Month: October 2026

Kongzi (traditionally 551–479 BCE), latinised as Confucius, was a disappointed minor official in his lifetime. Within four centuries he was the patron sage of an empire, and from 1313 to 1910 his canon was memorised by every candidate for office.…

Long before anything was called “Confucianism” or “Taoism”, the Yellow River peoples had a complete religious world. It held a high god in the sky, royal ancestors consulted through cracked bones, spirits of mountain and soil, gods of the door…

Bhakti, devotional love of a personal God sung in the vernacular, began in Tamil country and moved north over the next thousand years. It challenged Brahmin ritual and Sanskrit learning, and in the north it met Islamic Sufism. Out of…

Classical Indian philosophy is organised as darshanas, “views” or “points of view.” There are six orthodox systems, usually paired: Nyaya and Vaisheshika, Samkhya and Yoga, Mimamsa and Vedanta. All accept the authority of the Veda. They argued with each other…

What outsiders call “Hinduism” is, in the words of Michael Baltutis’s primer, “a family of myriad faiths with four primary denominations: Saivism, Vaishnavism, Shaktism and Smartism” [Baltutis, What Is Hinduism?, #54289, “Chapter 2: Hinduism’s Four Denominations”]. Running through all four,…

Buddhism and Jainism had made renunciation the high road to liberation. Brahmanical religion answered them with stories. The Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa turned the ethics of king and warrior into sacred narrative. Within the Mahābhārata, the Bhagavad Gītā argued that…

After the Ashokan centuries, Buddhism changed in two linked directions. In doctrine it grew into the Mahāyāna, the “Great Vehicle”, which taught the bodhisattva ideal, the Pure Lands, the philosophy of emptiness and the Yogācāra analysis of a “store consciousness”.…

The third Maurya emperor, Ashoka (reigned c. 268–232 BCE), is the first ruler in the library’s sources to turn a śramaṇa ethic into a programme of government. His rock and pillar edicts are the oldest readable Indian documents, his missions…

Siddhartha Gautama, the “awakened one” (Buddha) of the Shakya clan, belongs to the same śramaṇa ferment as Mahavira (Chapter 86). His solution differed from Mahavira’s. He rejected both sensual indulgence and the self-torment of the Jains, he denied the permanent…

Of the śramaṇa (“striver”) movements that challenged Brahmanical ritualism in the Ganges valley in the middle of the first millennium BCE, Jainism took renunciation to its furthest point. It holds that the soul (jiva) is bound by a subtle karmic…