 direct disciples trained in ritual practice.

Benevolence, ren, means acting toward others from a sense of what is good from their point of view; ritual propriety, li, gives that care a form. The pair works only together: ritual done by rote, without the right feeling, misses the point, and in the Analects these sit beside righteousness, wisdom and trustworthiness.

In the Analects a disciple argues that someone who behaves with filial piety toward parents and siblings will rarely disorder society, making the family the training ground for wider order. The feeling matters as much as the deed: the gentleman differs from a lesser person in being reverent when he cares for a parent.

The five relationships, a formulation found in Mencius, became central in the Han dynasty: ruler and subject, parent and child, husband and wife, siblings, and friends. Proper behavior in these roles came to be read as proof of fitness to govern.

The Confucian ideal person, the gentleman or junzi, is described by conduct: benevolence, righteousness, ritual propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness. One image compares the gentleman's way to an embankment dam that shores up ordinary people's weaknesses, and filial conduct was taken as proof of fitness to serve in office.

Mencius claimed that human nature is good, meaning that people have innate tendencies toward benevolence, righteousness, wisdom and propriety that grow in a healthy setting. Xunzi answered with a chapter titled “Human Nature is Evil”, arguing that goodness comes from ritual and deliberate cultivation. Both treat self-cultivation as necessary; they disagree about its raw material.

Scholars often list Confucianism among the paradigm “world religions”, yet China's government recognizes five official religions, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Protestantism and Catholicism, and Confucianism is not among them. Broad definitions that count belief in an ordering principle, such as the Principle in Neo-Confucianism, include it; narrower ones built on gods do not.

Dao means a way or path, and de, its expression in things, is variously translated as virtue, potency, efficacy, integrity or power. The Daodejing opens by warning that the way that can be trodden is not the enduring way, and the name that can be named is not the enduring name, so any definition falls short.

Wu wei, often translated nonaction, does not mean total inaction. In the Laozi it contrasts with action driven by self-serving desire, the profit motives and calculated steps of ordinary striving. Read that way, nonaction is ordinary action done with a mind at peace, which is why later Daoists linked it to meditative practices.

Ziran, literally “self so”, names how the Dao works: it is not modeled on anything else. The Laozi traces political disorder to excessive desire, a violation of naturalness, while basic human needs are part of it. Effort that goes against what is self-so is, on this reading, counterproductive and bound to fail.

The Laozi, or Daodejing, is a text built around Dao, virtue, naturalness and nonaction, open to both spiritual and political readings. The Zhuangzi teaches through parables, short, pithy and often funny exchanges between real or imaginary speakers. Little about either author can be confirmed outside the texts.

Qi, yin-yang and the Five Agents form a vocabulary shared by Chinese philosophy and Chinese medicine, used to draw analogies among the body, the state and the cosmos. In Daoist cosmology qi, breath, joins essence and spirit as the three treasures, and qi is the principle that sustains the cosmos through all its changes.

The split between philosophical and religious Daoism is a modern scholars' habit; the Daoist canons treat the two terms as practically interchangeable. The Way of the Celestial Masters traces its founding to a revelation in 142 CE, and the monastic Quanzhen order is the other main branch today. China recognizes Taoism as one of its five official religions.

Daoist self-cultivation falls into three groups: Nourishing Life, with breathing, daoyin exercises and diet; meditation; and alchemy, both external elixirs and the internal alchemy of the body. Chinese medicine and philosophy share the Nourishing Life tradition, and US health researchers group tai chi and qigong, practices of Chinese origin, with yoga as meditative movement.

Kami, often too narrowly translated “gods”, are whatever manifests an awe-inspiring power: a celestial deity, a ghost, a spirit within a natural object, a wondrous mountain such as Fuji, even a legendary sword. The claim that Shinto is only ancestor-worship was common in the early twentieth century, and the scholar W. G. Aston called it grossly exaggerated.

A jinja is a Shinto shrine, and the torii is the distinctive gateway set before it, commonly painted red. The gate is such a strong marker that Aston pointed to torii before the shrines of Hachiman as the sign of his Shinto standing, even though that god's cult is deeply mixed with Buddhism.

Shinto ritual centers on cleansing pollution, especially pollution from death. In the founding myth Izanagi bathes in the sea to wash off the pollutions of the land of the dead, and the Great Purification liturgy is recited in the myth after a god's offenses are punished. Older Shinto avoided funerals entirely; an authorized Shinto burial came only after 1868.

Matsuri, festivals, range from the great to the small. One of the simplest is the earth-calming festival held to propitiate the site of a new building, while the festivals of the gods of the crossways were held where roads met on the four sides of the capital. Aston noted that Kyoto's great Gion festival preserved an old name for such spirits.

The Kojiki of 712 and the Nihon shoki of 720 are the oldest Japanese chronicles of the myths of the gods and the imperial line, including the sun goddess Amaterasu. The scholar Motoori Norinaga's commentary made the Kojiki the central canon for Shinto; before him it was hard to read, written before Japanese spelling was standardized.

For centuries Japanese esoteric Buddhism absorbed kami worship by treating kami as surface manifestations of Buddhist reality, and gods such as Hachiman were worshiped in deeply Buddhist ways. Later, scholars of the native-studies movement tried to disentangle Shinto from that mixture. Today Japanese commonly take part in both Shinto and Buddhist rites.

Before 1945 State Shinto ideology tied the nation to the emperor, and under it Buddhism often suffered persecution; only after 1945 was it fully free again. Japan's postwar constitution requires the state to refrain from religious education and activity and bars religious organizations from receiving state privileges.

The tradition traces the covenant to the first patriarch, marked by circumcision, and to its renewal at Sinai, marked by the Sabbath. It is read as a bond that confers distinction and imposes duty, not as favoritism. Prophets such as Jeremiah also spoke of a covenant written on the heart, an inward bond that did not depend on the Temple or on the land.

The Hebrew Bible groups its books as Law, Prophets and Writings, an order the rabbis took to mark rank and, roughly, age; Daniel and Chronicles sit among the Writings, and Chronicles closes the book. Christian Old Testaments order the books differently: in the King James Version Daniel stands among the Prophets and Malachi comes last, and some churches also read further books, the Apocrypha.

The deliverance from slavery and the law given at Sinai are relived each year: the liturgy calls Passover the season of freedom and Shavuot, or Pentecost, the season of the giving of the law, when the Ten Commandments are chanted from the scroll. Jews who do not read the miracles literally still keep both festivals, so the story works as a charter of identity and calling as well as history.

Before 70 CE, worship centered on sacrifice at the Jerusalem Temple, and three festivals drew pilgrims to it. Roman forces under Titus took the city in 70, and after a later revolt Hadrian barred Jews from Jerusalem. Synagogues already existed, so prayer could take the place of sacrifice and repentance the place of sacrificial atonement. A fast day, the Ninth of Av, still mourns the loss.

With the Temple gone, the sages treated study of the law as a form of worship, and the people looked to councils of scholars for guidance. Authority came from learning: the early masters were called Tannaim, from a word meaning teacher, and one famous Babylonian sage was known simply as Rab, the teacher. The shift built on synagogue prayer and scripture reading that were already established.

The Mishnah, compiled around 200 CE, put into writing an oral tradition debated in the schools for two centuries; its name means teaching by repetition. Discussion of it grew into two Talmuds, the Palestinian and the Babylonian, the latter completed around 500. Later codes, from Maimonides' in 1180 to the sixteenth-century Shulchan Aruch, turned that debate into rulings people could follow.

Jewish communities had lived in Babylonia since the exile, largely running their own affairs, and after Rome crushed the revolts the faith became that of a community rather than a state, with no single center. Minority life, often under persecution, made martyrdom part of how faithfulness was understood. In the twentieth century the Nazis and their collaborators systematically murdered six million Jews, the Holocaust or Shoah.

In traditional observance Sabbath law forbids many acts that are not laborious in themselves and limits movement, which can look like a burden from outside. Within the tradition the day is a delight and a foretaste of the world to come: at home it opens on its eve with a blessing over wine, and in the synagogue it brings the weekly readings from the Torah and the Prophets.

The Torah permits land animals that both chew the cud and have split hooves, and water creatures with fins and scales. Blood is forbidden, so meat is slaughtered by the Jewish method, then soaked and salted to draw the blood out. Beside the verse against boiling a kid in its mother's milk stands the kitchen rule: meat and milk are not eaten at the same meal, and their utensils are kept apart.

Rabbinic tradition counts 613 commandments, and Jewish law tries to carry out the intention behind them, so rulings were extended and adapted as life changed. Codes gathered the results, most influentially the sixteenth-century Shulchan Aruch. Modern movements divide over how far that code still binds, with some reformers abandoning observances and others modifying them.

The New Year, on the first day of the seventh month, began in the Bible as a day of blowing the shofar, a ram's horn, and became a day of judgment opening ten days of penitence. Those days end with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a strict fast. Hanukkah, the festival of lights for the Maccabees, is not among the holy days the Torah sets, though it gained popularity in modern times.

Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot follow the farming year, from first harvest to ingathering, and were pilgrim festivals to Jerusalem; when the Temple fell, pilgrimage ended and the rites moved into homes and synagogues. At the Passover seder, a service that is also a family meal, the family retells the liberation from slavery over unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Sukkot centers on the booth, often a shared one at the synagogue.

Circumcision marks a boy's entry into the covenant. Under rabbinic law a girl reaches religious majority at twelve and a boy at thirteen; the Talmud and Maimonides knew no bar mitzvah ceremony, which developed later, and Conservative and Reform Jews now hold bat mitzvahs too. Wine blesses a marriage, and traditionally a son recited the Kaddish, a prayer praising God, daily for a year after his father died.

In Orthodox practice public prayer needs a minyan of at least ten men, while Conservative and Reform Jews hold mixed-gender, egalitarian services, a difference still contested beside Jerusalem's Western Wall. The Shema, declaring God's unity and the duty to love God, is among the oldest passages of the liturgy, and Sabbath readings from the Torah and the Prophets were fixed before the Temple fell.

The modern divide is over how far the law still binds. Traditionalists still live by the codes, nineteenth-century Reformers dropped many observances, and later liberals preferred to modify rather than abolish them; Israel's Chief Rabbinate does not recognize Reform or Conservative conversions. Hasidism began in Eastern Europe as a revival seeking direct communion with God, and Kabbalah's chief book is the Zohar.

Jesus lived as a Jew in Galilee and Judea under Roman rule, when Pontius Pilate governed Judea, decades before the Temple fell in 70. Historians ask what the sources can show about his life, while the creeds state what Christians believe, such as that he suffered under Pilate and rose again. Keeping the two questions apart lets each be answered on its own terms.

Matthew, Mark and Luke share so much wording and order that they are called the synoptic Gospels. A common explanation is that Matthew and Luke each drew on Mark, plus a lost collection of sayings scholars call Q, which is reconstructed rather than surviving. John stands apart: its Jesus speaks in long discourses, and history and theological reflection are woven together throughout.

Christians affirm that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day, a line in the Apostles' Creed. Paul made it load-bearing, writing that without it the faith itself would be vain. Easter, which marks it, sets the date of the church's movable feasts. Describing it as what Christians affirm keeps a belief about the event separate from claims a historian can test.

Some of Paul's letters were probably written before any other part of the New Testament, the Gospels included, though the canon does not print them in the order he wrote them. They wrestle with the question that divided the first communities: whether Gentile converts must keep the Jewish law. Paul argued that they need not, which opened the movement to non-Jews and helped set it apart from the synagogue.

The twenty-seven books of the New Testament were not fixed all at once, and the edges stayed blurry for a long time. The Codex Sinaiticus, a fourth-century Bible manuscript, includes the Epistle of Barnabas and part of the Shepherd of Hermas alongside them, two books of great repute in early Christian times. Being valued and being canonical were not the same thing.

Early believers met in homes; Paul's letters greet 'the church that is in their house.' Accounts of martyrs, such as the third-century African martyrdoms, kept fervor alive in times of persecution. Diocletian's persecution failed to suppress the faith, and soon afterward an emperor who ruled alone from 324, baptized only on his deathbed, turned imperial favor toward Christianity.

The first believers were Jews who read Israel's scriptures in the light of their faith in Jesus. The parting came over the law and over Jesus himself: Paul taught that Gentile converts need not keep the law, believers drew away from the synagogue, and most Jews did not accept the claims made for him. The charge that Jews killed Jesus, drawn from how that parting was told, became a classic image of antisemitism.

The doctrine holds that Father, Son and Holy Spirit share one divine essence, homoousios in Greek, yet are the one God of the Bible. Formulated and imperially enforced by the end of the fourth century, it was disputed before then and again after the Reformation, when unitarians rejected it. It also faces a standing logical question: how three equally divine persons avoid being three gods.

Once the church agreed that the Son is fully divine, it had to explain how Jesus, a human being, could also be God. After further debate it defined Christ as one person in two natures, fully human and fully divine. The formula sets limits rather than solving the puzzle of one subject who seems both all-knowing and limited in knowledge, and philosophers still argue over it.

Councils at Nicaea in 325, Constantinople in 381 and Chalcedon in 451 set the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, drawing the boundaries of orthodoxy. The Nicene Creed is still said in communion services, as in the Anglican Prayer Book. A council's formula settled the terms of belief, but Christian thinkers kept wrestling with what those terms mean and how they cohere.

Christians agree that Christ saves, but the early church never defined how, so several models grew up: satisfaction, which says Christ paid a debt humans owed God; penal substitution, which says he bore their punishment; and others. Augustine stressed humanity's dependence on grace against Pelagius, and Luther taught justification through faith rather than through works.

A long series of quarrels between Rome and Constantinople ended in a final rupture in 1054. Two issues mattered most: the pope's claim to lead all Christians, which the emperor and the patriarch in Constantinople would not accept, and a dispute over a fine point of Trinity doctrine. Do not confuse it with a later split, beginning in 1378, when rival popes sat in Rome and Avignon and which is also called the Great Schism.

Luther's Ninety-Five Theses of 1517 attacked the church's teaching on indulgences and led to his excommunication in 1521; he escaped capture under the protection of Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony. His core claim was that people are justified through faith, not by their own efforts to keep God's law. Swiss reformers such as Zwingli soon disagreed with him over the sacraments, so the movement divided early.

Authority is the deepest divide: Rome holds that the pope leads the whole church, a claim the patriarch in Constantinople would not accept, while Protestants made scripture the test of what must be believed. Sacraments follow: Rome counts seven, and the Anglican articles accept only baptism and the Lord's Supper as ordained by Christ. Church structure then follows from where authority is thought to lie.

Protestant families divide mainly over sacraments and church order. Lutherans follow Luther, who denied that the sacraments are mere symbols; the Swiss reformers and the Anabaptists saw them differently. Anglicans keep the Prayer Book and their own Articles of Religion. Quakers, at the far end, call infant baptism a human tradition and gather for worship in silent waiting.

Rome counts seven sacraments, and in 1521 Henry VIII wrote a defense of all seven against Luther. The Anglican articles later kept baptism and the Lord's Supper as the two ordained by Christ, calling confirmation, penance, orders, matrimony and anointing 'commonly called' sacraments. Luther rejected a merely symbolic view of them, which some Swiss reformers and Anabaptists held.

The church year opens with Advent, the weeks before Christmas, and its movable feasts all depend on Easter, which by the Prayer Book rule is the first Sunday after the full moon falling on or next after March 21. Lent runs in the weeks before Easter, Ascension comes forty days after it, and Whitsunday, the feast of Pentecost, seven weeks after. One date shifts the whole spring calendar every year.

Liturgical churches pray set texts in a set order through the year; the Book of Common Prayer is the classic English model, and its articles insist worship be in a language the people understand. At the other pole, Quaker meetings sit in silent waiting and speak only when moved by the Spirit. The difference is what counts as the core: the shared text and sacrament, or the inward prompting.

Christian monasticism grew from hermits who gave away their goods, into communities living under a rule. Benedict's Rule binds monks to obedience and stability, sets prayer at fixed hours seven times a day, and alternates manual labor with sacred reading because idleness is 'the enemy of the soul.' Monasteries copied and preserved classical texts and received every guest as Christ.

Putting scripture into everyday language repeatedly provoked conflict. Luther began his German New Testament while in hiding and had to defend his choice to render a key line of Romans as 'faith alone,' since 'alone' is not in Paul's Greek. The Anglican articles called worship in a tongue the people did not understand contrary to scripture and early church practice.

Christianity spread through both missionaries and rulers: Ansgar preached in Denmark, while Charlemagne forced the pagan Saxons into baptism at sword point. Where it took hold it could also blend with older practice; in Nigeria today, many people combine Christian or Muslim practice with Indigenous traditions or animism.

Traditional accounts place Muhammad's birth around 570. In 622 he and his followers migrated to Medina, the hijra; the caliph Umar later made that year the start of the Muslim era, which is why dates are counted from it. Muhammad died in 632, and the dispute over who should lead after him shaped the Sunni and Shia traditions.

Muslims hold the Quran to be the word of God revealed to Muhammad in Arabic; its name means reading or recitation. Many early Muslims knew it by heart. Reports say it was gathered into written leaves under Abu Bakr and then fixed as one standard text under the caliph Uthman, who had other copies burned, so later readers inherited a single authorized collection.

The sunnah is what Muhammad did, what he commanded and what he allowed to happen in his presence; hadith are the reports that preserve it. Scholars graded each report by its narrators: a sound (sahih) hadith comes through people known for integrity, and reports are also classed by whether the chain of narrators is unbroken. Shia collections include sayings of their imams too.

Tawhid, the oneness of God, is the base of Muslim belief, stated in the creed's first half: there is no deity but God. Theologians then had to explain how God's attributes fit that unity. Abu Hanifa is credited with teaching that the Quran is God's eternal word, an attribute that is not God yet inseparable from God; that view, that it is uncreated, prevailed, while the Mutazila held the Quran to be created.

Islam honors a line of prophets that includes Abraham and Jesus. Muslim scholars commonly distinguish a prophet (nabi), inspired by God, from a messenger (rasul), who also receives a book. The Quran calls Jews and Christians People of the Book, speaks often of the religion of Abraham, and has Jesus announce a messenger to come after him, whom Muslims identify as Muhammad.

Arab armies conquered Syria and Persia in the seventh century, but conquest was not the same as conversion. Christians under Muslim rule could keep their faith by paying the jizya, a tax levied in return for protection and in place of military service, and many churches declined only gradually. In Southeast Asia, Islam spread first through merchants at port towns rather than through armies.

The Kaaba, a cube-shaped building holding the Black Stone at the center of Mecca's Sacred Mosque, is the direction every Muslim faces in prayer. That direction, the qibla, changed once: early prayer at Medina faced Jerusalem before it was turned toward Mecca. In Medina, the chamber where Muhammad died and was buried adjoins the Prophet's Mosque.

Each pillar has its own rule. Zakat is not voluntary charity but a fixed share of wealth held for a full year above a minimum. The fast of Ramadan runs from dawn to sunset. Hajj is required once in a lifetime, and only of an adult who is healthy and can afford the journey while still supporting the family left at home.

Faith, iman, is defined as belief of the heart confessed by the lips, and its detailed form names six articles: God, the angels, God's books, the prophets, the Day of Judgment, and predestination to good and evil. The pillars say what a Muslim does; the articles say what a Muslim believes, though hadith also count deeds as part of faith.

Prayer is required five times a day: early morning, midday, afternoon, evening and night, though the Quran never lists all five together. Worshippers wash first (wudu) and face the qibla, the direction of the Kaaba. In a mosque, a niche called the mihrab marks that direction, and beside it stands the minbar, the pulpit for the Friday sermon.

Ramadan, the ninth month, is a fast from dawn to sunset; the sick and travelers may break it and make up the days later. Eid al-Fitr opens the next month, ending the fast with alms and congregational prayer. Eid al-Adha, the feast of sacrifice on the tenth of the pilgrimage month, recalls Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son and is kept worldwide, not only by pilgrims.

Pilgrims enter ihram, a state of consecration with strict prohibitions, which for men means two plain white cloths. They circle the Kaaba seven times, run between the hills of Safa and Marwa, stand at Arafat on the ninth of the month, throw pebbles at pillars, sacrifice and shave the head. Hajj law ranks standing at Arafat among its few strictly required acts. The lesser pilgrimage, umrah, can be made at other times.

Sharia names the law grounded in the Quran and the Prophet's example; fiqh is jurisprudence, the human work of deriving rules from those sources. There is no single code: jurists reason from the Quran, sunnah, analogy and consensus, so rulings differ by school. Saudi courts, for instance, apply sharia as the Hanbali school reads it, while in Turkey scholars' opinions are moral guidance, not law.

Sunni Islam has four main legal schools, named for founders: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii and Hanbali, each dominant in different regions. All weigh the Quran, the sunnah, analogy and consensus, but they give different weight to particular hadith. Iran follows the Twelver Jafari school, and Shia jurists allow more room for independent reasoning.

The Muslim year has twelve lunar months and no leap month, so it runs about 354 days, roughly eleven days shorter than the solar year. Each festival therefore arrives about eleven days earlier each year and cycles through every season over about 33 years. The era counts from the hijra, Muhammad's move to Medina in 622.

When Muhammad died in 632, most of the community accepted Abu Bakr as caliph, while a minority held that Muhammad had chosen his cousin Ali. Ali's partisans, the shia of Ali, became the Shia; the majority took the name Sunni, followers of the Prophet's customs. Shia mourn Ali's son Husayn, killed at Karbala in 680. The two share most beliefs; Shia are estimated at 10 to 15 percent of Muslims.

Shia groups split over which descendants of Ali were rightful imams. Twelvers, the largest, recognize twelve infallible imams and believe the twelfth went into hiding in the ninth century and will return. Ismailis broke off in the eighth century over Ismail, whom they count as the seventh imam, and many today regard the Aga Khan as their spiritual leader. Zaydis, mostly in Yemen, reject both infallibility and a hidden imam.

The name is usually traced to suf, wool, the rough garment of early Muslim ascetics, who stressed repentance and renunciation before mystical teaching developed. Sufis seek the passing away of the self (fana) into awareness of God. Sufism crosses the Sunni-Shia line: brotherhoods such as the Tijaniyya are prominent among Nigeria's Sunnis, and Shia Iran has an estimated several million Sufis.

Kalam, Muslim theology, and falsafa, philosophy in the Greek Aristotelian tradition, were rival ways of reasoning about God. Al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers, itself a work of kalam, attacked twenty positions of falsafa while he accepted and applied other teachings of it. Ibn Rushd, known in Europe as Averroes, replied with The Incoherence of the Incoherence and argued elsewhere for the value of philosophy to Islam.

Under the Abbasid caliphs, a movement translated Greek philosophy and science into Arabic, building on Syriac learning; the Nestorian Christian physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq, his son and their circle produced translations spanning the complete Aristotelian corpus. Most historians credit that movement with giving rise to Arabic philosophy, though some trace it chiefly to the Quran's own call to wisdom.

Salafism names a range of Sunni revival movements that seek to purify practice by returning to the ways of Islam's earliest generations, from politically quiet groups to violent ones. Wahhabism, from the eighteenth-century scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, is one strand, tied to the Saudi state since an alliance with the Saud family. Lumping every Saudi-linked group under 'Wahhabi' blurs real differences.

Most of the world's Muslims live in South and Southeast Asia, not the Arab world. Indonesia is about 87 percent Muslim among 280 million people, Pakistan over 96 percent among nearly 250 million, and Bangladesh about 91 percent, while India's minority of roughly 14 percent is very large in absolute terms. Each outnumbers Egypt, the most populous Arab country, at about 90 percent of 110 million.

Zarathustra, known in Greek and later sources as Zoroaster, is the prophet of an ancient Iranian religion whose supreme God is Ahura Mazda, also called Ormazd. The oldest parts of its scripture, the Avesta, are hymns called the Gathas. Scholars have long disagreed about when he lived, with estimates spread over many centuries, so treat any single date with caution.

The good creator is opposed by a destructive spirit called Ahriman, who counter-creates death and sin. Every person must take a side, and neutrality is impossible; the ideal follower is pure in thought, word and deed. After death each soul is judged by its deeds, and the cosmic struggle is expected to end in the triumph of the good.

Zoroastrians treat fire as the visible symbol of an unseen God, not as the object of their worship, though older Western writers still called them fire-worshippers. Purity rules extend to the elements: burning a corpse would pollute fire and burying it would pollute earth, so the dead were traditionally exposed in high places instead.

After the Muslim conquest of Persia, Zoroastrians who fled to India became the Parsis of its west coast, and a community in Surat taught a European scholar the Avesta's language in the 1750s. India now lists Parsis among its six officially recognized religious minorities and lets the community define its own customary practices. Iran's remaining Zoroastrians number in the tens of thousands.

The Baha'i Faith emerged in 1840s Persia from the movement of the Bab, which began within Shia Islam. The authorities executed the Bab, a central figure of the faith, for apostasy in 1850, and Baha'u'llah is regarded as its founder. Because Baha'is accept a revelation after Muhammad's, Iran's government treats them as apostates, though Baha'is do not consider themselves Muslims.

Baha'is accept Baha'u'llah's revelation as coming after Muhammad's, and they organize community life through administrative bodies such as national spiritual assemblies. A tenet of the faith is not to deny it, so in Iran, where Baha'is are the largest non-Muslim minority, they will not claim another religion to enter state universities, and with their institutions banned they have relied on coordinating groups.

Christian creeds expect the dead to be raised, Zoroastrian teaching judges each soul by its deeds, and Hindu and Buddhist traditions teach rebirth. These are not variations on one idea: Hindu thought gives an enduring self more weight through successive lives, while Buddhist thought treats the self as finally insubstantial and seeks release from the cycle altogether.

In theistic traditions, suffering raises the problem of evil: why a good and powerful God permits it. John Hick's soul-making theodicy says hardship builds character, though critics note it cannot explain animal pain or children's suffering. Rabbinic sources speak of chastisements of love to account for the suffering of the righteous, and Zoroastrian teaching sets evil in a cosmic struggle good will win.

Pilgrimage takes many forms. The hajj is a duty once in a lifetime for every Muslim who is able, and more than 1.8 million people made it in 2023. Zoroastrians travel each year to the temple of Chak-Chak near Yazd in Iran, one of their holiest sites, and Christian pilgrims visit Jerusalem's holy places. Jewish pilgrimage to the Temple at the three festivals ended when it fell.

Rules on food and washing overlap and diverge. Jewish law permits animals that chew the cud and part the hoof; the Quran forbids carrion, blood, pork and meat dedicated to other gods, so blood and pork are barred in both. Muslims wash before each prayer, and Zoroastrian law keeps fire, water and earth from contact with the dead.

Mystics describe union very differently: the Sufi passing away of self in God, a Christian spiritual marriage of soul and Christ, a Kabbalistic experience of one of the sefirot, and the Advaita Vedanta realization that the self and ultimate reality are one. Perennialists see one hidden core under these; constructivists reply that a mystic's culture shapes the experience itself, which limits how far comparison can go.

The Ten Commandments forbid making a graven image to bow down to, and Muslim jurists, citing reports that Muhammad cursed those who drew people and animals, held such pictures unlawful. Eastern Christians defend icons on the ground of the Incarnation: John of Damascus wrote that he worshipped not matter but the God who became matter, so the visible Christ may be painted.

In Israel, Orthodox women who study Jewish law have petitioned to take the exams used to ordain rabbis, and Conservative and Reform Jews have pressed for mixed-gender prayer at the Western Wall. In Iran, Muslim women have argued that treating women as lesser is a later accretion, not a precept of Islam. In each case the challenge appeals to the tradition's own sources.

Confucius offered a one-line rule for life: do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself. Hillel put it negatively too and called it the whole Torah, 'the rest is commentary.' Jesus gave a positive form, doing to others as you would have them do to you, and a hadith praises the same. The wording matters: avoiding harm is a narrower demand than doing good.

Thinkers such as Marx and Weber, and for a time Peter Berger, predicted that modern life would make religion disappear or retreat into private life. In liberal democracies it has not, though the evidence cuts both ways: in the 2021 census for England and Wales, fewer than half called themselves Christian and 37 percent reported no religion.

An established church is the state's own, as the Church of England is in England. Other constitutions refuse any establishment: Nigeria's bars a state religion and India's mandates a secular state. France's constitution includes secularism, and French law bans conspicuous religious symbols in places such as public schools. Pakistan, by contrast, establishes Islam while still promising freedom of religion.

Philosophers sort responses to religious diversity into exclusivism, which holds that one tradition's answer to a disputed question is true, inclusivism and pluralism, though the labels are used inconsistently. Because equally informed, sincere people still disagree, the open questions are whether one can stay justified in one's own view and whether diversity can ground tolerance.

Ian Barbour's influential scheme sorts the relation of science and religion as conflict, independence, dialogue or integration. Scholars have challenged the popular 'warfare' story; one argues that Protestant ideas of nature helped give rise to modern science. Conflict views still dominate public debate, as in American fundamentalist opposition to evolution.

A canon is a set of writings a community accepts as authoritative for religious life; the word comes from Greek for a rule. Status therefore rests on acceptance and use, not on age or genre. Muslims call the Quran the word of God itself, while Jewish tradition holds that an oral law, handed down by mouth, carries authority alongside the written books.

The Hebrew canon was not closed at one time: it is usually described as completed about a century into the Christian era, and some books left out survived in the Apocrypha. Christian lists of New Testament books took shape over the following centuries. Some boundaries were drawn in layers, as when the Anglican articles read the Apocrypha for example of life but not to establish doctrine.

Traditions kept texts alive in two channels at once. Many early Muslims knew the whole Quran by heart, and official reciters taught it wherever Islam spread. Jewish oral law passed from teacher to student for generations before it was written down. The Christian scriptures survive through copied manuscripts, since every original autograph has perished.

Muslims hold that the Quran was revealed in Arabic, and one of its traditional titles is simply 'the Arabic.' Protestant reformers pulled the other way: the Anglican articles call worship in a tongue the people cannot understand contrary to scripture. Translation choices can themselves become disputes, as when Luther had to defend adding 'alone' to Paul's words on faith in Romans.

Commentary is often where a tradition actually lives. The Talmud grew as discussion of the Mishnah, and Hillel called the whole Torah one rule, 'the rest is commentary.' Tafsir is the Muslim term for commentary on the Quran. In Hindu learning, Vedic texts are read with running commentaries such as the bhashyas ascribed to Shankara, and the church Fathers built doctrine by expounding scripture.

Readers have sought hidden meanings under the letter: Philo and the Zohar read the Torah allegorically, and early Christians used allegory to find Christ on every page of the Old Testament. Jurists read for rules, extending them by analogy. Historical-critical scholars instead ask how texts were written, for example by tracing how Matthew and Luke used Mark.

Communities differ on who may read authoritatively. In Shia Islam, learned mujtahids, the most senior called ayatollahs, interpret law, while Sunni Islam lets lay people lead prayer and preach more readily. Luther argued against a council called by the pope and upheld scripture's authority, and in Israel the Chief Rabbinate decides whose conversion counts for state marriage, divorce and burial.