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/ˈlɛksɪkən/noun

The working vocabulary of the inner life.

The terms, traditions, figures, practices and texts the index touches, each cross-linked to the works that use it. Concepts defined plainly, with their neighbours named.

Anunnaki ancient Sumerian pantheon The most linked entry: 25 cross-references

A

A Course in Miracles

tradition
channelled text A 1,200-page channelled spiritual text first published in 1976, and the loose study tradition that has formed around it. Helen Schucman, a research psychologist at Columbia University, took down the material between 1965 and 1972 from what she described as an inner voice she identified as Jesus. Her colleague William Thetford transcribed the notes. The text reframes Christian vocabulary through a non-dual idealism: the perceived world is the projection of a separated mind, and forgiveness is the disciplined withdrawal of that projection. Marianne Williamson is the most widely known living teacher in the lineage. 5 linked entries, 9 see also

A. H. Almaas

figure
Diamond Approach founder A. H. Almaas is the pen name of Hameed Ali (born Kuwait, 1944). He is a contemplative teacher and the founder of the Ridhwan School. His teaching, which he calls the Diamond Approach, draws on depth psychology, the Sufi tradition of inner work, and the non-dual recognitions of Asian contemplative traditions. He has taught since the mid-1970s and is the author of the five-volume Diamond Heart series and roughly twenty further books, most published by Shambhala Publications. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Abhidharma

concept
Buddhist analysis of mind The Abhidharma (Pāli: Abhidhamma) is the third piṭaka, or basket, of the Buddhist canon. The name means roughly higher dharma or concerning the dharma: a systematic reorganisation of the Buddha's teachings into a catalogue of the smallest units of experience and the conditions by which they arise. It is the analytical backbone of the Theravāda monastic curriculum, the textual source of the Yogācāra and Madhyamaka Mahāyāna traditions, and the analytic framework the Heart Sūtra's form is emptiness is designed to complete. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Abhinavagupta

figure
Kashmiri Śaiva polymath Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1016) was a Kashmiri philosopher, tantric master, and aesthetician. He is the systematic summit of Kashmir Shaivism and the author of the Tantrāloka, the longest and most influential single exposition of the Śaiva Trika tradition. His works range from the formal Pratyabhijñā philosophical treatises to the Abhinavabhāratī, his commentary on the Nāṭyaśāstra that founded the rasa-aesthetic tradition of Sanskrit literary theory. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Abhiniveśa

concept
the fifth kleśa Sanskrit abhiniveśa — clinging to, insistence on — is the fifth of the five kleśas in Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras. It is usually rendered clinging to life, but more precisely it is the pre-cognitive will to continue. The body-grounded insistence on persisting, the text observes, is present even in those who consider themselves unattached. Of the five, it is the hardest to dislodge, because the body itself is its substrate. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Abhyāsa

concept
sustained practice in yoga Sanskrit abhyāsa means sustained, attentive repetition. It is the first of the two pillars on which Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras (I.12) build the stilling of the citta-vṛtti (mind's modifications). Paired with vairāgya (dispassion), abhyāsa names the continuous, undeflected return to the discipline the path prescribes: sustained over a long time, without interruption, and with right attitude (I.14). This pair has been carried, under different vocabulary, through every major Indian contemplative school. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Acharya

concept
spiritual teacher title Ācārya (Sanskrit: आचार्य) is the formal title for a qualified spiritual teacher in Hinduism and Buddhism. The word derives from ā-cāra, meaning conduct: an ācārya teaches through how they live. In Hinduism, the most enduring form is the Shankaracharya lineage, established by Adi Shankara in the 8th century CE. In Buddhism, the ācariya is the ordained teacher responsible for a new monk's formal training. 4 linked entries, 7 see also

Acupressure

practice
pressure-point bodywork A traditional Chinese medicine practice that applies finger pressure to specific points on the body's meridian channels. The underlying theory is the same as acupuncture: stimulating these points is said to regulate the flow of qi (vital energy) through the jīngluò (meridian network). It is needle-free, making it accessible as self-practice. Scientific reviews have not found convincing evidence for the qi-flow mechanism, though some trials report modest effects on nausea and localised pain. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Ādi Śaṅkara

figure
Advaita Vedānta founder Indian philosopher and theologian (traditionally 788–820 CE; some scholars place him a century earlier). He systematised Advaita Vedānta into the dominant interpretive school of Hinduism. His commentaries on the Brahma Sūtras, the principal Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad Gītā remain foundational. He also founded four mathas at Sringeri, Dvāraka, Puri and Joshimath, giving the doctrine an institutional spine that has endured for twelve centuries. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Adoration

practice
devotional reverence Adoration is the act of directing sustained, loving reverence toward the divine, moving beyond petition to simple worship. In Catholic Christianity it takes its most formal shape in Eucharistic Adoration, where the practitioner sits in silence before the consecrated host. In Hinduism the equivalent runs through puja and the path of bhakti; in Sufism through dhikr and the poetic tradition of the Beloved. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Advaita Vedānta

tradition
Hindu non-dualism The Hindu philosophical school of non-dualism. Advaita means non-dual; vedānta means end or culmination of the Vedas. It was systematised by Ādi Śaṅkara in the 8th century CE on the basis of the Upaniṣads, the Brahma Sūtras and the Bhagavad Gītā. Its central claim, condensed in the Upaniṣadic phrase tat tvam asi (that thou art): Brahman (ultimate reality) and Ātman (the self) are not two. 6 linked entries, 9 see also

Adyashanti

figure
American non-dual teacher American teacher (b. 1962, Steven Gray) who trained for fourteen years in the Zen lineage of Taizan Maezumi-rōshi before being asked to teach in 1996. His voice is among the most accessible English-language entry points to non-dual realisation. It is free of imported jargon, denominationally unmoored, and grounded in lived practice rather than translated Sanskrit. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

Afterlife

concept
existence after death The term for any postulated existence, state, or form of consciousness that continues after the death of the physical body. Virtually every religious tradition has some account of it: Christianity's heaven and hell, Buddhism's rebirth in saṃsāra, Vedānta's mokṣa and cycle of karma. The concept ranges from personal survival with full memory and identity to complete dissolution of the self into an impersonal ground. 4 linked entries, 11 see also

Ahaṃkāra

concept
the I-making function Sanskrit ahaṃkāra, literally the I-maker: the cognitive function in classical Indian psychology that constructs the felt sense of being a separate self by appropriating thoughts, sensations and actions to a centre that claims them as its own. In Sāṃkhya it is the third evolute of prakṛti, the operation by which the undifferentiated subject splits into a first-person owner and the experiences it owns; in the Advaita Vedānta reading Ādi Śaṅkara systematised, it is the principal obstruction the self-enquiry curriculum is engineered to see through. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Ahiṃsā

concept
non-injury, the root ethic Sanskrit a-hiṃsā, meaning non-injury. The foundational ethical principle of Jain, Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and the first of the five yamas (restraints) in Patañjali's eight-limbed yoga. Often translated as non-violence, the classical meaning is broader: a discipline of avoiding harm in thought, word and deed toward all sentient beings, oneself included. 6 linked entries, 11 see also

Ajahn Chah

figure
Thai forest monk Thai forest monk (1918–1992) whose ordination name was Phra Bodhinyana Thera. From his monastery Wat Pah Pong in Ubon Ratchathani, he trained the Western disciples, among them Jack Kornfield, Ajahn Sumedho, and Ajahn Brahm, who carried Thai forest practice to Europe, North America, and Australia. His teaching paired strict monastic discipline with plain instruction in Lao-Thai vernacular. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Ajahn Mun

figure
Thai forest monk, 1870–1949 Ajahn Mun Bhūridatta (1870–1949), the Lao-Thai forest monk who revived strict thudong (wandering) practice from the margins of the Bangkok-centred Thai saṅgha and founded the modern Thai Forest Tradition. His insistence on the vinaya, sustained samādhi, and contemplative work over textual scholarship produced the lineage that reached Ajahn Chah and, through Chah's Western students, the Insight Meditation Society tradition of Theravāda practice across North America, Britain, and Australasia. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

Ajahn Sumedho

figure
Theravāda teacher American-born Theravāda monk (born 1934) and the senior Western disciple of Ajahn Chah. He ordained in northeast Thailand in 1967 and spent nine years at Wat Pah Pong before being sent to England in 1976. He founded Cittaviveka (Chithurst Buddhist Monastery, 1979) and Amaravati (1984), and established an unmodified Thai-forest Vinaya as a living monastic Saṅgha outside Asia. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Akashic Records

concept
cosmic memory record From the Sanskrit ākāśa (sky, ether), the proposed non-physical record of every thought, action and event that has ever occurred. The term was coined by Theosophical writers including Helena Blavatsky, Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was made famous in popular esotericism by Edgar Cayce, who reported reading from the Records in trance during thousands of recorded sessions. 0 linked entries, 11 see also

Al-Ghazālī

figure
Persian Sufi theologian Persian theologian, jurist, philosopher, and Sufi (1058–1111), widely regarded as the most influential Muslim thinker after the Prophet. He held the leading teaching chair at the Niẓāmiyya of Baghdad, abandoned it in a spiritual crisis, spent eleven years in Sufi practice, and returned to write Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (The Revival of the Religious Sciences). This forty-book treatise integrated inner discipline into Sunni orthodoxy and shaped Islamic religious life for nine centuries. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Alan Watts

figure
philosopher & Zen writer British-American philosopher and orator (1915–1973) who more than any other twentieth-century figure brought the categories of Eastern thought (Zen, Taoism, Vedānta) into educated American mainstream conversation. The Way of Zen (1957), Psychotherapy East and West (1961), and The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966) remain in print. The recordings of his Bay Area lectures from the 1960s and early 70s have outlasted most of his books and now circulate widely on YouTube. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Ālayavijñāna

concept
storehouse consciousness Sanskrit ālaya (store) + vijñāna (consciousness): the storehouse consciousness of the Yogācāra school of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Asaṅga and Vasubandhu developed the concept in the fourth century as the deepest of eight layers of mind. The ālayavijñāna holds the bīja (seeds) of past actions, which ripen moment by moment into what the practitioner perceives as the world. It underpins the East Asian Mahāyāna's reading of karma, the Vajrayāna's account of habitual tendencies across lifetimes, and Thich Nhat Hanh's image of seeds in the store consciousness. 5 linked entries, 7 see also

Alchemy

tradition
the art of transmutation The ancient art of transmuting base metals into gold and, in its inner reading, of purifying the human soul through the same process. The tradition runs from Greco-Roman Egypt in the 2nd century CE through Islamic scholars including Al-Ghazali to the laboratories and manuscripts of Renaissance Europe. Its symbolic vocabulary, including the prima materia, the opus magnum, and the philosopher's stone, shaped Western esotericism, the origins of chemistry, and twentieth-century depth psychology. 3 linked entries, 7 see also

Aldous Huxley

figure
novelist & philosopher Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was an English novelist and essayist. His 1945 anthology The Perennial Philosophy gave English readers the most influential statement of the idea that the world’s wisdom traditions share a common underlying recognition. His 1954 The Doors of Perception, an account of his first mescaline session in Los Angeles, reopened the Western debate about altered perception and contemplative experience. Through all his work runs the same question: what becomes available to a consciousness no longer filtered by the brain’s ordinary survival tuning. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Altar

concept
sacred table of offerings A consecrated surface (table, slab, or platform) used for ritual offerings, prayer, and acts of worship. The word comes from the Latin altāre, connected to altus, high. Altars mark the point where human and sacred are brought into contact. They are among the oldest documented religious structures and are found in virtually every living tradition. 3 linked entries, 9 see also

Amitābha

figure
Buddha of Infinite Light The Buddha of infinite light. Sanskrit Amitābha, Japanese Amida, Chinese Amita-fo. Amitābha is the central celestial Buddha of the Pure Land schools and one of the five principal dhyāni Buddhas of Tibetan Vajrayāna. He is not a historical figure like Śākyamuni. The Mahāyāna sūtras present him as a sambhogakāya, a Buddha appearing in the body of bliss. His forty-eight vows, recorded in the Sukhāvatīvyūha sūtras, are the doctrinal foundation of the largest Buddhist tradition in East Asia by practitioner count. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Anagarika Munindra

figure
vipassanā teacher Indian Buddhist teacher (1915–2003). He trained under Mahāsi Sayādaw in Burma and from 1966 directed the Burmese Vihāra at Bodhgayā. Under his direction, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg and others first learned the Satipaṭṭhāna-based vipassanā curriculum that became the foundation of American insight meditation. His role in the Western Theravāda transmission is structural rather than written: almost everything he taught now reaches the reader through his students' books and recordings. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Ānāpānasati

practice
mindfulness of breathing Pāli for mindfulness of breathing. The foundational Buddhist practice of placing attention on the in-breath and out-breath as they appear, then returning whenever attention has wandered. Laid out in full in the Ānāpānasati Sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 118) as sixteen progressive contemplations, from simple breath-awareness through recognition of impermanence to letting go. The technique is the unspoken centre of almost every meditation programme that has reached the West, present in vipassanā under its own name, in zazen as breath-counting, and in MBSR as awareness of the breath. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Anattā

concept
Buddhist doctrine of non-self Pāli for non-self (Sanskrit anātman): the Buddhist doctrine that no permanent, unchanging self can be found anywhere in the field of experience. Together with impermanence (anicca) and dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), it forms the three marks of existence in Buddhist analysis. The teaching does not deny the conventional person. It denies only the assumption that a separate, self-existing core lies beneath the processes that conventionally bear that person's name. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Andrew Harvey

figure
mystic and activist Andrew Harvey (born 1952, Coimbatore, India) is a British scholar of mysticism, poet, and translator of Rumi. He studied at Oxford and then immersed himself in Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufi traditions over thirty years. Since 2005 he has taught Sacred Activism, his term for the convergence of deep contemplative practice with urgent engagement in the world. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Andrew Holecek

figure
Dream-yoga teacher American Vajrayāna practitioner and dream-yoga teacher (born 1955). Holecek trained as a dentist before undertaking a three-year retreat under Khenpo Tsültrim Gyamtso Rinpoche and Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche in the Kagyu lineage. He has since built the principal English-language curriculum for the nocturnal practices the Six Yogas of Nāropa preserve: milam (dream yoga), ösel (clear-light), and bardo preparation. His books include Dream Yoga (2016), Preparing to Die (2013), and Reverse Meditation (2023). His teaching bridges the Tibetan completion-stage instructions with the contemporary Western lucid-dreaming research literature. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Angels

concept
celestial messengers Spiritual beings who mediate between the divine and the human, found across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism. The Greek angelos means messenger, the source of the English term. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 500 CE) arranged them into nine orders from Seraphim to Angels, a classification standardised in Western theology by Thomas Aquinas. In Islam, Jibril (Gabriel) is the archangel who dictated the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. 2 linked entries, 7 see also

Anicca

concept
impermanence in Buddhism Pāli for impermanence: the early-Buddhist insistence that everything compounded comes apart, and that no formation outlasts the conditions that produced it. It is one of the three marks of existence, alongside dukkha and anattā, which the historical Buddha taught as universal characteristics of conditioned experience. In Theravāda practice the recognition is meant to be seen directly, not believed. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Animism

tradition
the world alive with spirit Animism is the worldview that all entities carry spirit, agency, or personhood. Animals, plants, rivers, rocks, and weather are not inert matter but participants in a living world. The term was coined by the anthropologist E. B. Tylor in Primitive Culture (1871), though the reality it describes is far older than any modern vocabulary for it. Today scholars use 'new animism' to describe a relational way of encountering the world, distinct from Tylor's reading of it as a primitive stage of religion. 0 linked entries, 15 see also

Anita Moorjani

figure
NDE author & teacher Anita Moorjani is a Sindhi author and speaker who grew up in Hong Kong. In February 2006, after four years of Hodgkin's lymphoma, she was admitted to the Hong Kong Sanatorium and Hospital in a terminal state. During the coma that followed, she reported a near-death experience in which she encountered unconditional love and recognised that the self she had spent her life defending was a construction built from fear. Over the weeks after she woke, her oncologists documented a full regression of the tumours. Her 2012 book Dying to Be Me is the written record. Her teaching since then holds that the root of her illness was not a physical failure alone, but the suppression of who she actually was. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Annie Besant

figure
Theosophist and reformer English social reformer, women's rights activist and secularist (1847–1933). In mid-life she joined the Theosophical Society after reviewing Helena Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine in 1889. She became the Society's second international president on Henry Olcott's death in 1907 and shaped both the Indian and the Western reception of Theosophy for the first third of the twentieth century. Her 1909 identification of the thirteen-year-old Jiddu Krishnamurti as the vehicle for a coming World Teacher set in motion the most consequential of the Society's twentieth-century arcs. 6 linked entries, 7 see also

Anthony de Mello

figure
Indian Jesuit mystic Indian Jesuit priest and spiritual director (1931–1987). He brought the awareness vocabulary of the Hindu and Buddhist contemplative traditions into the Catholic Ignatian retreat, first at his Sadhana Institute in Pune and in the 1978 book of the same name, then in the posthumously assembled Awareness (1990). A 1998 Notification from the Holy See made him the modern Catholic test case for how far attention practice can be separated from Christian doctrine. 7 linked entries, 7 see also

Anunnaki

concept
ancient Sumerian pantheon The principal pantheon of ancient Sumerian religion (c. 3rd millennium BCE), literally the offspring of An, the sky god. In mainstream assyriology, the Anunnaki are the great gods of the Sumerian and Akkadian texts: Anu, Enlil, Enki, Inanna, Ninhursag and the rest. In modern reception, beginning with Zecharia Sitchin's 1976 The 12th Planet, the same texts are read as a literal record of a flesh-and-blood astronaut civilisation from a planet called Nibiru. The two readings use the same primary sources and disagree about almost everything else. 25 linked entries, 8 see also

Anuttarayoga Tantra

practice
highest tantra Sanskrit anuttara-yoga (no-higher yoga): the highest of four tantra classes in the Vajrayāna curriculum. It is the doctrinal home of the Six Yogas of Nāropa and of the Cakrasaṃvara, Hevajra, Guhyasamāja, and Kālacakra tantras. The class organises deity yoga into a generation stage (constructing the visualised maṇḍala) followed by a completion stage (dissolving the visualisation into the subtle body and resting in the recognition that follows). The Kagyu, Sakya, Nyingma, and Geluk lineages all treat it as the Tibetan path's most advanced section. Its endpoint is identified with the Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen recognitions of the New Translation and Old Translation schools. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Aparigraha

practice
non-grasping, fifth yama Sanskrit aparigraha means non-grasping, non-possessiveness, or non-accumulation. It is the fifth and final yama of Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras and the corresponding fifth great vow of Jain monastic discipline. The instruction goes beyond simply owning less. Aparigraha names the willingness to live without accumulating objects, relationships, or experience as defences against impermanence. When this is settled, the Sūtras claim, the practitioner gains knowledge of the conditions under which the present birth was acquired. 7 linked entries, 7 see also

Apatheia

concept
desert Christian dispassion Greek ἀπάθεια (apatheia) means dispassion or freedom from the passions. Evagrius Ponticus and the Desert Fathers used it as a technical term for the stable freedom of attention the contemplative curriculum produces. It is not the absence of feeling. It is the loosening of the grip the logismoi (intrusive thoughts) and the pathē (passions) exert on the practitioner. The Evagrian arc runs from recognising the logismoi, through cultivating nepsis (watchfulness), to apatheia. The desert literature treats apatheia as the ground from which agapē (love) can operate and the stage immediately before theōria (contemplative knowledge). 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Apophatic theology

concept
the via negativa The contemplative method that approaches the divine by saying what it is not (or, in secular forms, the ground of awareness). The Greek apophēmi means to deny or to unsay. The via negativa it names runs as a parallel current to the kataphatic or affirmative way through every major contemplative tradition: Pseudo-Dionysius and Meister Eckhart in Christianity, the neti neti method of Advaita Vedānta, the doctrine of śūnyatā in Mahāyāna Buddhism, and the fanāʾ register of Sufism. What remains when every predicate has been refused is what the path is pointing at. 5 linked entries, 9 see also

Arhat

concept
Buddhist liberation ideal Sanskrit arhat means 'the worthy one'; Pāli arahant. In early Buddhist teaching, an arhat is one who has cut all ten mental fetters, including sense-craving, becoming, and ignorance, and will not be reborn. The āsavas, the deep currents that drive rebirth, are destroyed. This is the supreme liberation ideal of the Theravāda tradition. The Mahāyāna preserves the term but treats the arhat's attainment as partial, superseded by the bodhisattva vow. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Āsana

practice
yoga posture; third limb From the Sanskrit ās, meaning to sit. Āsana is the third limb of Patañjali's eight-limb path, originally a single stable seated posture for meditation. The body-centred practice that fills Western yoga studios comes from a later haṭha tradition, developed between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries and reshaped by Krishnamacharya's early-twentieth-century revival at the Mysore palace. Today the term covers everything from the strenuous flow class to the prepared seat for meditation. 5 linked entries, 10 see also

Asaṅga

figure
Yogācāra founder Indian Buddhist philosopher of the fourth century CE, and the principal founder of the Yogācāra school of Mahāyāna Buddhism alongside his half-brother Vasubandhu. Tradition holds that he received the school's foundational texts from the bodhisattva Maitreya during a long retreat. He produced the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra, the Mahāyāna-saṃgraha, and the Abhidharma-samuccaya, establishing Yogācāra's three key doctrines: the eight consciousnesses, the ālayavijñāna (storehouse consciousness), and the tathāgatagarbha (Buddha-nature). 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Ascension

concept
rising to higher existence Ascension is the teaching, found across traditions, that the self or soul can move from its current level of existence to a higher or subtler one. The concept appears in Christianity as the bodily elevation of Jesus after the Resurrection, in Tibetan Buddhism as the rainbow body at death, and in yogic tradition as mahāsamādhi. In contemporary spirituality the term most often names a collective process: individual and planetary consciousness shifting to higher-frequency or higher-dimensional states, a grammar largely Theosophical in origin. 4 linked entries, 6 see also

Aṣṭāṅga

practice
Eight-limbed yoga path The eight-limbed yoga path compiled by Patañjali in the Yoga Sūtras. Sanskrit aṣṭa (eight) plus aṅga (limb). The eight are: ethical restraint (yama), personal observance (niyama), posture (āsana), breath regulation (prāṇāyāma), sense-withdrawal (pratyāhāra), concentration (dhāraṇā), meditation (dhyāna), and integration (samādhi). Not the same as the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path, which belongs to a separate tradition. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Aṣṭāvakra Gītā

text
Advaita Vedānta text A Sanskrit dialogue in twenty short chapters between the sage Aṣṭāvakra and the philosopher-king Janaka. It teaches that the Self is already free, with no ritual, ethical preparation, or staged path required. Composed most likely between the 8th and 14th centuries CE, it is treated by the Advaita Vedānta tradition as the most uncompromising of the post-Upaniṣadic non-dual scriptures. It is later than the Bhagavad Gītā it sometimes echoes. English translations by Swāmi Nityaswarūpānanda (1940), Hari Prasad Shastri (1949), and Thomas Byrom (1990) brought it to the modern direct-path reading list. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Asteya

practice
Yama of non-stealing Sanskrit asteya (non-stealing) is the third of the five yamas in Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras. The prohibition is broader than the legal one: the classical commentary reads steya (theft) to cover anything taken without it being given, including the time, attention, credit, or labour of others, and including the imagined possession of what is not yet held. The Sūtras attach a specific siddhi to settled asteya: sarva-ratna-upasthāna (the spontaneous arrival of all jewels), which the lineage reads as the depth-marker of the practice rather than as its advertised reward. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Astrology

tradition
reading celestial patterns The interpretive tradition that reads correlations between celestial configurations and human affairs. The Western lineage runs from Babylonian omen-astrology through Hellenistic Egypt (Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos) into medieval Arabic and Renaissance European systems, then into modern psychological and evolutionary schools. The Indian lineage (Jyotiṣa) developed in parallel with its own technical apparatus. This index treats astrology as a first-class theme. Pam Gregory's work represents the most substantial body of contemporary Western astrology in the index. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Athame

concept
Wiccan ritual blade The athame is a double-edged ritual knife with a black handle, used in Wicca and Western ceremonial magic to direct will and energy through gesture and intent. It is one of the four elemental tools of modern witchcraft, alongside the wand, the pentacle, and the cup. The athame is not used for physical cutting; that function belongs to a separate white-handled knife called the bolline. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Atiśa

figure
Bengali Buddhist master Atiśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna (982–1054) was a Bengali Buddhist master invited to Tibet in 1042 to restore what the suppression under King Langdarma had eroded. He brought the graded-path (lam rim) and mind-training (lojong) curricula to Tibet, founded the Kadampa school, and shaped all four major Tibetan lineages. His Bodhipathapradīpa, the Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, is the root text every later lam rim presentation descends from. The bodhicitta emphasis at the centre of his teaching is still alive in the tonglen and seven-points practices Pema Chödrön has brought into English. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Ātman

concept
the true Self in Vedānta Sanskrit for self: the Vedānta term for what remains of a person when every changing object of experience has been seen as not-self. The cardinal doctrine of Advaita Vedānta is the identity of ātman with brahman, the absolute ground of all experience seen from inside rather than from outside. The recognition is summed up in the mahāvākya tat tvam asi, that thou art. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

Atmananda Krishna Menon

figure
Advaita sage South Indian Advaita teacher (1883–1959), born Padmanabha Menon, who served as a magistrate in the colonial administration at Trivandrum and quietly received students at his home as Sri Atmananda. His method, sometimes called the direct path, relied on guided experiential investigation rather than scriptural commentary. It travelled to Europe through Jean Klein, then to Francis Lucille and Rupert Spira. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Attar of Nishapur

figure
Persian Sufi poet Persian Sufi poet and apothecary (c. 1145–1221), born in Nishapur in the northeastern Iranian province of Khorasan. He composed The Conference of the Birds (Manṭiq-uṭ-Ṭayr), an allegorical poem in which the world's birds cross seven valleys to find the mythical Simurgh, only to discover they are the Simurgh themselves. His prose hagiography, the Tadhkirat al-Awliyāʾ (Memorial of the Saints), preserved the lives of the earlier Sufi masters. Rumi named him a direct spiritual forerunner. 1 linked entries, 7 see also

Autobiography of a Yogi

text
yogi's memoir Paramahansa Yogananda's 1946 memoir of the kriyā yoga lineage of Lahiri Mahāsaya and Sri Yukteswar Giri. Published by the Self-Realization Fellowship press in Los Angeles, it has remained in print continuously in more than fifty languages. Less doctrinal treatise than picaresque portrait, it surveys the saints, yogis, and jīvanmuktas Yogananda encountered across India from the 1900s to the 1930s, written in a high-Edwardian English that has not aged well. Paired with Nisargadatta Maharaj's I Am That, it is among the English-language books most responsible for the Western reception of Indian contemplative traditions in the twentieth century. Steve Jobs reread it every year and asked that copies be given to mourners at his memorial. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Avalokiteśvara

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compassion bodhisattva The bodhisattva of compassion in Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna Buddhism. The Sanskrit name avalokita-īśvara means the lord who looks down. He vowed not to enter final liberation until every sentient being is freed from suffering. The same figure appears as Guan Yin in China, Kannon in Japan, and Chenrezig in Tibet, where the Dalai Lama lineage is held to be his continuing emanation. In the Heart Sūtra he declares form is emptiness, emptiness is form, and the mantra Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ is addressed to him. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Avataṃsaka Sūtra

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Mahāyāna flower text Sanskrit Avataṃsaka Sūtra, the Flower Ornament Scripture, is one of the longest Mahāyāna sutras and the foundational text of the Chinese Huá-yán school, transmitted to Japan as Kegon and to Korea as Hwaeom. Its central image is Indra's net: a cosmic lattice in which every jewel reflects every other, so any part of the cosmos contains and is contained by every other part. The teaching this image conveys is universal interpenetration, expressed as one in all and all in one. It became the philosophical ground for the interbeing vocabulary Thich Nhat Hanh carried into Western Buddhism. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Avesta

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scripture of Zoroastrianism The Avesta is the canonical scripture of Zoroastrianism, the ancient Iranian religion founded by the prophet Zarathustra. Its oldest layer, the Gathas, consists of seventeen hymns in Old Avestan attributed directly to Zarathustra and dated by scholars to the second or early first millennium BCE. The full canon was compiled and written down during the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE); the earlier oral tradition was largely lost after the Islamic conquest of Iran, and only a fraction of the original corpus survives in manuscript form. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Avidyā

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ignorance in Buddhist thought Sanskrit avidyā (Pāli avijjā) means not-knowing: the foundational concept of ignorance in Buddhism and Vedānta. It is not the absence of information but a constitutive misperception of how things are. In Buddhism it is the first link in the twelve-fold chain of dependent origination and the cognitive root of dukkha. The prajñā of the Eightfold Path is designed to undo it. In Vedānta the same term names a parallel concept: in the Buddhist setting avidyā is misapprehension of anattā and anicca; in the Vedāntic setting it is the obscuration of the always-already non-dual Brahman. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Awakening

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seeing one's own nature The shift from identification with an apparent separate self to recognition of one's own nature as awareness itself. The same recognition surfaces under different names: bodhi in Buddhism, mokṣa in Hinduism, self-realisation in Advaita, kenshō or satori in Zen, fanāʾ in Sufism. The terminology varies and the framings differ. The recognition each tradition points to overlaps significantly across them. 5 linked entries, 12 see also

Awareness

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bare knowing element The bare knowing element of experience: what registers a sight, a sound, or a thought before any commentary on it. Awareness is the central technical term of the direct-path lineage running from Ramana Maharshi through Atmananda Krishna Menon to Rupert Spira. Practitioners are asked not to think about awareness but to be aware of being aware, the recognition the lineage treats as the entrance to non-dual understanding. In technical use it is distinct from presence (the embodied, here-and-now register of Eckhart Tolle's instruction) and from consciousness (the metaphysical posit philosophy of mind debates). All three terms point in roughly the same direction. 11 linked entries, 8 see also

B.K.S. Iyengar

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Iyengar Yoga founder Indian yoga teacher (1918–2014) who built the most anatomically precise school of postural yoga in the world. Together with his teacher Krishnamacharya and fellow students Pattabhi Jois and T.K.V. Desikachar, he is one of the few twentieth-century figures responsible for the form in which the West encountered yoga. His 1966 manual Light on Yoga, with five hundred photographs of him in two hundred postures, became the postural canon and remains so. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Baal Shem Tov

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founder of Hasidism Israel ben Eliezer (c. 1698–1760), known as the Baal Shem Tov, 'Master of the Good Name', and often the Besht. A Jewish mystic and folk healer in the region of Podolia, in present-day Western Ukraine. He taught that God's presence fills all of creation and that worship is best offered through joy and fervent prayer. He wrote nothing himself, but his teaching became the seed of Hasidism, one of the major movements of modern Judaism. 0 linked entries, 5 see also

Báb

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Persian prophet, 1819–50 Siyyid 'Alí Muḥammad Shírází (1819–1850), known as the Báb (Arabic: 'Gate'), was a Persian merchant from Shiraz who in 1844 declared himself the Gate to the hidden Imam of Shia Islam and the bearer of a new divine revelation. He founded the Bábí Faith, authored the Bayán as its central scripture, and was executed in Tabriz in 1850. In the Bahá'í Faith, he is venerated as a Manifestation of God and the forerunner of Baháʼu'lláh. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Bandha

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yoga body locks From the Sanskrit bandh-, meaning to bind or to lock. A bandha is a sustained muscular contraction used in haṭha yoga to seal and redirect prāṇa within the trunk. The three principal locks are mūla bandha (root lock, at the perineum), uḍḍīyāna bandha (upward-flying lock, the abdomen drawn up and back), and jālandhara bandha (throat lock, chin to chest). Together they form mahā-bandha, the great lock. In the classical texts they are not a separate exercise but the technical mechanism by which breathwork and postures actually move the prāṇa the practice claims to direct. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Baqāʾ

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abiding in God (Sufism) Baqāʾ, Arabic for abiding or subsistence, is the second stage of the classical Sufi path. The first stage, fanāʾ, is the annihilation of the apparent self. Baqāʾ is what follows: the dissolved practitioner returns to ordinary life, no longer acting as a separate self but as a transparent vehicle of divine action. The classical formula is fanāʾ fī Allāh, baqāʾ bi-Allāh — annihilation in God, abiding by God. The prepositions carry weight: the dissolution is in God, the abiding is by God. This pair is what Junayd of Baghdad used to distinguish sober Sufism from the intoxicated register that stopped at fanāʾ alone. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Bard

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Celtic praise-poet In Celtic societies the bard was a professional poet and the living memory of a people. Employed by a king or chieftain, the bard composed and recited praise, elegy, genealogy and tribal history, all held in memorised verse rather than writing. The English word comes from the Proto-Celtic bardos, a praise-maker. The role ran as a hereditary, highly trained caste in Ireland, Scotland and Wales until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and survives today in the Welsh eisteddfod and as the first grade of revived Druidry. 0 linked entries, 5 see also

Bardo

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Tibetan between-state Bar do is a Tibetan word meaning between-state: the gap between any two settled conditions of mind. The tradition counts six bardos: of birth (waking life), of dream, of meditation, of dying ('chi kha'i bar do), of dharmatā (the luminous gap immediately after death), and of becoming (the disorientation before the next rebirth). The post-death bardos, mapped in the Bar do thos grol (the Tibetan Book of the Dead), are the term's most familiar use in English. Chögyam Trungpa and Pema Chödrön taught that the dying bardo mirrors the ordinary moments of loss, when the scaffolding of identity gives way. 5 linked entries, 10 see also

Basic goodness

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Trungpa's core concept The load-bearing first principle of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's Shambhala teaching, articulated from 1976 onward. The claim: human beings and the phenomenal world are, prior to any spiritual achievement or self-work, intrinsically sane and workable. It is presented as observation rather than encouragement — what is uncovered when the layers of self-protective construction have been seen through. Basic goodness is the secular-facing rendering of the buddha-nature doctrine Trungpa also transmitted under the technical Vajrayāna heading. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Be Here Now

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Ram Dass's 1971 classic 1971 book by Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert), assembled collectively with the Lama Foundation commune in New Mexico. The central section, hand-lettered on brown pages, introduced devotional Hinduism, the teacher Neem Karoli Baba, and the practice of be here now to an American audience that existing Indian-spiritual texts had not yet reached. Over two million copies in print across five decades. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Beginner's mind

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shoshin: Zen openness Shoshin, Japanese for "beginner's mind," is the Zen capacity to meet each moment without the filter of accumulated expertise. Shunryū Suzuki introduced the idea to English readers in his 1970 book whose opening line — in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's there are few — became the most-quoted sentence in Anglophone Buddhism. The term does not mean naïveté but the practitioner's standing ability to meet what arises without expertise pre-sorting it. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Being Aware of Being Aware

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Spira book Rupert Spira's 2017 book (130 pages) is the most distilled written statement of the contemporary direct-path teaching of non-duality. It is a short, careful procedure for turning the attention that habitually rests on the contents of experience back onto the awareness that is knowing them. The text was assembled from talks given on retreat and reorganised into a continuous argument: from the observation that awareness is the one element of experience that cannot be doubted, to the recognition that awareness is not the property of a separate self. It is the standard contemporary English-language entry point into the lineage that runs from Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj through Atmananda Krishna Menon, Jean Klein and Francis Lucille into Spira's own teaching. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Bernardo Kastrup

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analytic idealist Dutch philosopher (b. 1974) and executive director of the Essentia Foundation. He argues for analytic idealism: the position that consciousness is the only fundamental reality. On his account, the physical world is the extrinsic appearance of mental processes seen from outside, not the substrate from which mind emerges. His books and public lectures are conducted in the register of analytic philosophy, which is why the work is read both by non-dual audiences and by working philosophers of mind. 8 linked entries, 9 see also

Besom

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Wiccan ritual broom The besom is a traditional broom of birch twigs on a hazel handle, used in Wicca and neopagan practice to sweep and purify sacred space before ritual work. It is one of the consecrated magical tools of the Wiccan altar, alongside the athame, the chalice, and the pentacle, though unlike these it has no fixed elemental assignment. Outside the ritual circle, the besom appears in handfasting ceremonies, where the couple jumps over it as a public act of union. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Bessel van der Kolk

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trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk (b. 1943) is a Dutch-American psychiatrist based in Boston, best known for The Body Keeps the Score (2014), which argues that traumatic experience is not only a matter of memory but becomes encoded in the body and nervous system. He has spent decades researching post-traumatic stress at Boston University and through the Trauma Research Foundation. His work draws on neuroscience and body-based therapies, placing him at the intersection of clinical psychiatry and somatic practice, though some of his neuroscientific claims are disputed. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Bhagavad Gītā

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Hindu poem on yoga The Song of the Lord is a 700-verse dialogue embedded in book six of the Mahābhārata (compiled c. 400 BCE–400 CE). In it, Krishna teaches the warrior Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. The Gītā synthesises karma, bhakti, and jñāna yoga into a single path. It has been the most widely-read Hindu text outside India since the late eighteenth century. 0 linked entries, 10 see also

Bhakti

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Sanskrit path of devotion The Sanskrit word for devotion. Bhakti redirects the heart's natural love toward a chosen form of the divine: Krishna, Rāma, the Goddess, the formless absolute, or the figure of the guru. Indian tradition places it among four classical paths to liberation alongside karma (action), jñāna (knowledge), and rāja (meditation). It has shaped the largest share of ordinary Indian religious life and reads immediately to anyone raised in Christian or Sufi devotional traditions. 5 linked entries, 10 see also

Bhakti Yoga

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the yoga of devotion Bhakti yoga is the yoga of devotion. It is one of the four classical paths in Indian tradition, alongside karma yoga (action), jñāna yoga (knowledge), and rāja yoga (meditation). Bhakti practice routes spiritual realisation through the heart's love for a chosen form of the divine: Krishna, Rāma, the Goddess, or the formless beloved described by mystics like Rāmakrishna. Most Indian devotional life is some form of bhakti. In the West it is best known through kīrtan, Hare Krishna chanting, and the lineage of Ram Dass. 0 linked entries, 13 see also

Bhavacakra

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Buddhist wheel of becoming The bhavacakra (Sanskrit bhava-cakra, wheel of becoming) is the iconographic depiction of saṃsāra that Tibetan Vajrayāna monasteries paint at the temple entrance. The wheel's hub holds the three poisons: a cockerel (attachment), a snake (aversion), and a pig (moha, delusion), each biting the next one's tail. The middle ring shows the six realms of rebirth. The outer ring depicts the twelve links of pratītyasamutpāda, the chain by which the wheel turns. The whole is held in the jaws of Yama, the lord of death, a reminder that the round of becoming is bounded by impermanence. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Bhikkhu Bodhi

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Pāli Canon translator American-born Theravāda monk (b. 1944) and the most prolific living English translator of the Pāli Canon. Ordained in Sri Lanka in 1972, he has edited or translated the Majjhima Nikāya, the Saṃyutta Nikāya, the Aṅguttara Nikāya, and the anthology In the Buddha's Words. Most contemporary English-language Theravāda study rests on this body of work. He also founded Buddhist Global Relief. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Bible

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the Abrahamic scripture The collection of sacred texts shared by Judaism and Christianity. The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) contains Torah, Prophets, and Writings. The Christian canon adds the New Testament: four Gospels, letters of Paul, and the Book of Revelation. Composed across roughly a thousand years in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, the Bible is the foundation on which the Western contemplative tradition was built. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Big Mind process

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Genpo's Zen method A guided meditation method created in 1999 by the American Zen teacher Dennis Genpo Merzel, who trained for about fifteen years under Taizan Maezumi Roshi. It borrows the Jungian voice dialogue technique of Hal and Sidra Stone, asking participants to speak in turn from a series of inner voices: the controller, the protector, the seeking mind, and finally Big Mind itself. The claim is that this dialogue can give an ordinary person a direct, if temporary, taste of the awakened awareness that zazen usually approaches over years. The method is widely taught and just as widely debated. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Biocentrism

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life and mind are primary A cosmological theory proposed by American scientist Robert Lanza and writer Bob Berman in their 2009 book Biocentrism. The central claim is that life and consciousness are not products of the universe but its preconditions: the observable universe takes the form it does because living minds are present to observe it. The theory invokes the observer effect in quantum mechanics as supporting evidence and extends its claims to space, time, and death. It belongs to a cluster of post-materialist positions alongside analytic idealism and quantum mysticism, though its scientific reception has been critical. 3 linked entries, 7 see also

Biofield

concept
a claimed energy field A hypothesized field of subtle energy said to surround and permeate the living body. The word was coined in 1992 at the US Office of Alternative Medicine as a single umbrella for older ideas of vital energy: Chinese qi, Indian prāṇa, Japanese ki, and the etheric energy of Western esotericism. Biofield therapies such as Reiki and Therapeutic Touch claim to act on this field. It has not been detected by reproducible measurement, and mainstream science treats its existence as unproven. 0 linked entries, 11 see also

Black magic

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magic used for harm Black magic is magic understood to work toward harmful, selfish, or morally illicit ends, the traditional counterpart to white or beneficent magic. The distinction is contested: most historical magical traditions did not impose a black/white division on their own practice, and scholars treat the split as an external moral overlay. The term has been applied to folk cursing, ceremonial demonology, Left-Hand Path esotericism, and the destructive strands within Tantra and the Western esoteric traditions. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Bodhi

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Buddhist awakening From the Sanskrit and Pāli root budh, meaning to wake. Bodhi is the Buddhist term for awakening and the source of the title Buddha. It names a specific recognition: seeing impermanence (anicca), the unsatisfactoriness of grasping (dukkha) and the absence of a fixed self (anattā) not as doctrine but as lived experience. Each vehicle inflects it differently. Theravāda's arhat path, Mahāyāna's bodhisattva vow, and Vajrayāna's tantric route are three approaches to the same destination. All agree: bodhi is what the path is for. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Bodhicitta

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awakened heart-mind Sanskrit bodhi (awakening) + citta (heart, mind). Together they name the awakened heart-mind, the central operative concept of Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna Buddhism. It is the orientation, formalised as a vow, in which practice is no longer pursued for one's own liberation alone but for the welfare of all beings. The classical analysis distinguishes two aspects: relative bodhicitta, the felt commitment to compassion in concrete situations; and absolute bodhicitta, the recognition of emptiness that makes the commitment natural rather than effortful. The two are taught together. Either alone tends to deform. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Bodhidharma

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Chan Buddhism's patriarch Semi-legendary Indian monk of the fifth or early sixth century CE, credited with carrying the dhyāna (meditation) lineage of Mahāyāna Buddhism to China and founding what would become Chinese Chán and Japanese Zen. Almost everything reported about him is hagiography over a thin biographical core. The nine years facing a wall at Shaolin, the missing eyelids that became the first tea bushes, the four-line summary of his teaching: each legend is a doctrinal compression, not a chronicle. The teaching attributed to him is unusually compact: a special transmission outside the scriptures, not founded on words and letters, pointing directly to the human mind, seeing into one's own nature and attaining buddhahood. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Bodhisattva

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Mahāyāna awakening ideal The being aimed at awakening and the central figure of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The older Theravāda ideal was the arhat, a practitioner seeking personal liberation. The bodhisattva takes the opposite vow: to remain engaged with the world until every being is free. Contemporary teachers extend the figure beyond its monastic origin, treating it as a practical orientation rather than a cosmic ideal. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Body Scan

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mindfulness meditation Body scan is the practice of moving attention systematically through the body, noticing whatever sensation is present in each region without trying to change it. It is the central method of the S. N. Goenka and U Ba Khin vipassanā inheritance, works the vedanā foundation of satipaṭṭhāna, and is the opening practice of every MBSR week. It became one of the most widely taught contemplative practices in Western clinical and lay settings over the twentieth century. 3 linked entries, 9 see also

Brahma Sūtras

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Vedānta's root text The second of the three foundational texts of Vedānta: 555 terse Sanskrit aphorisms in four chapters, traditionally attributed to Bādarāyaṇa and dated between the second century BCE and the second century CE. The aphorisms are sometimes only two or three words long and unreadable without commentary. The commentaries built on them, principally Śaṅkara's, Rāmānuja's and Madhva's, are how the Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita and Dvaita sub-schools defined themselves against each other across more than a thousand years of disputation. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Brahmacarya

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Yama of continence Sanskrit brahmacarya (literally walking in Brahman, moving in the divine) is the fourth of the five yamas in Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras. Usually translated continence or celibacy, the term is broader than either: the Sūtras treat the sexual and reproductive force as one of the most volatile energies available to the practitioner, and brahmacarya names the discipline by which that force is conserved rather than dissipated. The text attaches a specific siddhi to settled brahmacarya: vīrya-lābha (the acquisition of uncommon vitality). The classical commentary reads the discipline as operative for the householder and the renunciate alike, distinguished only in the form the continence takes. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Brahman

concept
the Absolute in Vedānta The Sanskrit term for the absolute reality at the heart of Vedānta thought. Brahman is neuter in gender, distinct from the masculine brāhmaṇa (a member of the priestly caste, anglicised as Brahmin). The Upaniṣads describe it as sat-cit-ānanda: being, consciousness, and bliss. It is the one undivided ground in which the apparent multiplicity of the world arises. The cardinal doctrine of Advaita Vedānta holds that the inner self (ātman) is identical to this absolute. The formula is tat tvam asi: that thou art. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

Brahmavihāras

concept
Four divine abodes The four divine abodes of Buddhist practice: mettā (loving-kindness), karuṇā (compassion), muditā (sympathetic joy), and upekkhā (equanimity). The Buddha inherited the term from Brahmanical tradition and redirected it into a graded curriculum of attention training. The Theravāda exposition is in Buddhaghosa's fifth-century Visuddhimagga. The Mahāyāna carries the same four as the Four Immeasurables (apramāṇa). 2 linked entries, 9 see also

Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad

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root Upaniṣad The oldest and largest of the principal Upaniṣads, composed in north-east India between roughly the 8th and 6th centuries BCE. Its name combines bṛhad (great) and āraṇyaka (forest book). The text is the philosophical capstone of the Yajurveda's ritual literature and the source of two of the most consequential formulations in Indian thought: the neti neti (not this, not this) instruction of the sage Yājñavalkya to his wife Maitreyī, and the ahaṃ brahmāsmi (I am Brahman) declaration that became one of the four Mahāvākyas of Advaita Vedānta. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

Bruce Lipton

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epigenetics biologist American developmental biologist (b. 1944). His research on cell membrane signalling at Stanford University School of Medicine in the 1980s led him to argue that genes alone do not determine cellular behaviour. Environmental signals, including consciousness, are causally upstream of gene expression. His 2005 book The Biology of Belief brought the epigenetics vocabulary to a wide audience, nearly a decade before the term became routine in mainstream biology. 0 linked entries, 5 see also

Buddha-nature

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innate awakened nature Tathāgatagarbha means the womb or embryo of the thus-gone in Sanskrit. It is the Mahāyāna doctrine that awakening is not constructed by practice but uncovered. Every being already carries the seed. In the stronger reading, every being is the awakened nature it appears to be searching for. The teaching connects the older Buddhist analysis of suffering's causes to the Zen and Tibetan claim that recognition of one's own nature is sudden rather than gradual, available rather than earned. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Buddhaghosa

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Theravāda commentator Fifth-century Theravāda scholar (active c. 410–450 CE) who systematised Pāli Buddhist doctrine into a durable curriculum. His Visuddhimagga, the Path of Purification, is the tradition's canonical manual on ethics, meditation, and wisdom. His commentaries (aṭṭhakathās) cover virtually the entire Pāli canon. The brahmavihāra framework, the forty meditation subjects, and the modern vipassanā revival's vocabulary all trace back to his work. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Buddhi

concept
Sanskrit term for intellect Buddhi (Sanskrit: बुद्धि) is the discriminating intellect — the faculty that reasons, judges, and decides. In Sāṃkhya-Yoga philosophy it is the first evolute of prakṛti, also called mahat (the great one), and it is what enables viveka, discriminating wisdom. It contrasts with manas (the sense-coordinating mind) and ahaṃkāra (the I-maker): buddhi judges and decides; manas collects; ahaṃkāra personalises experience. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Buddhism

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tradition of the Buddha The wisdom tradition that grew from the teachings of Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha (c. 5th century BCE), in northern India. It is organised around the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. Three main branches survive today: Theravāda (the elder teaching), Mahāyāna (the great vehicle, including Zen), and Vajrayāna (the diamond vehicle, predominant in Tibet). Roughly 500 million practitioners worldwide. 6 linked entries, 10 see also

Byron Katie

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teacher of The Work Byron Katie (b. 1942) is an American spiritual teacher known for The Work, a four-question method of self-inquiry she developed after an unexpected inner shift in 1986. The practice applies four questions to any stressful belief to test whether it holds up. A final step, the turnaround, examines the opposite of the original belief for its own truth. Her primary book, Loving What Is (2002), co-written with the translator Stephen Mitchell, presents the method through verbatim transcripts of live sessions. 1 linked entries, 7 see also

Caitanya Mahāprabhu

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Vaiṣṇava saint Bengali Vaiṣṇava saint (1486–1534), born Viśvambhara Miśra at Nabadwip, who centred the bhakti tradition of Hinduism on saṅkīrtan, the public collective chanting of Krishna's names. He founded the Gauḍīya lineage, whose metaphysics (acintya-bhedābheda: inconceivable difference and non-difference) treat devotional ecstasy as the highest human state. That lineage produced the global Hare Krishna movement four centuries later. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Candomblé

tradition
Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé is an Afro-Brazilian religion that developed in nineteenth-century Bahia among communities of enslaved West and Central Africans. It venerates a pantheon of spirits called orixás, drawn mainly from Yoruba and Fon tradition and later blended with Roman Catholic imagery. Ritual life centres on drumming, ecstatic dance, and spirit possession inside autonomous community houses called terreiros, each led by a priest or priestess. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Carl Jung

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founder of depth psychology Swiss psychiatrist (1875–1961) and founder of analytical psychology. More than any other Western clinician of the twentieth century, Jung treated the symbolic vocabulary of contemplative traditions as material the modern psyche still works with. Through Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the Collected Works, and a series of forewords to Eastern texts in English translation, he built a framework in which dream, ritual, alchemical image, and contemplative report can all be read as expressions of an underlying structure the conscious ego does not author. His late work remains contested, particularly around his occult interests, his autobiographical curation, and the empirical status of his core constructs. 14 linked entries, 8 see also

Carlos Castaneda

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Yaqui shaman author Peruvian-American writer and anthropologist (1925–1998). His twelve books, beginning with The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968), describe a multi-year apprenticeship under a Yaqui sorcerer named Don Juan Matus and introduce concepts such as stopping the world, the nagual, and the assemblage point. The character of Don Juan is now widely considered fabricated; the books nonetheless shaped Western shamanism and the New Age movement, selling over eight million copies in seventeen languages. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Carnac

concept
megalithic site in Brittany Carnac is a landscape of more than 3,000 prehistoric standing stones arranged in long parallel rows near the south coast of Brittany, France. The stones were erected by the pre-Celtic people of Brittany, probably around 3300 BCE, with some dating to 4500 BCE. No written record of the builders' beliefs survives. The site has become a place of pilgrimage for modern practitioners of earth-based and pagan spirituality. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Caroline Myss

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medical intuitive Caroline Myss (born 1952, Chicago) is an American author and self-described medical intuitive. Her 1996 book Anatomy of the Spirit maps the seven chakras to the seven Christian sacraments and the seven Kabbalistic sefirot, proposing a unified energy anatomy. Her central argument is that unresolved psychological wounds compromise the body's energy field. She summarizes this as 'your biography becomes your biology.' 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Cathedral

concept
bishop’s seat, sacred form A cathedral is a church that contains the bishop’s cathedra, the seat of episcopal authority from which a diocese is governed. In the Gothic tradition, from the twelfth century onward, it became an architectural image of heaven: geometry, light, and carved iconographic program understood as a symbolic language pointing the worshipper toward God. The tradition draws on Platonic ideas about beautiful proportion reflecting cosmic order and on the Christian conviction that sacred space can make the divine tangible. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Cave in the Snow

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1998 biography Vicki Mackenzie's 1998 biography of Diane Perry, known as Tenzin Palmo. Perry was a British nun who spent twelve years in solitary retreat in a high Himalayan cave under the Drukpa Kagyu lineage. The book is the index's most direct record of long-form sādhana under a Vajrayāna tradition. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Censer

concept
incense vessel for ritual use A vessel made for burning incense in religious ceremony. In Catholic and Orthodox churches it is called a thurible and swung on chains to spread fragrant smoke through the nave; in Buddhist and Taoist temples it holds upright incense sticks; in Hindu pūjā, fragrant smoke (dhūpa) is one of the sixteen classical offerings. Censers have been in continuous use since at least the mid-5th century BCE in China. The rising smoke is read, depending on the tradition, as prayer ascending, space purification, or a sensory offering to the divine. 2 linked entries, 7 see also

Centering Prayer

practice
silent prayer method A Christian contemplative method developed by Thomas Keating, William Meninger, and Basil Pennington at St Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, from 1975. The practitioner chooses a sacred word as a sign of consent to God's presence and action within, sits silently for twenty minutes, and returns to the word whenever thought arises. The theological frame is the Christian apophatic tradition. The mechanics are recognisably similar to those of meditation across other traditions, a parallel the method's founders acknowledged openly. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Chakras

concept
yogic subtle-body centres From the Sanskrit cakra, wheel or circle. The energy centres along the spine described in tantric and yogic traditions. The most widely known model is the seven-chakra system: mūlādhāra (root), svādhiṣṭhāna (sacral), maṇipūra (solar plexus), anāhata (heart), viśuddha (throat), ājñā (third eye), sahasrāra (crown). Earlier and parallel systems describe between four and twelve. 2 linked entries, 11 see also

Chan Buddhism

tradition
Chinese Buddhist school Chán (禪) takes its name from the Chinese pronunciation of Sanskrit dhyāna (meditation). The school took shape between the sixth and ninth centuries CE, when Mahāyāna Buddhist meditative practice encountered the Taoist emphasis on spontaneity and natural action. Chan is the parent tradition of Japanese Zen, Korean Sŏn, and Vietnamese Thiền. Its motto — a special transmission outside the scriptures, not founded upon words and letters, pointing directly at the human mind — is attributed to Bodhidharma, though most scholars believe it was shaped by eighth- and ninth-century editors. 5 linked entries, 9 see also

Chāndogya Upaniṣad

text
Vedāntic root text One of the oldest and longest principal Upaniṣads, composed in north-central India between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE. The name chāndogya means of the chanters, linking the text to the Sāmaveda chant literature of which it is the philosophical capstone. Its most consequential passage is in chapter six: Uddālaka Āruṇi's instruction to his son Śvetaketu, ending in the mahāvākya tat tvam asi, that thou art. That declaration — that the individual self and brahman are not two separate things — became the founding premise of Advaita Vedānta. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

Chanting

practice
Devotional vocal repetition The repetition of sacred syllables, names, mantras, or scripture as a contemplative practice, in which the sound itself is the operative element. Forms include Hindu japa and kīrtan, Buddhist mantra and sūtra-recitation, Sufi dhikr, the Christian Jesus Prayer, and Jewish davening. The shared claim is that certain syllables carry a density ordinary speech does not, and that sustained repetition steadies the mind in ways the silent forms reach more slowly. 5 linked entries, 7 see also

Chiron

concept
the wounded healer In Greek mythology, Chiron (Χείρων) was the centaur renowned above all others for wisdom, healing, and teaching: tutor to Achilles, Asclepius, and Jason, and son of the Titan Cronus. Unlike other centaurs, who were wild and violent, Chiron bore a different nature from his different lineage. An accidental Hydra-poisoned arrow struck him and left him in continuous pain: immortal and unable to heal himself. That image, the healer undone by his own wound, became the wounded healer archetype that Carl Jung, Henri Nouwen, and contemporary astrology have each drawn on. 3 linked entries, 5 see also

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

figure
Tibetan lama Tibetan lama (1939–1987), widely regarded as the most influential figure in the early Western transmission of Vajrayāna Buddhism. The eleventh Trungpa tülku, he was recognised as a child at the Surmang monasteries in eastern Tibet. He fled the Chinese occupation in 1959, studied at Oxford in the 1960s, and from 1970 built the Vajradhatu and Shambhala communities in North America. Most of the West's first generation of Tibetan-Buddhist teachers, including Pema Chödrön, trained within his institutions. His teaching was sharp and idiomatic; his personal conduct produced an institutional reckoning that remains unresolved. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Choiceless awareness

concept
undivided seeing A term from Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986). It names attention that includes the observer in what is observed, with no move to evaluate, name, or correct. Krishnamurti used the phrase across the published dialogues and the talks at Brockwood Park and Saanen. The recognition it points at converges with the witness teaching of Advaita Vedānta and with the non-dual work of Rupert Spira and Adyashanti, though Krishnamurti refused every traditional vocabulary including those. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Christian cross

concept
symbol of crucifixion The primary symbol of Christianity, representing the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth (c. 30 CE). The cross has served as the tradition's defining emblem since the 2nd century CE, appearing across Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant branches. Within theology it marks the site of atonement; within contemplative practice it serves as a pattern for spiritual transformation. 2 linked entries, 7 see also

Christianity

tradition
religion of Jesus Christ The Abrahamic tradition built on the life and teaching of Yeshua of Nazareth (Jesus Christ, c. 4 BCE – 30 CE), preserved through the canonical Gospels and the writings of Paul. About 2.4 billion adherents worldwide. It splits broadly into Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant streams. The contemplative current runs through all three: the Desert Fathers, Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, Thomas Merton. That current is where Christianity most directly meets the rest of this index. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Citta

concept
heart-mind in yoga & Buddhism Citta is the Sanskrit and Pāli term for the heart-mind. Indian languages do not separate the cognitive and emotional registers the way European languages do, so the word covers the whole field: sensation, feeling-tone, thought, memory, and will. Across yoga and Buddhism, citta names the inner instrument whose movements (vṛtti) are what practice works to settle. The formulation that set the agenda is Patañjali’s second sūtra: yogaś cittavṛtti-nirodhaḥ, yoga is the cessation of the modifications of citta. That analysis has remained the working architecture of classical Indian and Buddhist meditative theory. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

Claircognizance

concept
clear knowing Claircognizance is the New Age term for clear knowing: the claimed faculty of receiving information as sudden, certain knowledge, without sensory input or prior reasoning. It belongs to the clair senses, a family of four claimed psychic faculties that also includes clairvoyance (clear seeing), clairsentience (clear feeling), and clairaudience (clear hearing). Direct knowing that bypasses discursive thought appears across contemplative traditions under different names. 2 linked entries, 7 see also

Clairvoyance

concept
seeing beyond the senses From French clair (clear) and voyant (seeing): the claimed faculty of perceiving events, objects, or information beyond the range of the ordinary senses. The concept appears across traditions under different names. In Yoga it is one of the siddhis catalogued in Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras. In the Theosophical tradition, it was the operative instrument through which Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant reported investigating the Akashic Records and mapping the subtle body. 4 linked entries, 9 see also

Coleman Barks

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Rumi interpreter American poet (1937–2026) who made Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī the bestselling poet in the United States. His free-verse English renderings were built from literal cribs of Persian texts, not from the original Persian itself. The Essential Rumi (1995), made with John Moyne, is the canonical book of the Barks reception. Academic scholars were critical of the renderings for thirty years; the reading public was not. 4 linked entries, 6 see also

Color Therapy

practice
light and color healing An alternative healing practice that uses colored light, gemstones, or visualization to influence the body's energy centers. Its framework is the chakra color map of Ayurvedic and yogic tradition: each of the seven chakras is paired with a color, from red at the root center to violet at the crown. Mainstream medicine classifies chromotherapy as pseudoscience, and its therapeutic claims lack robust clinical evidence. 2 linked entries, 6 see also

Conference of the Birds

text
Sufi allegory A Persian Sufi poem of about 4,500 couplets in masnavi form, written by Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār of Nishapur around 1177. The hoopoe leads the world's birds through seven valleys to find the legendary Simurgh, the king-bird who turns out to be themselves. It is one of the most influential allegorical accounts of the Sufi path, and was widely read by later Persian and Mughal poets, including Rumi, whose Masnavi draws on its narrative devices. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Confession

practice
sacrament of repentance Confession is the formal acknowledgment of sins or transgressions to God, a priest, or a spiritual community. In Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity it is a sacrament, a rite that conveys forgiveness and restores the penitent to right relationship with God. The practice has analogues elsewhere: the Yom Kippur viduy in Judaism, the Pratimoksha recitation among Buddhist monastics, and the act of tawba in Islam. 2 linked entries, 7 see also

Confucius

figure
founder of Confucianism Confucius (c. 551–479 BCE) was a Chinese philosopher of the Spring and Autumn period, traditionally considered the founder of Confucianism. He taught that moral self-cultivation through ren (benevolence) and li (ritual propriety) is the basis of just governance and harmonious society. His sayings were compiled by his students into the Analects, the central text of the tradition. 2 linked entries, 9 see also

Conscious relationship

concept
mindful love A conscious relationship is one in which both partners bring sustained awareness to their own reactive patterns, emotional needs, and habitual behaviours, rather than acting from them automatically. The practice draws on mindfulness, nonviolent communication, and often shadow work. The aim is not to find a perfect partner but to become a more present one. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Consciousness

concept
the fact of experience The bare fact of experience: the being-aware present in every waking moment, and arguably in sleep too. Philosophy names this experiential feel qualia, and calls the question of its explanation the 'hard problem' (David Chalmers, 1995). The Advaita Vedānta tradition calls it cit, the knowing quality of awareness. Advaita treats it not as a product of the brain but as the ground in which the brain, along with everything else, appears. Consciousness is simultaneously the deepest unsolved problem in science and the central object of inquiry in the non-dual and mystical traditions. 5 linked entries, 17 see also

Contemplative Prayer

practice
wordless prayer The silent, receptive strand of Christian prayer. It is distinct from petitionary prayer, which asks God for things, and from liturgical prayer, which is communal worship. It seeks not to speak to God but to rest in the presence of God, making no demands and holding no agenda. The lineage runs from the hesychasm of the third-century Desert Fathers through the lectio divina of the Benedictines, the apophatic theology of Meister Eckhart, and the centering prayer taught by Thomas Keating in the twentieth century. Structurally, it is almost identical to meditation. Theologically, it is rooted in the Christian claim that what is encountered in that silence is a personal God. 1 linked entries, 13 see also

Convent

concept
women's religious community A residential community of nuns or women religious who live together under a shared rule of prayer, silence, and work. In Catholic usage, the term refers specifically to an enclosed house of women religious. The word comes from the Latin conventus, assembly. The tradition traces to female communities associated with Pachomius in 4th-century Egypt and to Scholastica's Benedictine house at Plombariola in the early 6th century; its most enduring products include the works Teresa of Ávila wrote from inside the Discalced Carmelite reform. 4 linked entries, 6 see also

Crazy wisdom

concept
wisdom that breaks the rules The English rendering of the Tibetan yeshe chölwa ('wisdom gone wild'). It is the Vajrayāna category for the realised teacher whose conduct deliberately cuts across conventional ideas of what spiritual seriousness looks like. The tradition holds that these apparent transgressions are a teaching device, not a lapse. The lineage of figures the category enrolls — Tilopa, Naropa, Marpa, Milarepa, Padmasambhava, the Tibetan mahāsiddha tradition, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche most consequentially in the modern West — has textual warrant inside the tradition. The category is also the doctrinal frame in which the recurrent twentieth-century failures of Vajrayāna teacher conduct have been justified, and the structural problem the guru entry maps is the same problem crazy wisdom names in its most expansive register. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Creative energy

concept
cosmic creative force The teaching, found across Hindu, Taoist, and tantric traditions, that reality is animated by a dynamic generative force. Hindu thought names it Śakti, Taoism calls it Qi (氣), and Tantra names its concentrated form Kuṇḍalinī. Each tradition holds that this force is not only cosmic but also present in the body, and that working with it is the work of practice. The concept appears in Yoga, Tantra, and Kashmir Śaivism, as well as in parallel Taoist frameworks. 4 linked entries, 7 see also

Cult of Isis

tradition
Greco-Roman mystery cult A mystery religion of the ancient Greco-Roman world centred on the Egyptian goddess Isis. Originating in Egypt and spreading from the Ptolemaic period (305–30 BCE) onward, it offered initiates personal divine protection, magical assistance, and a guided afterlife under Isis's guardianship. It was among the most widely practiced voluntary religious movements in antiquity, eventually competing with early Christianity for adherents across the Roman Empire. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

text
Chögyam Trungpa, 1973 Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's 1973 book, assembled from transcripts of his first sustained year of public lectures in North America (1970–71). It is the foundational English-language Karma Kagyu text and the source from which the concept of spiritual materialism entered the Anglophone vocabulary. Spiritual materialism is the construction of a religious self-image as the surest dead end on the contemplative path. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Cynthia Bourgeault

figure
Wisdom teacher American Episcopalian priest and contemplative teacher, born in 1947. She is one of the principal heirs of Thomas Keating's Centering Prayer lineage and a founding faculty member of Richard Rohr's Living School at the Center for Action and Contemplation. Her books include Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (2004), The Wisdom Way of Knowing (2003), The Wisdom Jesus (2008), and The Heart of Centering Prayer (2016), among a dozen others. She also founded an itinerant Wisdom School programme that brings the Christian apophatic tradition into dialogue with Asian contemplative practices. 6 linked entries, 7 see also

D.T. Suzuki

figure
Zen scholar, 1870–1966 Japanese scholar (1870–1966) who became the most influential English-language interpreter of Zen. His Essays in Zen Buddhism (1927–1934) and Manual of Zen Buddhism (1935) were the first systematic expositions of Rinzai Zen in English. The technical vocabulary English speakers now use for the tradition comes largely from his books. His dharma name, Daisetsu, meaning Great Simplicity, was given by his Rinzai teacher Shaku Sōen. He is not the same person as Shunryū Suzuki, the Sōtō priest who came a generation later. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Dalai Lama

figure
Tibetan Buddhist teacher Title for the spiritual head of the Gelug school of Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism. It is currently held by Tenzin Gyatso (b. 1935), recognised at age two as the fourteenth holder in a lineage the tradition understands as a continuing manifestation of the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteśvara. After the 1959 Tibetan uprising he fled to India and established a government-in-exile at Dharamsala. His decades of Western teaching, and dialogues with Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh and cognitive scientists, made him the most globally visible Buddhist of the late twentieth century. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Dāna

practice
Buddhist practice of giving Pāli and Sanskrit dāna means giving or generosity. It is the first of the six pāramitā the Buddhist tradition treats as the operative ground of the path, and the structural foundation on which the sīla–samādhi–paññā training is built. In the Theravāda world it is the daily transaction between lay community and saṅgha that has sustained the monastic institution for twenty-four centuries. In the contemporary Western reception the term has been carried through the teacher–student gift economy the Insight Meditation Society and Plum Village communities preserve, in which retreats are offered at cost and the teaching itself is given on a dāna basis rather than priced. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Dark Night of the Soul

concept
noche oscura A phrase from John of the Cross's sixteenth-century Spanish poem and prose (la noche oscura del alma) for the contemplative passage in which the consolations of practice withdraw and the soul is stripped of every previous support. The original doctrine is precise: not depression or ordinary suffering, but a specific purgation that prepares the soul for union with God. The phrase has drifted into popular use as a name for any prolonged dark patch. The careful contemporary reading restores the distinction. 5 linked entries, 9 see also

Darśan

practice
auspicious sight in Hinduism Sanskrit darśana means seeing or sight. In Hindu and broader Indian usage, it names the practice of being in the presence of a teacher, deity image, or sacred site as itself a form of spiritual transmission. The encounter is mutual: the devotee sees the teacher and is seen back. What is transmitted is not information but proximity to a state. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

David Bohm

figure
physicist of wholeness David Bohm (1917–1992) was a theoretical physicist who proposed the pilot-wave interpretation of quantum mechanics and the implicate order programme set out in his 1980 Wholeness and the Implicate Order. His central claim was that the universe is an undivided wholeness, that the apparent separation of objects is a surface effect, and that thought itself generates the feeling of separation. His dialogues with Jiddu Krishnamurti across 1974–1985 brought trained physics and contemplative inquiry into sustained conversation. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

Dean Radin

figure
consciousness researcher An American parapsychologist (born 1952) and chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). His work applies controlled laboratory science to the study of psi phenomena: telepathy, remote viewing, precognition, and mind-matter interaction. He is known for statistical meta-analyses of hundreds of experiments, arguing that cumulative effect sizes exceed chance. His books include The Conscious Universe (1997), Entangled Minds (2006), and Real Magic (2018). The scientific mainstream has not accepted his conclusions. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Death and dying

concept
mortality in practice The encounter with mortality and the body of practice, teaching, and cosmology that contemplative traditions have built to meet it. Every major wisdom tradition addresses death directly — not as a problem to solve but as one of the primary teachers of the spiritual life. Buddhist maraṇasati (mindfulness of death), the Tibetan bardo curriculum, and the Christian ars moriendi all treat dying as territory that can be prepared for. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Decans

concept
36 faces of the zodiac The 36 ten-degree segments of the zodiac, each carrying a planetary ruler in the Chaldean order. In ancient Egyptian astronomy (attested c. 21st century BCE) they served as star-clocks, each marking one hour of the night and one ten-day period of the year. Hellenistic astrologers absorbed them into horoscopic practice; Hermetic and Renaissance writers added a symbolic image to each, used in talisman work. In contemporary astrology, decans give every zodiac sign three internal faces with distinct planetary tones. 0 linked entries, 5 see also

Deepak Chopra

figure
Indian-American author Indian-American physician and author (b. 1946) who became the most widely read English-language popularizer of Vedānta, Āyurveda, and mind-body medicine. He trained in endocrinology and was chief of staff at New England Memorial Hospital before leaving institutional medicine in 1985. He has published more than ninety books, with Quantum Healing and The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success among the best known. The contemplative material he popularizes is not original to him, and his standing inside the academic non-dual tradition is contested. 14 linked entries, 8 see also

Deity Yoga

practice
central Vajrayāna practice The central meditative practice of Vajrayāna Buddhism. The practitioner visualises a chosen enlightened figure (a yidam: Avalokiteśvara, Tārā, Vajrasattva, and Mañjuśrī among the best-known), recites the figure's mantra, and at the close of the session dissolves the visualisation back into emptiness. The classical claim is that the practice compresses into a single lifetime the bodhisattva work the Mahāyāna treats as spanning many, given the right conditions and a qualified teacher. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

Dependent origination

concept
interdependence Sanskrit pratītyasamutpāda, Pāli paṭiccasamuppāda. The Buddhist doctrine that nothing arises independently. Every phenomenon comes into being through conditions that are themselves conditioned. The classical formula is: this being, that becomes; this ceasing, that ceases. The Twelve Nidānas spell out the chain by which ignorance perpetuates saṃsāra. The corollary teaching of emptiness is the same recognition stated as the absence of any independently-existing self in any of the conditioned links. Thich Nhat Hanh's English coinage interbeing renders the same teaching for a contemporary readership. 2 linked entries, 9 see also

Desert Fathers and Mothers

tradition
ascetics The third- and fourth-century Christian ascetics who withdrew from the cities of the late Roman Empire into the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Sinai. Their practice of solitary cell life, sustained prayer, manual labour and the Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers) is the seed of every later Christian contemplative current. The figures most often named: Antony of Egypt (c. 251–356), Pachomius (c. 292–348), Macarius the Great, Evagrius Ponticus, John Cassian, Amma Syncletica and Amma Theodora. 5 linked entries, 10 see also

Destiny / Fate

concept
a predetermined course Destiny and fate are names for the idea that events follow a predetermined order, shaped by divine will, karma, or cosmic law. The concept appears in nearly every tradition: as qadar in Islam, as the Greek Moirai who spin each life's thread, as prārabdha in the Indian schools, and as wyrd in Norse thought. Where traditions diverge is on what room, if any, the individual retains to shape what is already written. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Dhammapada

text
Pāli verse anthology The Dhammapada is a collection of 423 short Pāli verses preserved in the Khuddaka Nikāya of the Theravāda canon and attributed to the historical Buddha. The verses are gathered into twenty-six thematic chapters and present the core teachings of Buddhism in compressed, memorisable form. Where the longer suttas develop the Four Noble Truths and dukkha at length, the Dhammapada puts the same material into single lines that can be carried in memory. Since F. Max Müller's 1881 translation, it has been the most widely read Buddhist text in the English-speaking world. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Dhāraṇā

practice
concentration in yoga Sanskrit dhāraṇā means holding or binding. It is the sixth of the eight limbs codified in Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras: the deliberate fixing of attention on a single chosen object after the senses have been withdrawn. It is the first of three inner limbs Patañjali groups together as saṃyama, alongside dhyāna (sustained absorption) and samādhi (the dissolution of the gap between meditator and object). Patañjali treats the three as a single graded continuum, not three separate techniques. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Dharma

concept
cosmic law, duty, teaching Sanskrit dharma (root dhṛ-, to hold, to bear) covers a remarkable range: cosmic order, religious duty, inner law, the teaching itself, and (in Buddhism) the bare phenomena that arise and pass moment by moment. In Hindu use it names right conduct calibrated to a person's station and stage of life. In Buddhist use it names two things at once: the Buddha's teaching, and any unit of experience. Both senses share the same root idea of holding things in their proper form. There is no clean English equivalent; dharma stays in Sanskrit because no translation does the full job. 2 linked entries, 13 see also

Dharmakāya

concept
truth body of the Buddha Dharmakāya is the truth body of a Buddha in Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna doctrine. It is the unconditioned ground from which the saṃbhogakāya (the enjoyment body of pure form) and the nirmāṇakāya (the emanation body in which a Buddha appears in history) are said to arise. The trikāya (three-body) doctrine names this triad. It underwrites the Kagyu lineage's claim that Tilopa received the Mahāmudrā transmission from the dharmakāya Buddha Vajradhara, outside any historical line of human teachers. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Dhikr

practice
Sufi practice of God's name Arabic for remembrance, dhikr is the central Sufi practice of invoking one of God's names. It parallels the mantra practices of Hindu yoga and the Jesus Prayer of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. It is performed silently or aloud, alone or in groups, often paired with breath or movement. The Mevlevi samāʿ is one formal elaboration. The practice aims at fanāʾ, the annihilation of the self in God, followed by baqāʾ, abiding in God. 0 linked entries, 11 see also

Dhyāna

practice
sustained meditation The seventh limb of the eight-limb yoga path set out by Patañjali in the Yoga Sūtras. Dhyāna is sustained, unbroken absorption in a chosen object: the state dhāraṇā deepens into when attention no longer slips and returns. It sits between dhāraṇā and samādhi in the inner group Patañjali calls saṃyama. Transliterated into Chinese as chán, the word gave Chán Buddhism its name; carried to Japan, it became zen. The Pāli cognate is jhāna. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Diamond Approach

practice
path to true nature A path of inquiry developed by A.H. Almaas and Karen Johnson from the mid-1970s, carried by the Ridhwan School. It combines depth psychology, the Sufi tradition of structured inner work, and non-dual recognition. The method is inquiry: sustained attention to present-moment experience until what has been defended against discloses itself and the essential quality it has been substituting for becomes available. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Diamond Sūtra

text
Mahāyāna wisdom sūtra The Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, meaning 'the diamond that cuts', is a short Mahāyāna scripture from the Prajñāpāramitā (Perfection of Wisdom) corpus. Composed in Sanskrit between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, it was first translated into Chinese in 401 CE by Kumārajīva. Its argument runs by self-cancellation: the text names each concept in turn (bodhisattva, dharma, Buddha, self) and immediately dismantles it, leaving the meditator with the cutting wisdom (prajñā) that no concept can contain. The British Library's Dunhuang copy, dated 868 CE, is the earliest dated printed book in any language. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Diloggún

practice
16-cowrie Lucumí divination Diloggún is the sixteen-cowrie divination practice of the Lucumí tradition (Santería). A trained priest casts prepared shells and reads one of sixteen sacred patterns called odù, each carrying proverbs, stories, and prescribed remedies. Distinct from Ifá, diloggún is practiced by Orisha priests and remains central to initiation ceremonies in Lucumí communities. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Direct path

concept
Advaita teaching method The English name for an Advaita teaching method traced to Atmananda Krishna Menon and carried west through Jean Klein, Francis Lucille and Rupert Spira. Where gradual paths assemble conditions over years for an eventual realisation, the direct path asks the student on the first day what is the nature of the awareness reading these words. The question is not deferred. 6 linked entries, 9 see also

Disciple

concept
spiritual student A disciple is a student who commits to a spiritual teacher not to acquire a curriculum but to undergo transformation through the relationship itself. The word appears across traditions: Sanskrit śiṣya, Sufi murīd, Buddhist sāvaka, Greek mathētēs. What distinguishes a disciple from an ordinary student is the degree of trust transferred and the expectation that the teacher's perception will gradually alter the student's own. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Divine

concept
the sacred and transcendent The divine refers to what is sacred, transcendent, and ultimate in reality. The Abrahamic traditions call it God, Hinduism calls it Brahman, Taoism calls it the Tao, and non-dual teaching calls it the Absolute or pure Awareness. Across every major tradition, the divine is encountered not primarily through argument but through prayer, devotion, and contemplation. 4 linked entries, 7 see also

Divine Plan

concept
God's plan for creation The divine plan is the teaching, found across traditions, that creation unfolds according to a higher intention and that each soul has a role within it. Christianity names this divine providence; Hinduism maps it as dharma; Sufism frames it as divine decree; A Course in Miracles treats it as a blueprint each person can align with. The concept is present wherever a tradition holds that events have meaning and that the purpose behind them is knowable or participable. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Djed Pillar

concept
spine of Osiris The Djed Pillar is a pillar-shaped ancient Egyptian hieroglyph meaning stability. Associated first with the craftsman god Ptah and then firmly with Osiris by the New Kingdom period, it represents the spine of Osiris and his resurrection. The raising of the djed was a public ritual performed each Khoiak season, and djed amulets were placed at the spines of mummies to ensure the resurrection of the dead. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Dōgen

figure
founder of Sōtō Zen Japanese monk (1200–1253) and founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan. After training under Tiantong Rujing in Song-dynasty China, he returned to Japan in 1227 with the practice of shikantaza, which he rendered as just sitting. He spent the rest of his life writing the Shōbōgenzō, a ninety-five-fascicle masterwork that remains the densest primary source any Zen lineage has produced. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Dokusan

practice
Zen private interview Japanese 独参, dokusan is the formal one-on-one interview between teacher (rōshi) and student during a Zen retreat. It lasts two to three minutes and is repeated several times a day during sesshin. The teacher tests how the student is working their kōan, what is arising in shikantaza, or whether the practitioner is deceiving themselves. The term sanzen, used in some Sōtō houses, names the same form; the function is identical. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Donald Hoffman

figure
cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman (born 1955) is an American cognitive scientist, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. His interface theory of perception argues that evolution shapes human senses for fitness, not for truth. Space, time, and physical objects, on his account, are icons of a species-specific user interface, not a window onto reality. His book The Case Against Reality (2019) and his conscious-agents mathematical model have made him a recurring reference in contemporary consciousness research and philosophy of mind. 8 linked entries, 6 see also

Donna Eden

figure
energy medicine teacher Donna Eden (born c. 1948, Monterey, California) is an American author and teacher of energy medicine. Her 1998 book Energy Medicine, co-written with her husband David Feinstein, presented nine distinct energy systems — including meridians, chakras, the aura, and the radiant circuits — as a teachable self-care framework. She is one of the best-known figures in the Western energy medicine movement. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Dream Interpretation

concept
decoding dreams Dream interpretation is the practice of finding meaning in the imagery and narratives that arise during sleep. Across traditions it has served as a tool for divination, spiritual guidance, and psychological self-knowledge. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks saw dreams as messages from gods; Islamic tradition systematised the practice through Ibn Sirin; Hinduism maps the dream state in the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad; and Carl Jung reframed dreams as communications from the unconscious. 2 linked entries, 7 see also

Dream Yoga

practice
tantric yoga of dreaming A contemplative practice of training lucidity inside the dream state: recognising the dream as dream while remaining inside it, then using that lucid state as the working ground for the Vajrayāna curriculum that follows. Sanskrit svapna, Tibetan rmi lam, the third of the Six Yogas of Nāropa. A parallel curriculum runs in the Bön and Nyingma lineages from the Mother Tantra sources of the Zhang Zhung tradition. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Drishti

practice
focused gaze in yoga Drishti (Sanskrit dṛṣṭi, 'gaze') is the yoga practice of directing the eyes to a fixed point during postures and meditation. It links pratyahara (sense withdrawal) to dharana (concentration), initiating the inward movement that yoga practice aims at. In the Ashtanga Vinyasa tradition codified by Pattabhi Jois in 20th-century Mysore, each posture carries one of eight prescribed drishtis, making gaze a structural element of the method rather than an incidental choice. 3 linked entries, 6 see also

Drukpa Kagyu

tradition
Tibetan Buddhist lineage A sub-school of the Tibetan Kagyu tradition, founded in the late twelfth century by Tsangpa Gyare Yeshe Dorje (1161–1211). The lineage descends through Linjé Repa, Phagmo Drupa, and Gampopa from the mahāmudrā teachers Tilopa, Naropa, Marpa, and Milarepa. It is the state religion of Bhutan, the principal Vajrayāna lineage of Ladakh and Zanskar, and the institutional home of a long-form solitary retreat tradition made widely known in English through Tenzin Palmo’s twelve years in a Himalayan cave. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Drunvalo Melchizedek

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New Age teacher American teacher and author (born Bernard Perona, 1941), known for The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life (Volumes I and II, 1999–2000) and the Mer-Ka-Ba meditation he reconstructed from Egyptian and Atlantean sources. After a 1971 encounter with two angelic beings, Drunvalo spent decades teaching the Flower of Life workshop in person. In 2011 he founded the School of Remembering and consolidated his life work into the four-day Awakening the Illuminated Heart (ATIH) workshop, now taught worldwide by some 200 certified teachers. Lives in Sedona, Arizona. 12 linked entries, 8 see also

Dukkha

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unsatisfactoriness in Buddhism Pāli term, Sanskrit duḥkha, central to Buddhist analysis. Conventionally translated as suffering, it is more accurately rendered as unsatisfactoriness or the inability of conditioned things to deliver lasting peace. The Buddha's First Noble Truth states that dukkha is intrinsic to ordinary life. The entire path is articulated as the conditions under which it ceases. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

Dvapara Yuga

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the third world age In Hindu cosmology, Dvapara Yuga is the third of the four yugas, the descending world ages that together form one great cycle. Its name means the age after the two. The texts describe it as a time when dharma stands on only two of its four legs and human virtue has measurably declined from the earlier ages. It is the age in which the Mahābhārata is set, and it is said to have ended with the death of Krishna and the start of the present Kali Yuga, dated to 3102 BCE. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Dzogchen

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Great Perfection Rdzogs chen (Great Perfection in Tibetan) is the contemplative tradition centred in the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. Awareness recognises its own primordial nature (rigpa) directly under a teacher's pointing-out instruction; the recognition is then stabilised through the formless practices of trekchö (cutting through) and tögal (direct crossing). The tradition is twin to the Karma Kagyu's Mahāmudrā: both lineages reach what their teachers describe as the same recognition by routes they treat as parallel rather than identical. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Eckhart Tolle

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spiritual teacher German-Canadian teacher (b. 1948 as Ulrich Leonard Tölle in Lünen, Germany). His 1997 book The Power of Now, and the 2005 follow-up A New Earth (an Oprah's Book Club selection), brought non-dual realisation and the practice of presence to a global mainstream audience without denominational framing. He is the figure most responsible for the term presence in its current English-language spiritual usage. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Ego

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psyche vs. constructed self The Latin word for I, used in both psychology and contemporary spirituality with overlapping but distinct meanings. In Freud, the ego (German Ich) is the part of the psyche that mediates between unconscious drives, conscience, and external reality. In contemporary spiritual writing, especially Eckhart Tolle, ego names the constructed sense of being a separate self: the image-of-me that the mind continuously reinforces. The two meanings sound similar but are not the same. 0 linked entries, 11 see also

Ego Death

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dissolution of self-sense The complete dissolution of the subjective sense of a separate self. The English phrase entered wide use through psychedelic research in the 1960s but names an experience documented across traditions for millennia: anattā in Buddhism, fanāʾ in Sufism, mokṣa and self-realisation in Advaita Vedānta, kenshō or satori in Zen. Whether the term captures one phenomenon or several related ones is an open question. 4 linked entries, 10 see also

Eightfold Path

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the path to liberation The Buddha's prescription for the cessation of dukkha. It is the fourth of the Four Noble Truths and the structural backbone of Buddhist practice. Eight factors are grouped under three headings: wisdom (right view, right intention), ethical conduct (right speech, right action, right livelihood), and mental discipline (right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration). The eight are not stages to be mastered in sequence but mutually conditioning cultivations that develop together. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Ein Sof

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the limitless divine Ein Sof (Hebrew for "without end") is the Kabbalistic name for the infinite divine reality as it is in itself, before any self-revelation. It is unknowable and beyond all attributes, so the tradition speaks of it only by negation. From Ein Sof the ten sefirot emanate, and it is the fullness that tzimtzum withdraws from to allow a finite world. The term gained its technical sense among 13th-century Kabbalists in Provence and Spain. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Ekayāna

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one-vehicle doctrine Sanskrit eka-yāna, meaning 'one vehicle'. The Mahāyāna teaching, introduced in the second chapter of the Lotus Sūtra, that the three paths the Buddha taught (śrāvaka, pratyekabuddha, and bodhisattva) are provisional upāya, or skilful means. The actual structure of the way is one: a single Buddha-vehicle (buddhayāna) through which every practitioner is ultimately headed toward complete awakening rather than a more limited liberation. The foundational doctrine of the Chinese Tiantai and Japanese Tendai schools, and the operating principle underlying most East Asian Mahāyāna self-understanding for fifteen centuries. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Embodiment

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presence in the body Embodiment is the practice of inhabiting the physical body with full, awake attention. It treats sensation, breath, and felt experience as legitimate pathways to presence and self-knowledge. Where some spiritual traditions frame the body as an obstacle, the embodiment approach argues the opposite: the body is the ground of spiritual life, not its cage. 5 linked entries, 7 see also

Emptiness

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Mahāyāna concept of śūnyatā Śūnyatā is the central philosophical concept of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Articulated most influentially by the second-century Indian thinker Nāgārjuna, it is the claim that no phenomenon has an independent, self-existent essence. Every thing is empty of inherent nature and constituted instead by its relations to everything else. The doctrine extends the older Buddhist teaching of non-self (anatta) from persons to all phenomena. It is the philosophical ground on which the bodhisattva path becomes intelligible. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Endless Knot

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sacred Buddhist symbol The Endless Knot (śrīvatsa) is a sacred interlaced symbol found in Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. It is one of the Eight Auspicious Symbols (ashtamangala) and represents the interweaving of wisdom and compassion, the inseparability of emptiness and dependent origination, and the endless cycle of cause and effect. 2 linked entries, 7 see also

Engaged Buddhism

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Buddhism in action A strand of twentieth-century Buddhism that treats meditation practice and social action as one path. Thich Nhat Hanh coined the term during the Vietnam War to describe his community's relief work and non-aligned peacemaking. Its principal contemporary lineages run through Plum Village (Vietnamese Thiền), Joanna Macy's Work That Reconnects (Buddhist ecology), Joan Halifax's Upaya Zen Center (clinician training and end-of-life care), and the forgiveness ethics developed in conversation between the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

Enlightenment

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awakening or liberation The English term used to translate a wide range of distinct technical concepts across Eastern traditions: Buddhist bodhi (awakening), Hindu mokṣa (liberation), Zen kenshō (seeing one's nature) and satori (sudden awakening), and Vedāntic jīvanmukti (liberation while embodied). These are not the same thing. The translations are useful shorthand but imperfect, and conflating them has produced real confusion among Western practitioners. Awakening is increasingly preferred as a less freighted term. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Enneads

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Plotinus's 54 treatises The fifty-four philosophical treatises of Plotinus (c. 204–270 CE), arranged after his death by his student Porphyry into six groups of nine (from the Greek ennea), and given the title that has held for seventeen centuries. The founding document of Neoplatonism, the bridge from Plato to Christian apophatic theology, and one of the few late-antique texts that contemplative readers still mine for live material rather than read as intellectual history. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Enneagram

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nine-type personality map A personality typology built around nine character types, each defined by a core motivational drive and a characteristic pattern of attention. The system maps relationships between the types using lines and wings on a nine-pointed geometric figure. Its modern form emerged from Oscar Ichazo's Arica school and Claudio Naranjo's SAT programme in the 1960s–70s, downstream of the Gurdjieff tradition's earlier use of the enneagram as a process symbol. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Essence-Energies Distinction

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Palamite The Eastern Christian doctrinal claim, articulated in its mature form by Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century and ratified at the Constantinople councils of 1341, 1347, and 1351, that God's essence (ousia) and God's energies (energeiai) are really distinct rather than merely conceptually distinguished. The essence remains beyond all created knowing and all participation. The energies are uncreated, are God himself in his operative aspect, and can be directly experienced. The uncreated light the hesychast monks of Mount Athos reported seeing during sustained prayer is, on the Palamite reading, neither a created phenomenon nor a metaphor for divine presence but the divine energy itself, made perceptible to a faculty the practice has prepared. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Evagrius Ponticus

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ascetic theologian Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345–399) was a fourth-century Christian monk and theologian, the most systematic of the Egyptian Desert Fathers. His analysis of the eight thoughts (logismoi), apatheia, and pure prayer formed the psychological foundation of the desert curriculum. That framework reached the Latin West through John Cassian's Conferences and Institutes and became, in Gregory the Great's reworking, the seven deadly sins of medieval Christianity. His Greek metaphysical writings were condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 and survived in the Eastern tradition mostly under pseudonymous attribution. The twentieth-century philological recovery has restored him to his place as the first systematic theologian of the Christian contemplative life. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Falun Gong

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Chinese qigong tradition Falun Gong (Fǎlún Dàfǎ, 'Dharma Wheel Great Law') is a Chinese qigong practice founded in 1992 by Li Hongzhi. It combines five meditative exercises with a moral framework built on three principles: Truthfulness (Zhēn, 真), Compassion (Shàn, 善), and Forbearance (Rěn, 忍). Its rapid spread through 1990s China drew tens of millions of practitioners before the Chinese government banned and began suppressing it in 1999. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Fanāʾ

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Sufi annihilation of the self Arabic for annihilation. In Sufi tradition, it names the dissolution of the separate self in God. The doctrine is paired with baqāʾ (abiding), which the tradition holds to follow it. Fanāʾ is the goal that dhikr prepares for, and the doctrinal centre of Ibn ʿArabī's and Rumi's inheritance. In comparative religion it is often set alongside mokṣa, nirvāṇa, emptiness and Christian unio mystica. 6 linked entries, 9 see also

Faravahar

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Zoroastrian winged symbol The Faravahar is the best-known emblem of Zoroastrianism, the ancient Iranian religion founded by the prophet Zarathustra. It depicts a bearded man standing in a winged disc, one hand raised toward the divine. The symbol appears in Achaemenid relief carvings at Persepolis (c. 550–330 BCE) and is read by Zoroastrians as the fravashi, the divine pre-existent guardian soul of every person. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Fierce grace

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grace through difficulty The phrase Ram Dass used in his late teaching for the unexpected workability of severe difficulty inside a long-prepared contemplative life. He gave this name to his 1997 stroke, which left him in a wheelchair and shaped the final two decades of his work. The concept names the recognition that grace is not always tender: its operative compassion can include the dismantling of the supports the practitioner believed the practice would protect. The phrase runs parallel to what the Vajrayāna tradition calls groundlessness and the Sufi tradition calls fanāʾ. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Five Ks

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Khalsa articles of faith The Five Ks (Pañj Kakār) are five articles of faith that Gurū Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh gurū, commanded initiated Khalsa Sikhs to wear at all times from 1699. Each item begins with the Punjabi letter kakkā (K): kesh (uncut hair), kangha (wooden comb), kara (steel bracelet), kachhera (undergarment), and kirpan (ceremonial sword). Together they form the Khalsa visible identity. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Five Precepts

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lay Buddhist ethics Pāli pañca-sīla, the five ethical training rules the Buddha offered lay followers as the foundation of the Buddhist path: abstention from killing, from taking what is not given, from sexual misconduct, from false speech, and from intoxicants that cloud the mind. The precepts are training rules (sikkhāpada), not commandments. They are voluntarily undertaken and renewed daily in formal lay practice. They are the lay form of the broader sīla that organises the Eightfold Path's right-speech and right-action limbs, and they share a structural family resemblance with the Yoga Sūtras' five yamas. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Francis Lucille

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Direct-path teacher French physicist and non-dual teacher (b. 1944) in the direct path lineage that runs from Atmananda Krishna Menon through Jean Klein. His teaching is the closest in temperament to classical Advaita Vedānta among living English-language non-dual teachers. He is precise and philosophically patient. He is unwilling to skip the ontological argument that other lineages tend to bypass in favour of pointing. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

Frithjof Schuon

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Swiss perennialist Swiss-German metaphysician and Sufi shaykh (1907–1998). After René Guénon's death in 1951, he became the central voice of the Traditionalist (or perennialist) school. The school argues that each revealed religion preserves, in its esoteric core, the same metaphysical recognition, and that this transcendent unity is only accessible from inside one of the revealed forms, never from above them. His 1948 De l'unité transcendante des religions is the school's twentieth-century locus classicus. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Full Catastrophe Living

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MBSR manual A 1990 book by Jon Kabat-Zinn, drawn from the first decade of the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programme he had run at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center since 1979. It is three things at once: a curriculum manual, a collection of patient case studies, and a secular argument that the course works. The practice it teaches is a satipaṭṭhāna method derived from Theravāda Buddhism, with the doctrinal frame removed. The title comes from Zorba's resigned summary of human life in Kazantzakis's novel, and names what mindfulness is built to meet. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

G. I. Gurdjieff

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Fourth Way teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (c. 1866–1949) was an Armenian-Greek esotericist who taught what his pupil P. D. Ouspensky later codified as the Fourth Way. The system holds that ordinary human beings live mechanically in a state the teaching called waking sleep, and that liberation requires sustained, deliberate work on three lines at once: knowledge, being, and conscious effort in the conditions of daily life. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Gabor Maté

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trauma and addiction MD A Hungarian-born Canadian physician and author (b. 1944) known for the idea that addiction and many chronic illnesses grow out of unresolved childhood trauma rather than genes or weak willpower. He spent twelve years as a doctor in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside treating severe addiction, then wrote widely read books including In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and The Myth of Normal. His trauma-centred view is influential in contemplative and wellness circles, though some clinicians say it overstates trauma's role. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Gampopa

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Kagyu school founder Sönam Rinchen of Dakpo (1079–1153) was a Tibetan monk-physician who received the Mahāmudrā transmission from Milarepa and built it into a teachable monastic curriculum for the first time. His Dwags po thar rgyan — the Jewel Ornament of Liberation — merged the Kadampa school's blo sbyong mind-training and bstan rim graded-path with the Mahāmudrā and Six Yogas of Naropa. All four major and eight minor sub-schools of the Kagyu line descend from him through his student Düsum Khyenpa, the first Karmapa. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Gardnerian Wicca

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initiatory Wicca Gardnerian Wicca is the founding lineage of Wicca, established by Gerald Gardner (1884–1964) in 1950s England. It is an initiatory, oath-bound tradition structured around coven membership and three degrees of initiation, drawing on the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley's writings, and earlier folk sources. Doreen Valiente (1922–1999) co-authored its central ritual text, the Book of Shadows, and gave the tradition much of its literary voice. Most other Wiccan lineages either descend from Gardnerian practice or were formed in reaction to it. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Geluk

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Tibetan Buddhist school The Gelug (dge lugs, 'the virtuous tradition') is the youngest of the four major schools of Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism. Tsongkhapa founded it in the early fifteenth century, building on the older Kadam lineage. It is marked by its Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka reading of emptiness, strict monastic vinaya, and a long geshe curriculum that combines sūtra study with tantric practice. The institution of the Dalai Lama is Geluk; the school remains the most populous of the four today. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Gnosticism

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liberation through gnosis Gnosticism names a cluster of early Christian movements, with pre-Christian roots, in which spiritual liberation comes through gnosis — direct experiential knowledge — rather than faith, ritual, or institutional authority. Gnostic teachings hold that the material world is the imperfect work of a lesser deity (the demiurge). The human soul carries a divine spark trapped in matter. Its task is to remember its true origin and return, through the layers of intermediate powers, back to the highest God. Largely suppressed by the institutional church after the fourth century, Gnosticism was rediscovered in the Nag Hammadi library found in Upper Egypt in 1945. 0 linked entries, 15 see also

God

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the supreme being God is the name for the one supreme being of monotheism: the eternal, uncreated source of all that exists, creator and sustainer of the world. The three Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — share belief in a single personal God while differing on how that God is known. Christianity is distinctive in confessing one God in three persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — the doctrine of the Trinity. 3 linked entries, 5 see also

Goddess

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the divine in female form A female deity. Goddesses appear in almost every religion, from creators of the world to consorts, guardians, and fierce protectors. In Shaktism, a major branch of Hinduism, the Goddess is the supreme reality itself, and her power is śakti. The English word joins god with the feminine -ess and dates to the 14th century. 0 linked entries, 13 see also

Gospel of Thomas

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early sayings gospel The Gospel of Thomas is an early Christian sayings collection containing 114 logia attributed to Jesus. It survives complete in a single fourth-century Coptic manuscript recovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, and in three earlier Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus. Unlike the canonical gospels, it has no narrative, no passion, and no resurrection account. It presents only teachings. In non-dual and perennialist readings it is often seen as the closest surviving early Christian text to the pointer-teachings of the Indian traditions. Its canonical status is contested; the early church did not include it, and its relationship to Gnostic movements remains a scholarly question. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Grace

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unearned spiritual gift Grace is what arrives in spiritual life beyond the reach of effort, practice, or merit. It is most fully developed in Christian theology, where it names the action of God in the soul at the point where the soul's own effort runs out. Parallel ideas appear in Hindu bhakti (the deity's prasāda, given to the devotee), Sufi fanāʾ (an annihilation done to the mystic rather than achieved by them), and Pure Land Buddhism's trust in Amida's other-power. Across these traditions, the shared recognition is that sincere effort eventually reaches a wall. 9 linked entries, 9 see also

Grandmother Moon

concept
moon ancestor spirit Grandmother Moon is the Anishinaabe name for the moon understood as a living ancestor spirit who governs water, women's ceremonial cycles, and the seasonal round. Her thirteen yearly faces each carry spiritual teachings appropriate to that time of year. The tradition is oral, carried by Elders among the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Odawa, and related peoples of the Great Lakes and Canada. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Gratitude

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recognition of the given The recognition that something good has been received, and the felt response to that recognition. Present across the major contemplative traditions: the Christian eucharistia and Benedictine gratefulness, the Sufi shukr, the Buddhist kataññutā. The contemporary Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast holds that every moment — not only pleasant ones — can be received as gift, and that this orientation is a full spiritual practice in itself. 3 linked entries, 6 see also

Gregg Braden

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consciousness researcher American author and lecturer (b. 1954) working at the intersection of geophysics, ancient texts, and consciousness research. He spent his early career as a senior computer systems designer in the defence industry during the late Cold War, then moved into independent research on field physics, ancient DNA evidence, and the lost-civilisation question. His twelve books include The Divine Matrix (2007), Fractal Time (2009), The God Code (2004), and Pure Human (2024). 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Gregory Palamas

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hesychast theologian Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) was a monk of Mount Athos and Archbishop of Thessalonica. He defended the hesychast tradition against the Calabrian critic Barlaam, and his defence produced the essence-energies distinction: God's essence (ousia) is forever beyond all knowing, but God's energies (energeiai) are real divine acts in which the uncreated light of Tabor is directly perceived. The Eastern Orthodox Church received this as dogma at the councils of 1341 and 1351. His Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts (composed 1338–1341) remains the canonical statement of the position. 9 linked entries, 8 see also

Grihastha

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the householder āśrama The second of the four āśramas (stages of life) in the classical Hindu scheme. Gṛhastha means one established in a home (gṛha). It names the period of adult life devoted to marriage, raising children, earning a livelihood, and fulfilling social obligations. The Manusmṛti calls it the most excellent of the four stages because the householder sustains those in the other three. It follows brahmacharya (student life) and precedes vānaprastha (gradual withdrawal) and sannyāsa (renunciation). Classical tradition holds that artha (material wellbeing) and kāma (pleasure and love) are legitimate aims of this stage, with mokṣa (liberation) as its ultimate horizon. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Groundlessness

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emptiness in practice An English term from the Vajrayāna tradition for the felt experience of emptiness and anattā. Popularized by Pema Chödrön and her teacher Chögyam Trungpa, it names the recognition, met most clearly in illness, loss, or sustained practice, that there is no fixed standpoint from which life can be safely surveyed. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Guṇas

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three qualities of nature Sanskrit guṇa means quality, strand, or constituent. In classical Sāṃkhya philosophy, the three guṇas are the irreducible constituents of prakṛti: sattva (clarity and equilibrium), rajas (activity and passion), and tamas (inertia and opacity). They are present in varying proportions in every body, food, thought, mood, and action that prakṛti composes. The Bhagavad Gītā's seventeenth chapter applies this analysis systematically to the categories of everyday life. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Guru

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Sanskrit for spiritual teacher Sanskrit guru means the heavy one: the spiritual teacher who transmits a lineage's recognition through direct relationship, not through text alone. Indian traditions treat the guru-śiṣya (teacher-disciple) bond as the primary channel for that transmission. The Western reception has veered between two errors: treating any spiritual teacher as a guru in the technical sense, and dismissing the role entirely after the well-documented twentieth-century scandals. The English career of the word is unusually muddled. 5 linked entries, 14 see also

Guru Yoga

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Vajrayāna guru-devotion The Vajrayāna practice of recognising the teacher as the embodied presence of awakened mind, and using that recognition as the vehicle of transmission. Guru yoga sits at the centre of every Tibetan school's ngöndro preliminaries and continues into the higher Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen instructions. The premise is that devotional openness creates the conditions under which the teacher's realisation can reach the student's mind. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

H. W. L. Poonja (Papaji)

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Lucknow guru Indian Advaita teacher (1910–1997), born Hariwansh Lal Poonja in Punjab. He met Ramana Maharshi at Tiruvannamalai in 1944 and recognised him as his master. From the late 1980s he taught from a small house in Lucknow. Papaji is the affectionate Hindi for father. The wave of Western seekers who came to him, Mooji among them, carried Ramana's self-enquiry into a global English-speaking audience. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Hafiz

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Persian Sufi poet Hafiz, or Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī (c. 1325–1390), was a Persian poet who memorised the Qurʾan in his youth. His collected Dīvān of around five hundred ghazals is the most-read book of poetry in the Persian-speaking world and one of the foundational documents of the Sufi literary tradition. The poems use the surface vocabulary of wine, the cup-bearer, and the beloved. That vocabulary sits in continuous tension with a theological reading: the soul's intoxication in God. How to read them has been a live controversy in Persian letters for six hundred years. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Hakuin

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Zen Reformer Hakuin Ekaku (白隠 慧鶴, 1686–1769) was a Japanese Zen master who revived the Rinzai school from decline and built the graduated kōan curriculum that Rinzai monasteries, and the Sanbō Kyōdan school that brought Zen to the twentieth-century West, still use today. He composed the sound of one hand and the Zazen Wasan (Song of Zazen), a verse summary of Rinzai teaching still chanted in Japanese and Western dōjō. He was also among the most prolific Zen artists; his rough Daruma sketches and self-portraits show a teacher who treated the brush as part of the practice. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Hand of Fatima

concept
protective hand amulet The hamsa (Arabic khamsa, 'five'), also called the Hand of Fatima in Islamic tradition and the Hand of Miriam in Sephardic Jewish usage, is a palm-shaped amulet used across North Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean to ward off the evil eye. The symbol predates Islam, appearing in ancient Mesopotamian, Phoenician, and Israelite material culture before entering Islamic popular piety and Kabbalistic practice. It is now one of the most widely recognised protective symbols in the world. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Hans Wilhelm

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children’s book author German-American children’s book author and illustrator (b. 1945, Bremen). After a forty-year career producing illustrated books for young readers, he became a YouTube teacher of a Theosophically-derived spiritual cosmology: reincarnation, a conscious-subconscious-spirit-conscious three-layer anthropology, the Akashic substrate, and a Christ-spark account that places the divine inside every embodied human. His channel is the index’s densest single source on the popular esoteric reincarnation framing and on the practical applications of New Thought subconscious programming, delivered in the patient narratable register the picture-book career trained him in. 14 linked entries, 8 see also

Hasidism

tradition
Jewish mystical revival A mystical revival movement within Judaism, founded by Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, in 18th-century Eastern Europe. It took the dense, scholarly world of Kabbalah and made it a living popular piety: God is present in all things, worship is best offered through joy, and the path to God runs through fervent prayer and devekut, a constant cleaving of the mind to the divine. Each community gathers around a charismatic leader, the rebbe or tzaddik. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Haṭha Yoga

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yoga of the subtle body A medieval Indian branch of yoga that works with the subtle body through āsana (posture), prāṇāyāma (breath control), mudrā (gesture), bandha (lock), and ṣaṭkarma (cleansings). The Sanskrit haṭha means force or forcible effort; the syllables are also read as ha (sun) and tha (moon), the two polar energies the practice claims to align. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā

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haṭha yoga text A fifteenth-century Sanskrit manual attributed to Svātmārāma. It codified the haṭha yoga curriculum into four chapters: āsana (posture), prāṇāyāma (breath-control), mudrā and bandha (energetic seals and locks), and samādhi (the absorption the earlier limbs prepare). The shortest of the three classic haṭha manuals, alongside the Gheraṇḍa Saṃhitā and the Śiva Saṃhitā. It is the textual ancestor of the global postural-yoga vocabulary the twentieth-century Krishnamacharya lineage carried into the modern studio. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Healing Tao

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Taoist qigong system A modern system of qigong and Taoist inner alchemy founded by Mantak Chia in the 1970s. It organises classical Taoist energy practices into a graded curriculum centred on working with qi (vital energy), jing (essence), and shen (spirit). The system's foundational practice is the Microcosmic Orbit: circulating qi through two primary channels up the spine and down the front midline. Chia calls his full curriculum the Nine Formulas and teaches it through the Universal Healing Tao Centre near Chiang Mai, Thailand. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Heart Sūtra

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brief sūtra on emptiness The shortest and most widely recited of the Prajñāpāramitā (Perfection of Wisdom) sūtras of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The standard Chinese form (Bōrě Bōluómìduō Xīnjīng) runs to around 260 characters; the Sanskrit title is Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya, the Japanese Hannya Shingyō. In the text, the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara addresses the teaching of emptiness (śūnyatā) to the elder disciple Śāriputra in the formula form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Recited daily in Zen monasteries from Japan to Taiwan, in Tibetan dharma centres globally, and in Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese Mahāyāna communities for some fifteen centuries. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Helen Schucman

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psychologist, ACIM American research psychologist (1909–1981) at Columbia University and the scribe of A Course in Miracles. Between 1965 and 1972 she took down the 1,200-page text from an inner voice she identified as Jesus, with her colleague William Thetford transcribing the notes. She was an atheist who found the experience troubling and requested that her role remain anonymous until after her death. The text she scribed became one of the most widely studied channelled works in twentieth-century American spirituality. 2 linked entries, 6 see also

Helena Blavatsky

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occultist, 1831–1891 Russian-born occultist (1831–1891) and co-founder of the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. Her 1888 work The Secret Doctrine assembled Hindu, Buddhist, Hermetic, and Kabbalistic ideas into the first sustained Western esoteric cosmology. She claimed to have received her teachings from Masters in the Tibetan Himalayas; that claim remains disputed. Her influence on modern Western spirituality does not. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

Hell

concept
afterlife realm of suffering Hell is the name most traditions give to an afterlife realm of suffering or punishment. Christianity and Islam have typically depicted it as a place where souls face the consequences of their choices, with classical theology often treating this as eternal. Buddhism and Hinduism describe equivalent realms, called naraka, as temporary states within the cycle of rebirth from which the soul eventually departs. The duration of hell, whether eternal or finite, is among the most contested questions in each tradition. 4 linked entries, 10 see also

Hermes Trismegistus

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Hermetic sage Thrice-greatest Hermes is the legendary syncretic figure of late-antique Alexandria, named as the supposed author of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Asclepius, and a wide body of alchemical, astrological and theurgic literature. He fuses the Egyptian Thoth, scribe of the gods, with the Greek Hermes, messenger and psychopomp, into a single contemplative authority the Hermetic tradition has claimed as its founder for two millennia. No such person ever existed. The entry tracks what the figure has done in the Western esoteric imagination. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Hermeticism

tradition
Western esoteric thought The Western esoteric tradition rooted in the Corpus Hermeticum and the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice-greatest. It is a syncretic blend of Greek philosophy, Egyptian mystery religion, and early Gnostic thought, codified in Alexandria in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. Hermeticism's central claim: the universe is fundamentally mental. The All is mind, and the human being is a microcosm in correspondence with the macrocosm. The tradition runs through Renaissance magic, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and freemasonry, and resurfaces in the twentieth-century Kybalion. 0 linked entries, 21 see also

Hermitage

concept
place of solitary retreat A hermitage is a dwelling set apart from the world for solitary religious practice. The word derives from the Greek eremos, meaning desert or wilderness. Christian hermits from the third century built cells in Egypt and Syria; the form reappears as the Tibetan ri-khrod (mountain retreat) and the Hindu forest ashrama. In every tradition the hermitage embodies one discipline: withdrawal as the precondition for the inner life. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Hesychasm

tradition
Eastern Orthodox stillness Hesychasm is the Eastern Orthodox contemplative tradition rooted in hesychia, the Greek for stillness and quietude. Its central practice is the Jesus Prayer: the rhythmic interior repetition of Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. The tradition descends from the third- and fourth-century Desert Fathers of Egypt and Syria, through the Byzantine monasticism of Mount Athos, to the Philokalia compiled in 1782. It survives today as the live mystical practice of the Greek, Russian, Romanian and Slavic Orthodox churches. Its defining theological claim was articulated by Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century: the uncreated light the hesychast perceives is God himself, not a metaphor and not a created intermediary, but the divine energies directly experienced. 7 linked entries, 9 see also

Hexagram

concept
I Ching oracle symbol One of sixty-four six-line symbols at the heart of the I Ching (Yìjīng, the Classic of Changes). Each hexagram is formed by stacking two trigrams of three lines each: a solid yang line (—) or a broken yin line (– –). Consulting a hexagram involves casting yarrow stalks or coins to generate a pattern, then reading it against the Yìjīng's verse-commentary. The system has been in use in China since at least the Western Zhou period (c. 9th century BCE) and shaped Taoist, Confucian, and Neo-Confucian cosmology alike. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Hildegard of Bingen

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abbess and mystic Hildegard of Bingen (c. 1098–1179) was a German Benedictine abbess, theologian, visionary, and composer. Her three-volume theological trilogy — Scivias, Liber Vitae Meritorum, and Liber Divinorum Operum — records twenty-six visions she received from childhood onward, presented as doctrine within the Western Christian tradition. She was declared a Doctor of the Church in 2012, one of only four women to hold that designation. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Hinduism

tradition
the eternal way The world's oldest continuously practised major religion. Its internal name is Sanātana Dharma, the eternal way. The tradition is rooted in the Vedic literature of the Indian subcontinent and reaches back at least 3500 years. It is less a single doctrine than a family of schools and devotional currents. Among them: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gītā, Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras, the worship of Vishnu, Shiva and the Goddess, and the philosophy of Vedānta. Its yogic and non-dual streams have travelled furthest into the Western contemplative landscape. Roughly 1.2 billion adherents today, mostly in India and Nepal. 8 linked entries, 19 see also

Hoʻoponopono

practice
reconciliation practice Hoʻoponopono (to make doubly right) is a Hawaiian practice of restoration and reconciliation. In its traditional form, it was a structured family or community ritual: conflicts were spoken aloud, unraveled, and released with elder guidance. The version most widely known outside Hawaii is Self-Identity Through Hoʻoponopono (SITH), developed by Morrnah Simeona in the late twentieth century. SITH internalises the practice into four phrases repeated silently toward the self: I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. The working premise is that what one encounters outside reflects what one carries inside. The practice has spread widely through New Thought and self-help channels. 7 linked entries, 7 see also

Hollow Earth

concept
inner-earth mythology The Hollow Earth is the esoteric belief that the planet contains a vast interior space populated by advanced beings or hidden civilizations. The idea entered Western occultism through Theosophical literature in the late 19th century and persists today in New Age communities as a claim that subterranean peoples, sometimes called Agarthans, preserve ancient wisdom beneath the surface. Science has settled the question: the Earth has no hollow interior, but the mythological form continues as a cosmological symbol in esoteric traditions. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Holotropic Breathwork

practice
Grof's method A practice that uses accelerated breathing, evocative music and focused bodywork to bring on non-ordinary states of consciousness. Stanislav and Christina Grof developed it in the 1970s at the Esalen Institute as a drug-free successor to Grof's earlier LSD-assisted therapy. The name joins the Greek holos (whole) and trepein (moving toward): 'moving toward wholeness.' It is classed as a form of alternative medicine, and both its effects and its safety remain contested. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Hōnen

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founder of Jōdo-shū Japanese Tendai-trained monk (1133–1212) who founded Jōdo-shū, the first independent Japanese Pure Land school, on the exclusive practice of the nembutsu, the recitation of the name of Amitābha. His 1198 treatise Senchakushū Hongan Nembutsu Shū argued that senju nembutsu, the exclusive practice of the name, was the one path to liberation the degenerate age of mappō permitted. He was exiled in 1207, pardoned in 1211, and died the following year in Kyoto. His disciple Shinran extended the teaching into Jōdo Shinshū, today the largest Buddhist tradition in Japan by lay membership. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Huayan

tradition
Chinese Buddhist school Huayan is a Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhist school that formed in the seventh century CE around the Avataṃsaka Sūtra (Huāyán Jīng, Flower Garland Sūtra) and the synthesis articulated by its patriarchs Dushun, Zhiyan and, most decisively, Fazang (643–712) under Tang-dynasty patronage. Its central teaching is interpenetration: the famous Indra's net image describes a cosmos in which every jewel reflects every other jewel, recursively and without end. The school distinguishes four dharmadhatu, or dharma-realms, with the final realm describing the unobstructed interpenetration of phenomena with phenomena. Its downstream influence flows through Chan and Zen, which absorbed the Huayan metaphysics even as the Sanskrit vocabulary receded, and through Thich Nhat Hanh's interbeing, which carries the same doctrine into contemporary English. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Huineng

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Sixth Chan Patriarch Sixth and final Patriarch of Chinese Chan Buddhism (traditional dates 638–713). An illiterate woodcutter from the Cantonese south, Huineng was awakened by a single line of the Diamond Sūtra recited in a marketplace. This became the founding episode of the Southern school of Chan. His attributed text, the Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch (Liùzǔ Tánjīng), is the only Chan text given the rank of sūtra in the Chinese Buddhist canon. Through his heirs, every surviving school of Chan and Japanese Zen descends from his transmission. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Huisi

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second Tiantai patriarch Sixth-century Chinese Buddhist monk (515–577), the second patriarch of the Tiantai lineage and the teacher of Zhiyi. His principal surviving works, the Dasheng Zhiguan Famen (Method of Calming and Contemplation in the Mahāyāna) and the Anlexing Yi (Course of Ease and Bliss), give the zhǐguān meditative pairing and the Lotus Sūtra-centred one-vehicle doctrine their first sustained Chinese theoretical exposition. The tradition names his own master Huiwen as the first patriarch and Huisi as the proximate source of the doctrinal orientation Zhiyi systematised into the most influential medieval East Asian Buddhist school. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Human Design

concept
esoteric type system Human Design is a typology created by Ra Uru Hu in 1987 that assigns each person one of four energy types via a composite chart derived from birth date and time. The chart, called a bodygraph, draws on the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, Western astrology, the Kabbalistic tree of life, and the Hindu chakra system. The system is widely used in contemporary spiritual communities; its claims to scientific grounding are not accepted by mainstream researchers. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Huston Smith

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world religions scholar American scholar of comparative religion (1919–2016), born in Suzhou to Methodist missionary parents. His 1958 textbook The Religions of Man, retitled The World's Religions in 1991, became the standard English-language introduction to comparative religion for four decades and sold over three million copies. Smith was the leading mid-twentieth-century advocate of the perennialist reading: the view that the historic religions, beneath their distinct theologies, point toward a single underlying recognition. 5 linked entries, 7 see also

I Am That

text
Nisargadatta's dialogues A compilation of dialogues with Nisargadatta Maharaj, recorded by the Polish engineer Maurice Frydman in the loft above Nisargadatta's small Bombay tobacco shop between 1970 and 1973, and published by the Chetana Press in 1973. The most widely read English-language non-dual text after the writings of Ramana Maharshi. The source text from which the post-1970s Western advaita lineage descends, including the teachings of Mooji, Francis Lucille, Rupert Spira and the broader direct-path stream. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

I Ching

text
Book of Changes The I Ching (Yìjīng, the Classic of Changes) is an ancient Chinese divination text, probably compiled in the Western Zhou period (c. 1000–750 BCE). It is organised around sixty-four hexagrams, symbols formed from pairs of three-line trigrams, each line either solid (yang) or broken (yin). The text was read as a moral guide by Confucius, as a map of the Tao's natural movement by Taoist thinkers, and as a psychological mirror by Carl Jung, who wrote its most widely read Western foreword in 1950. 2 linked entries, 6 see also

Iain McGilchrist

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psychiatrist, author Scottish psychiatrist, literary scholar and former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (b. 1953), whose work argues that the two cerebral hemispheres attend to the world in fundamentally different ways. The modern West, he claims, has progressively over-weighted the analytic, manipulative attention of the left hemisphere at the cost of the contextual, relational attention of the right. The Master and his Emissary (2009) and the two-volume The Matter With Things (2021) make the case across neuropsychology, philosophy and the history of culture. The thesis is contested at the neuroscience layer but widely read as a diagnosis of what a strictly materialist account of consciousness misses. 5 linked entries, 7 see also

Ibn ʿArabī

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Andalusian Sufi mystic Andalusian Sufi philosopher (1165–1240), often called al-Shaykh al-Akbar (the greatest master) within the Sufi tradition. His doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd, or unity of being, holds that only God truly exists, the world is the locus of divine self-disclosure, and the human heart is the place where this disclosure becomes consciously known. His influence runs through the Persian and Ottoman Sufi inheritance and reaches modern English readers through scholarly editions, the comparativist work of Toshihiko Izutsu, and the perennialist literature. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Iconography

concept
Eastern Christian icons The Eastern Christian discipline of producing icons — sacred images of Christ, the Theotokos, and the saints — under a doctrinal grammar fixed at the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787 CE) and held continuously by the Greek, Russian, and Slavic Orthodox churches. The core claim, defended against the Byzantine iconoclasts, is that the icon is not a representation but a participating window onto its prototype. The image does not depict the saint. It makes the saint addressable. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Idries Shah

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Sufi author and teacher Afghan-born British author (1924–1996) whose 1964 book The Sufis became the most-read English-language introduction to Sufism of the twentieth century. Shah presented Sufism not as an Islamic mystical school but as a universal wisdom tradition with parallels across cultures. That framing reached a vast Anglophone readership and shaped how two generations understood Persian mystical literature; academic Sufi studies has been critical of it ever since. 6 linked entries, 7 see also

Ifá

tradition
Yoruba divination system Ifá is a Yoruba divination and counseling system from West Africa, in systematic form by at least the 16th century. A trained priest called a babaláwo reads from a corpus of 256 Odu, each containing hundreds of sacred verses, to help a person understand and align with their destiny. UNESCO inscribed Ifá on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Ik Onkar

concept
Sikh symbol of divine unity Ik Onkar (ਇੱਕ ਓਅੰਕਾਰ) is the opening symbol of the Guru Granth Sāhib and the first phrase of the Mūl Mantar, Sikhism's root affirmation. Attributed to Gurū Nānak (1469–1539), it declares that God is one, undivided, and the sole Creator. The symbol appears at the head of every major section of the scripture and above the entrance of every gurdwara. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Imam

concept
Islamic prayer leader The imam (Arabic imām) leads Islamic congregational prayer in Sunni practice and holds no ordained priesthood — any knowledgeable Muslim may fill the role. The title also honours the founders of the four Sunni legal schools. In Shia Islam it names something different: the twelve divinely-guided, infallible successors to the Prophet, beginning with ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Impermanence

concept
anicca, all things pass The Buddhist doctrine that all conditioned phenomena arise, change, and pass away. In Pāli it is anicca, in Sanskrit anitya. With dukkha (unsatisfactoriness) and anatta (non-self), it forms the three marks of existence in Buddhist analysis. It is not a pessimistic claim but a structural one. Nothing in the field of experience holds still long enough to be a stable refuge. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Inari Ōkami

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Japan's fox kami Inari Ōkami (稲荷大神) is the kami of rice, foxes, fertility, and worldly success in Shinto. One of the tradition's principal deities, Inari has been worshipped since at least 711 CE. The kitsune (fox) acts as Inari's messenger and most distinctive symbol. Inari also absorbed a Buddhist identity: since the 9th century, Inari's female aspect has been identified with Dakiniten, a deity associated with Shingon Buddhism. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Initiation

concept
rite of passage A rite that formally admits a seeker into a tradition, lineage, or community. The rite typically involves a threshold moment, transmission from a qualified teacher, and the assumption of new obligations. Diksha in Hindu traditions, abhisheka (empowerment) in Vajrayāna, bay'ah in Sufism, and taking refuge in Buddhism are all forms of initiation. 5 linked entries, 7 see also

Inner Journey

concept
the path turned inward The inner journey is the turn from outer activity to inward attention. Every contemplative tradition has a name for it: self-enquiry in Vedānta, meditation in Buddhism, contemplative prayer in Christianity, murāqaba in Sufism. It is not a withdrawal from life. It is a reorientation of attention from objects to the subject that knows them. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Inner Wisdom

concept
discernment from within Inner wisdom is the name most contemplative traditions give to the reliable knowing that arises from within the practitioner through practice and silence. In Hindu philosophy this faculty is called buddhi or viveka; in Christian mysticism, the magister interior; in Sufism, kashf. The traditions agree that it is not produced by the individual mind but recognised through it. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Insight Meditation Society

tradition
US retreat The American Vipassanā center founded in 1975 in Barre, Massachusetts by Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, and Jack Kornfield to bring Burmese and Thai-forest Theravāda practice to the West. Together with its California sister Spirit Rock (1987), IMS trained essentially every American insight teacher of the second generation, including Tara Brach, and is the institutional backbone of what became the mindfulness movement in the English-speaking world. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Interbeing

concept
Nhat Hanh on co-arising The English word Thich Nhat Hanh coined for the Vietnamese Tương Tức, his rendering of the Sanskrit pratītyasamutpāda (conditioned co-arising) for late-twentieth-century English readers. The doctrine it carries is the Mahāyāna teaching that nothing arises independently. Every phenomenon is constituted through everything else. The Plum Village community made the term central to its teaching. Through Thich Nhat Hanh's books and retreats, interbeing travelled further into general English than any other classical Buddhist term. 2 linked entries, 9 see also

Interior Castle

text
Teresa of Ávila, 1577 Teresa of Ávila's 1577 masterwork, El Castillo Interior (also circulated as Las Moradas, The Dwellings), maps the soul as a crystal castle of seven concentric dwellings. The contemplative moves inward through them, from discursive prayer in the outer rooms to matrimonio espiritual (spiritual marriage) in the innermost. Teresa wrote it in five months while her co-reformer John of the Cross was held in a Carmelite prison in Toledo. Published posthumously in 1588 by Luis de León at Salamanca, it remains the principal pastoral document of the Spanish Carmelite school. 10 linked entries, 7 see also

Intuition

concept
knowing beyond reasoning Intuition is direct knowing that arrives without conscious reasoning. Across traditions it appears as viveka in Hindu thought, prajñā in Buddhism, kashf in Sufism, and intellectus in Christian mysticism. These terms share a common structure: a mode of understanding that bypasses the discursive mind and grasps something whole. 3 linked entries, 10 see also

Isaac Luria

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Kabbalist of Safed Isaac ben Solomon Luria (c. 1534–1572), known as the Ari ('the Lion') or Arizal. A Jewish mystic who taught for only a few years in the town of Safed, in the Galilee, yet reshaped Kabbalah so thoroughly that the form he founded, Lurianic Kabbalah, became the dominant version of Jewish mysticism. He is known for the linked doctrines of tzimtzum (divine contraction), the shattering of the vessels, and tikkun (cosmic repair). 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Īśvara

concept
the Hindu personal absolute Sanskrit for lord, the term the Hindu contemplative traditions use for the personal absolute. In the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, the word names the special puruṣa untouched by action and its results, whose contemplation, īśvara-praṇidhāna or surrender to the Lord, is one of the niyamas. In Advaita Vedānta, it names brahman seen with attributes, saguṇa brahman, the form in which the absolute can be approached, worshipped, and ultimately seen through. The English translation God is unavoidable and almost always misleading. 6 linked entries, 7 see also

Īśvara-praṇidhāna

practice
fifth niyama Sanskrit īśvara-praṇidhāna — dedication to the Lord, or resting one's actions in the absolute — is the fifth of the five niyamas Patañjali prescribes as the inner-observance limb of the eight-limbed path. The Yoga Sūtras explicitly mark it as one of the operations sufficient on its own for samādhi. The compound joins Īśvara (the personal absolute the Sūtras introduce into an otherwise Sāṃkhya dualism) with praṇidhāna (the deliberate placing of one's actions at the disposal of something larger than the conditioned self). The tradition distinguishes the practice from passive resignation and from theistic submission in the Abrahamic sense. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Jack Kornfield

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Vipassanā teacher American Vipassanā teacher and clinical psychologist (b. 1945). He co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts (1976) and Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California (1987). Trained as a Theravāda monk in Thailand under Ajahn Chah and briefly under Mahasi Sayadaw in Burma, he is among the most influential figures in bringing Thai and Burmese forest insight meditation to the English-speaking world. A Path with Heart (1993) and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry (2000) are his best-known books. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Jainism

tradition
ancient Indian religion Jainism is an ancient Indian śramaṇa tradition that predates Buddhism and stands structurally apart from Hinduism. Its central discipline is ahiṃsā: absolute non-injury to all living beings, taken further here than in any other Indic tradition. Founded in its present form by Mahāvīra in the sixth century BCE, it holds that eternal souls (jīva) are bound to rebirth by literal karmic matter, and that liberation requires ascetic purification rather than grace or ritual. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Japa

practice
mantra repetition The repetition of a divine name, mantra, or short phrase as a contemplative practice. It can be performed silently, whispered, or aloud, often counted on a mālā (rosary) of 108 beads. The Sanskrit japa derives from the root jap- (to mutter, to whisper) and names the most widely practised form of bhakti and mantra discipline in Indian tradition. Cognate practices exist in every major theistic contemplative culture: the Sufi dhikr, the Eastern Orthodox Jesus Prayer, the Catholic rosary. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Jean Klein

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Direct-path teacher French musicologist and physician (1912–1998) who carried the direct path of Atmananda Krishna Menon into Europe. After several years in India in the 1950s under Krishna Menon's guidance, Klein returned to teach quietly in France, Switzerland and Britain for four decades. His students include Francis Lucille, through whom the lineage reaches Rupert Spira and a wide English-speaking audience. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Jesus Christ

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founder of Christianity Jesus of Nazareth (c. 4 BCE– 30 CE) is the central figure of Christianity — the Jewish teacher from Galilee whose life, death, and reported resurrection became the foundation of a tradition now numbering over two billion. His followers know him as the Christ, from the Greek Christos (the anointed one), and the tradition calls him the Son of God and the second person of the Trinity. The contemplative streams of Christianity — the Desert Fathers, the mystics, the centering-prayer movement — return constantly to his example as the pattern of a life given over to union with God. 4 linked entries, 6 see also

Jesus Prayer

practice
Eastern Christian prayer The Jesus Prayer is a short formula repeated continuously in Eastern Christian practice. The most common form is Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. It is the central instrument of hesychast practice, carried in transmission from the Desert Fathers of the fourth century through Sinai and Athonite monasticism to the Philokalia anthology of 1782. The method is structurally similar to the dhikr of Sufism and the japa of Hindu mantra practice: the same name-repetition method under different theological frameworks. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Jhāna

concept
meditative absorption Pāli jhāna (Sanskrit dhyāna, Chinese chán, Japanese zen) names the family of meditative absorption states that classical Buddhist literature treats as the deepest fruit of śamatha practice. The model has four rūpa-jhānas (form absorptions) and four arūpa-jhānas (formless absorptions). Each stage is defined by which mental factors are present and which have been released. The suttas are explicit: jhāna is not awakening. It is a stabilising of attention so complete that insight work becomes possible at a finer register. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

Jiddu Krishnamurti

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Indian philosopher Indian-born teacher (1895–1986) raised by Theosophists as the prophesied World Teacher. In 1929 he dissolved the international organisation built around him with the declaration truth is a pathless land. He then spent fifty-seven years addressing audiences worldwide, refusing the role of guru. His central instruction was choiceless awareness: attention that includes the observer in what is observed. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Jīva

concept
the individual soul Sanskrit for the living one, jīva names the apparent individual self bound to a particular body and biography. Advaita Vedānta treats the jīva as provisional: investigate it all the way down and you find ātman, which is identical with brahman. Jain philosophy holds it to be a literally eternal soul bound by karmic matter, plural without remainder. The jīvanmukta (the one liberated while alive) is the Vedāntic figure for recognising that the jīva was apparent rather than ultimate. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Jīvanmukti

concept
liberation while alive Sanskrit for liberation while alive. In Advaita Vedānta, jīvanmukti is the doctrine that mokṣa can be realised in the present life, not only at death. The realised one is the jīvanmukta: the same world continues, but the felt centre of identity has dissolved. The contrasting doctrine is videhamukti, liberation at death, which several Indian schools treat as the only available mode. The teachers most cited as canonical examples in English-language commentary are Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Jñāna yoga

practice
the yoga of knowledge The yoga of knowledge. One of the four classical paths of Hindu yoga, alongside bhakti (devotion), karma (action) and rāja (meditation). It proceeds by direct investigation of the experiencer. Its instruments are viveka (discrimination) and the mahāvākyas of the Upaniṣads, not ritual, devotion or technique. Ramana Maharshi's who am I? is the most distilled contemporary form. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Joe Dispenza

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chiropractor & author American chiropractor (b. 1962), author, and retreat teacher. His work reframes meditation in clinical language: sustained internal-state change, brain-wave entrainment, and mental rehearsal of a desired future self. He built a global audience through You Are the Placebo, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, and Becoming Supernatural, and through week-long retreats. The testimonials of physical-illness remission these retreats produce are both the central draw and the most contested part of the work. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

John Cassian

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monastic writer, 360–435 John Cassian (c. 360–435) was a monastic writer born in the Roman province of Scythia Minor on the lower Danube. He trained for a decade among the Desert Fathers of Scetis and Lower Egypt before settling in Marseille around 415, where he founded Saint-Victor monastery for monks and Saint-Sauveur for nuns. He then wrote his two Latin works: the Institutes and the Conferences. These books are the channel through which the Egyptian desert curriculum reached the Latin West. Benedict's sixth-century Rule prescribes Cassian as required reading, and the entire subsequent Latin contemplative tradition flows from that prescription. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

John of the Cross

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Carmelite mystic John of the Cross (Juan de Yepes y Álvarez, 1542–1591) was a Spanish Carmelite friar, mystical poet, and reformer. He wrote four works: The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night of the Soul, The Spiritual Canticle, and The Living Flame of Love. These map the soul's progressive stripping of attachment on its way to union with God. With Teresa of Ávila he reformed the Carmelite Order. The unreformed branch imprisoned him in Toledo for nine months in 1577–78, where he first composed the Cántico Espiritual. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Jon Kabat-Zinn

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founder of MBSR American molecular biologist (b. 1944) who founded the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programme (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979. He secularised Vipassanā meditation for clinical use, stripping the Buddhist terminology while keeping the practice intact. That translation is largely responsible for the vocabulary of mindfulness in contemporary medicine, education and corporate life. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Jonathan Pageau

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Orthodox iconographer Jonathan Pageau (b. 1973) is a French-Canadian Orthodox iconographer and the creator of The Symbolic World, a YouTube channel, podcast and small-press publisher based in Quebec. He reads scripture, ritual and contemporary culture through the patristic and Athonite symbolic grammar of the Eastern Christian tradition. 4 linked entries, 7 see also

Joseph Campbell

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American mythologist Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) was an American mythologist. His comparative-mythology programme, centred on the monomyth of The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) and developed across thirty years of teaching at Sarah Lawrence, brought the depth-psychological reading of myth that Carl Jung had developed in clinical practice to a wider English-reading public. His late-life conversation with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (1988), is the document through which Campbell's reading of the contemplative inheritance reached a generation of readers who would not otherwise have encountered it. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Joseph Goldstein

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Buddhist teacher American Buddhist teacher (born 1944). Co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society at Barre, Massachusetts (1976) and the main English-language transmitter of the satipaṭṭhāna-based vipassanā curriculum to the first generation of Western Theravāda students. Trained under Anagarika Munindra in Bodhgayā and under Mahāsi Sayādaw in Burma. His main books are Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening (2013), The Experience of Insight (1976), and One Dharma (2002). 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Joseph Murphy

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New Thought author Irish-American author and minister (1898–1981) whose 1963 book The Power of Your Subconscious Mind became one of the bestselling works in the New Thought tradition. Trained in Ireland, he left the Catholic Church in his twenties and eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he was ordained in Divine Science and taught from the same pulpit for nearly three decades. His core claim was that the subconscious mind faithfully executes whatever ideas are deliberately impressed on it. That thesis shaped much of the late-twentieth-century law-of-attraction literature. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Julian of Norwich

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English anchoress English anchoress and mystical theologian (c. 1343 – after 1416). Author of Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest surviving book in English known to be written by a woman. She lived enclosed in a cell at the Church of St Julian in Norwich. In May 1373, during a serious illness, she received sixteen visions she called shewings. She spent the following two decades writing the Long Text, a theological reflection on what she had seen. 6 linked entries, 7 see also

Junayd of Baghdad

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Baghdad Sufi master Abū al-Qāsim al-Junayd ibn Muḥammad al-Khazzāz al-Baghdādī (c. 830–910) was a Persian-Arab teacher in Baghdad whose articulation of the sober register of Sufism became the doctrinal mainstream of the classical tradition. He codified the fanāʾ–baqāʾ pair: the teaching that dissolving the self must be followed by a return to ordinary, law-grounded life. Through this formulation, the Iraqi ascetic schools of the ninth century reached the systematising Sufism of al-Ghazālī and the later Sufi orders. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Jyotish

concept
Vedic science of light Jyotiṣa, anglicised as Jyotish ('science of light'), is one of the six Vedāṅgas, the auxiliary disciplines of the Vedas. It organises into three classical branches: Siddhānta (mathematical astronomy), Saṃhitā (mundane and environmental astrology), and Horā (horoscopic birth-chart analysis). What the West calls Vedic astrology is the Horā branch — one third of the full system, rooted in a tradition with origins reaching back to approximately 1200 BCE. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

K. Pattabhi Jois

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founder of Ashtanga Indian yoga teacher (1915–2009) and founder of Aṣṭāṅga Vinyāsa. This system links postures through precise breath counts and is taught as daily self-practice in Mysore, India. Jois trained under Tirumalai Krishnamacharya at the Mysore palace from 1927, alongside B.K.S. Iyengar. His Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute, founded in 1948, trained the Western students who brought vinyāsa practice into global studio culture. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Kabbalah

tradition
Jewish mystical tradition The mystical tradition within Judaism, originating in twelfth-century Provence and Spain. It first peaked in the Zohar (late thirteenth century, attributed to Moses de León). Kabbalah teaches a structured map of divine emanation: the ten sefirot arrayed on the Tree of Life, with a practical discipline for the soul's return through them. The sixteenth-century Lurianic school in Safed reframed the system around tzimtzum (divine self-contraction) and tikkun olam (the repair of the world), a framework central to contemporary Jewish mysticism. 0 linked entries, 21 see also

Kabir

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15th-century Sant poet-saint Fifteenth-century weaver-poet of Varanasi (c. 1440–1518) and one of the most consequential figures in the medieval Sant current of Indian devotional poetry. This strand of bhakti operates outside temple, monastery, and caste, addressing the divine directly through vernacular song. Born into a low-caste Muslim weaver family in a Hindu sacred city, Kabir rejected both the paṇḍit and the mullā. He produced dohās (couplets) and padas (songs) that excoriate ritual formalism in either tradition while pointing to a direct interior recognition. His verses sit inside the Sikh Ādi Granth, the Kabīr Panth he founded survives in northern India, and his poetry reached modern English chiefly through Rabindranath Tagore's 1915 translation. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Kadampa

tradition
Tibetan Buddhist school The Tibetan Buddhist school established by Atisha Dīpaṃkara's principal disciple Dromtönpa in the eleventh century, transmitting Atiśa's Bodhipathapradīpa and the lojong mind-training literature. The school dissolved as an independent institution by the early fifteenth century, its curriculum absorbed by the four schools that followed, most directly by the Geluk founded by Tsongkhapa, informally called the New Kadampa (bka' gdams gsar pa). The lasting Kadampa contributions are the lam rim genre, the lojong slogans, and the institutional shape Tibetan monastic education has carried since. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Kagyu

tradition
Tibetan Buddhist school One of the four major schools of Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism. Founded in the eleventh century, it traces its lineage from Tilopa through Naropa, Marpa, and Milarepa. Its name (bka' brgyud, oral lineage) signals that the tradition's central teaching, Mahāmudrā, must be transmitted directly from teacher to student rather than learned from books. The Karma Kagyu sub-school, headed by the Karmapa, is the branch most active in the West, and the line under which Chögyam Trungpa, Pema Chödrön, and the Shambhala movement sit. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Kaivalya

concept
liberation in yoga Sanskrit kaivalya means aloneness or standing-alone. It is the liberation named in Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras: the recognition that pure consciousness (puruṣa) was never identical with the mind, body, and appearances (prakṛti) it had been mistaken for. Distinct from Vedāntic mokṣa, which is non-dual, kaivalya rests on a dualist metaphysics: consciousness and matter are two separate realities. In practice the operative move is the same in both: a false identification drops away. 10 linked entries, 8 see also

Kalpa

concept
cosmic aeon Sanskrit kalpa, Pāli kappa — the cosmic aeon: the unit of time the Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies use to scale the path. A standard mahā-kalpa covers one full cycle of cosmic formation, persistence, dissolution, and emptiness, running roughly 4.32 billion years per kalpa in the Hindu reckoning. The unit's function in the contemplative literature is to hold the path's timeline open at a scale that makes the long forms of practice structurally coherent: the bodhisattva vow, the Jain ascetic curriculum, the Theravāda four-stage progression. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Karma

concept
action and its consequences From the Sanskrit karman, meaning action. The principle that intentional actions have consequences that shape future experience, within a single lifetime or across many. The doctrine appears in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh traditions, each with its own inflection. In common Western use it gets reduced to cosmic reciprocity, what goes around comes around. The original teaching is more precise: what generates karmic residue is the intention behind an action, not the action itself. 4 linked entries, 12 see also

Karma yoga

practice
yoga of selfless action The yoga of selfless action, one of the four classical paths of Hindu yoga, alongside bhakti (devotion), jñāna (knowledge) and rāja (meditation). Its technical formulation comes from the Bhagavad Gītā: niṣkāma karma, action without attachment to its fruit. In the contemporary West, Ram Dass is the figure most identified with the path, his late career framed as service-as-sādhana. 5 linked entries, 10 see also

Karuṇā

concept
Buddhist compassion Sanskrit and Pāli for compassion: the wish that beings be free from suffering. Paired in Buddhist teaching with mettā (loving-kindness), it is the second of the four brahmavihāras. In the Mahāyāna it is inseparable from prajñā (wisdom): compassion without insight tends to sentimentality, and insight without compassion to a detachment the tradition treats as incomplete. 3 linked entries, 9 see also

Kashmir Shaivism

tradition
non-dual Śaiva path A medieval non-dual school of Śaiva tantra, formalised in the Kashmir Valley from the 9th to 11th centuries by Vasugupta, Somānanda, Utpaladeva, Abhinavagupta and Kṣemarāja. Its central teaching is Pratyabhijñā (recognition): the world is the spontaneous self-display (spanda) of a single self-aware consciousness (Paramaśiva), and liberation is the recognition of oneself as that consciousness. Unlike Advaita Vedānta, it holds the world to be real and integrates tantric body, breath and energy practices into the path from the start. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Kataphatic theology

concept
affirmative way The affirmative way, via positiva, in Christian and cross-traditional mystical thought, in which the divine is approached by image, by name, by attribute. It stands in contrast to the apophatic via negativa, which proceeds by unsaying. Where the apophatic mystic strips every attribute from God, the kataphatic mystic adds, through icon, liturgy, devotional song, scriptural narrative, and the bhakti relationship with a chosen form. Mature traditions cultivate both, since too much negation flattens into dryness and too much affirmation thickens into idolatry. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Ken Wilber

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integral theorist Ken Wilber (born 1949) is an American philosopher who developed Integral Theory, a synthesis of science, developmental psychology, philosophy, and the world's contemplative traditions. Its central model is AQAL — All Quadrants, All Levels — a four-quadrant map of existence correlated with developmental levels drawn from modern psychology. His work draws on Advaita Vedānta, Tibetan Buddhism, and cross-traditional wisdom while incorporating the scientific study of consciousness and human development. 3 linked entries, 9 see also

Kenshō

concept
first Zen awakening Japanese 見性, meaning seeing one's nature. This is the Zen tradition's term for the initial breakthrough recognition of Buddha-nature. In technical use, it is distinguished from satori: the same lineage reserves satori for the more enduring realisation that grows from years of further practice. In the Rinzai school, kenshō is what the koan curriculum aims to provoke. In the Sōtō school, the term is used sparingly; the recognition is treated as already present in correct zazen, not as a flash to be aimed at. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Kinhin

practice
Zen walking meditation Kinhin (経行) is the formal walking meditation that Zen practitioners do between periods of seated zazen. The characters parse as 経 (sūtra or thread) and 行 (to walk), naming an older Chinese monastic practice of pacing while reciting scripture. Today the form keeps the physical structure and drops the recitation. Practitioners walk single-file around the zendō, hands in shashu (left fist at the sternum, right hand covering it), eyes cast down. Sōtō practice is very slow, advancing roughly half a foot per breath. Rinzai practice moves briskly, sometimes close to a jog. Both lineages treat kinhin as continuous with the sitting period. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Kīrtan

practice
call-and-response chanting Kīrtana is a Sanskrit word meaning narrating, singing, and praising. The shortened form kīrtan names the call-and-response devotional singing central to the bhakti yoga traditions of Hinduism and to several adjacent streams: Sikh kīrtan, Tibetan chant, Sufi samāʿ. A leader sings a phrase, often a divine name or short mantra, and a group repeats it back. Simple instrumentation accompanies: harmonium, tabla, hand cymbals. Tempo builds progressively. The practice is participatory, not performative. 3 linked entries, 10 see also

Kitchen Witchcraft

practice
cooking as magic Kitchen witchcraft is the practice of working magic through the home, the hearth, and the act of cooking. A kitchen witch treats the domestic space as sacred ground. The practice draws on the pre-modern tradition of cunning folk and wise women, who worked with plants, food, and domestic ritual rather than in formal ceremonial circles. The term as a named category is modern, emerging within neopagan communities from the late twentieth century onward. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Kleśas

concept
five afflictions in yoga Sanskrit kleśa, meaning affliction, is the technical term in Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras for the five conditions at the root of suffering: avidyā (misperception), asmitā (I-am-ness), rāga (attachment), dveṣa (aversion), and abhiniveśa (clinging to life). The text treats them as the operating substrate of the conditioned mind and as the primary target of the eight-limbed path. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Kōan

practice
Rinzai Zen contemplative case From the Japanese 公案 (kōan; Chinese gōng'àn, public case), a kōan is a brief recorded exchange between a teacher and student, or a fragment of a sūtra, treated as a question whose discursive answer is known to be wrong. It is the central literary genre and contemplative practice of Rinzai Zen, distinguishing it from the Sōtō approach. The student is given a case and asked to live with it in zazen and outside of it until the discursive faculty exhausts itself and a different mode of response emerges. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Krishna

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eighth avatar of Vishnu Krishna (Kṛṣṇa) is one of the most widely worshipped deities in Hinduism, venerated as the eighth avatāra of Vishnu and, in the Vaishnava traditions centered on him, as the Supreme God in his own right. He is the divine teacher of the Bhagavad Gita, composed within the Mahabharata epic and dated by scholars to roughly 200 BCE to 200 CE. The bhakti traditions of Caitanya Mahaprabhu in 16th-century Bengal transformed Krishna's worship into the most globally recognized form of Hindu devotional religion. 4 linked entries, 7 see also

Krishna Consciousness

concept
Krishna bhakti Krishna consciousness is the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava teaching that every act of life can be offered to Krishna. Orienting awareness toward God continuously is not preparation for liberation but is liberation itself, arriving through love. The term in English belongs chiefly to A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, who spread the teaching through the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) from 1966 onward. 3 linked entries, 7 see also

Krishna Das

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American kirtan singer Krishna Das (born Jeffrey Kagel, Long Island, 1947) is the best-known English-language singer of Hindu devotional chant. He lived at Neem Karoli Baba's Kainchi-Dham temple in the Kumaon hills from 1970 to 1973, learning the bhakti kīrtan repertoire alongside Ram Dass. After Maharaji's death in 1973 he returned to the United States, spent two decades in personal collapse, and re-emerged in 1994 as the founding voice of the contemporary American kīrtan circuit. His albums and the 2012 documentary One Track Heart brought the Hare Kṛṣṇa and Sītā-Rām chants of the Caitanya lineage into yoga studios across the country. 3 linked entries, 7 see also

Krista Tippett

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Host of On Being Krista Tippett (b. 1960) is an American journalist, author, and broadcaster. She created and hosts On Being, a long-form public radio conversation about spirituality, ethics, and the human condition. The show began in 2003 as Speaking of Faith and was renamed in 2010. It has produced over a thousand interviews and stands as one of the principal English-language archives of contemplative thought in the early twenty-first century. Tippett received the National Humanities Medal in 2013. 11 linked entries, 7 see also

Kriyā Yoga

practice
yoga of breath and mantra A yoga practice built around breath, mantra, and subtle-body technique. The Sanskrit word kriyā means action in the sense of disciplined inner method. This is a householder tradition: practical inner work for people living ordinary lives, not a renunciate path. The lineage most familiar to English readers descends through Lahiri Mahasaya and Sri Yukteswar Giri to Paramahansa Yogananda, whose 1946 Autobiography of a Yogi introduced the term to a wide Western audience. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Kūkai

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Japanese Shingon founder Japanese monk (774–835), posthumously Kōbō Daishi (meaning the Great Master who Spread the Dharma), who sailed to Tang China in 804, received the full esoteric Buddhist transmission from the master Huiguo, and returned to found the Shingon school of Japanese Vajrayāna Buddhism on Mount Kōya. He was also the most consequential calligrapher of his generation, a poet of the highest classical rank, and by long-standing cultural attribution the inventor of the kana phonetic syllabary that made the vernacular Japanese literary tradition possible. 0 linked entries, 20 see also

Kumbhaka

practice
breath retention in yoga Kumbhaka (Sanskrit, from kumbha: water pot) is the retention phase of prāṇāyāma: the held pause between breaths. Haṭha yoga treats it as the operative phase of breath-work. The inhalation and exhalation are preparatory; the held pause is where prāṇa concentrates and the contemplative work takes effect. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Kundalini

concept
coiled serpent energy From the Sanskrit kuṇḍalin, meaning coiled. In Hindu tantric and haṭha yoga traditions, this is the latent spiritual energy pictured as a serpent coiled three and a half times at the base of the spine. When awakened by yogic practice, devotional intensity, or spontaneously, it rises through the chakras. Gopi Krishna's Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man (1967) is the best first-person account in English. 0 linked entries, 12 see also

Lahiri Mahasaya

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householder yogi Shyama Charan Lahiri (1828–1895), known as Lahiri Mahasaya, was a Bengali householder yogi credited with the modern revival of kriyā yoga. He received the practice from the legendary Babaji in the Himalayan foothills in 1861 and taught it for the rest of his life while working as an East India Railway accountant in Varanasi. His lineage passed through Sri Yukteswar Giri to Paramahansa Yogananda, whose Autobiography of a Yogi brought his name to a global audience. 5 linked entries, 6 see also

Lakota tradition

tradition
Sioux sacred way The spiritual way of the Lakota people, the seven western groups of the Sioux, sometimes called Lakota religion or Lakota spirituality. At its centre is wakȟáŋ, a sacred power or energy that fills the universe; its unity is Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka, the Great Mystery, regarded as the source of all things. Because people share in this power, the tradition treats all living beings as kin. Its seven sacred rites, said to have been given by White Buffalo Calf Woman, include the sacred pipe, the sweat lodge, the vision quest and the sun dance. 0 linked entries, 10 see also

Lamrim

concept
stages of the path Tibetan lam rim (stages of the path) is the doctrinal genre in which Tibetan Buddhism organises the entire Buddhist curriculum into a graded sequence. It runs from foundational practices — contemplation of the preciousness of human life and the reality of death — through the personal-liberation curriculum of the middle-scope practitioner, to the bodhicitta aspiration and emptiness view of the great scope. The genre descends from Atisha's eleventh-century Bodhipathapradīpa through the Kadampa transmission. Its longest treatise is Tsongkhapa's 1402 Lamrim Chenmo. The curriculum Geluk codified became the shared scaffold all four Tibetan schools draw on. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra

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Mahāyāna scripture The Sūtra on the Buddha's Descent to Laṅkā is a fourth-century Mahāyāna scripture in Sanskrit. It is framed as a dialogue between the Buddha and the bodhisattva Mahāmati on the island of Laṅkā, and is the principal scripture of the Yogācāra doctrine of consciousness-only (cittamātra). Tradition holds that Bodhidharma carried it to China as the founding text of the Chan transmission. Its central teaching, that the apparent objectivity of perceived objects is the activity of the same consciousness that perceives them, runs through the entire East Asian Zen tradition that descends from him. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Lao Tzu

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author of the Tao Te Ching Semi-legendary Chinese sage of the 6th–4th century BCE traditionally credited with the Tao Te Ching and regarded as the founder of Taoism. The historical record is thin enough that some modern scholars treat Lao Tzu, the Old Master, as a composite name covering multiple authors and a longer compositional period; the text itself has nonetheless shaped Chinese thought for two and a half millennia and circulates today in more English translations than any work other than the Bible. 6 linked entries, 9 see also

Law of Attraction

concept
New Thought concept The central proposition of the New Thought movement: thoughts and feelings held with sufficient intensity tend to attract corresponding outer circumstances. Wallace Wattles stated it clearly in The Science of Getting Rich (1910). Napoleon Hill, Joseph Murphy and Neville Goddard each expanded the doctrine. Esther Hicks brought it back into prominence in the late twentieth century, and Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (2006) carried it to a global mainstream audience. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Lectio Divina

practice
sacred reading Lectio Divina is a four-step Benedictine practice of sacred reading. The four steps are lectio (slow reading), meditatio (quiet rumination on a phrase), oratio (spoken prayer in response), and contemplatio (silent resting beyond words). Guigo II, a Carthusian monk, codified this sequence in the twelfth century in his Scala Claustralium. The practice itself had been part of Western monastic life since at least the Rule of St Benedict in the sixth century. In the late twentieth century, the Cistercian Thomas Keating adapted it for lay use, making it a major entry point into contemplative prayer for non-monastics. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Ledi Sayadaw

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Burmese Theravāda monk Burmese Theravāda monk and reformer (1846–1923) who reopened serious vipassanā practice to laypeople after centuries in which the satipaṭṭhāna curriculum had been confined almost entirely to monks. He wrote more than seventy dīpanī: plain-language manuals in modern Burmese. He authorised a line of lay teachers running through Saya Thetgyi to U Ba Khin and S. N. Goenka, and in parallel through Mingun Jetavan Sayādaw to Mahāsi Sayadaw. That lineage is the upstream source of nearly every English-language insight-meditation curriculum today, including the secular MBSR programme. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Life Purpose

concept
a person's guiding aim The sense that one's life has a direction or calling worth living toward. In contemporary spirituality and positive psychology, life purpose names a guiding aim that organises a person's choices and gives their days meaning. The idea draws on much older sources: Aristotle's telos, the Hindu notion of dharma as one's proper role, and the Japanese ikigai, a reason to get up in the morning. Whether purpose is discovered, chosen, or constructed is contested. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Light on Yoga

text
Iyengar's yoga manual Light on Yoga: Yoga Dīpikā is the 1966 manual by B.K.S. Iyengar that became the postural canon of modern haṭha yoga. It documents roughly two hundred āsanas in six hundred photographs, with technical commentary on alignment, breath, and the eight-limb framework of Patañjali. For half a century it was the single most-cited reference in the English-language yoga literature. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Līlā

concept
divine play in Hindu thought Sanskrit līlā, meaning play, is the Vaiṣṇava and bhakti tradition's name for the cosmic activity by which the personal absolute manifests the world. Where Advaita Vedānta's māyā doctrine treats apparent multiplicity as illusion to be dissolved, the līlā reading treats it as the playful self-disclosure of a personal divine that has its own reasons for appearing as many. 6 linked entries, 7 see also

Linji Yixuan

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Founder of Línjì Chán Tang-dynasty Chinese Chán master (d. 866). His recorded sayings, the Línjì lù, founded the Línjì school, which reached Japan as Rinzai, the dominant kōan-using lineage of Zen. He taught by sharp interruption: the sudden shout (katsu!), an unexpected blow with a staff, or the disorienting reply that cut a student's conceptual grasping the moment it arose. His central teaching was the true person of no rank, the awareness that looks out through the senses without belonging to any social or doctrinal class. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Logismoi

concept
intrusive-thought schema Greek λογισμοί (singular logismos): the technical term the Desert Fathers of fourth-century Egypt gave to intrusive trains of thought that arise unbidden in solitude, before they consolidate into action. Evagrius Ponticus catalogued eight: gluttony, lust, avarice, sorrow, anger, akēdia (the noonday despair), vainglory, and pride. John Cassian carried the schema west, and Gregory the Great's sixth-century redaction reduced it to the seven deadly sins. The contemplative discipline of watching these arisings without assenting to them is nepsis (watchfulness), the practice the hesychast tradition has preserved to the present. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Logos

concept
divine reason and the Word Logos (Greek: λόγος, lógos) means word, reason, or discourse. In philosophy it names the rational principle thought to underlie the cosmos; in theology it is the creative Word through which the divine orders and sustains existence. Heraclitus introduced it in the sixth century BCE; the Stoics made it the soul of the universe; Plotinus gave it a place in his Neoplatonist hierarchy of emanations. The Gospel of John opens In the beginning was the Logos, making the concept the cornerstone of Christian doctrine about the nature of Christ. 2 linked entries, 9 see also

Lojong

practice
Tibetan mind-training practice Tibetan for mind training: an eleventh-century Mahāyāna curriculum pairing tonglen (sending and taking) breath practice with a sequence of pithy slogans. The slogans are designed to undo the habits by which a self-protective consciousness arms itself against experience. The curriculum traces to the Indian master Atiśa Dīpaṃkara and was crystallised in Chekawa Yeshe Dorje's Seven Points of Mind Training. In the contemporary English-language Buddhist world it is most associated with Pema Chödrön. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Lotus position

practice
cross-legged yoga seat From the Sanskrit padma (lotus) + āsana (seat): a cross-legged posture in which each foot rests on the opposite thigh, soles facing upward. It is the canonical seated form for meditation in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions. The posture is named for the lotus flower, which rises from mud yet opens unblemished. Iconographically it is the seat of Śiva in deep meditation, the Buddha in dhyāna, and the Jain Tīrthaṅkaras in omniscient stillness. 4 linked entries, 6 see also

Lotus Sūtra

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Mahāyāna scripture The Saddharmapuṇḍarīka-sūtra ('Sūtra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Dharma') is one of the foundational scriptures of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Composed in Sanskrit in stages between roughly the 1st century BCE and the 2nd century CE, it teaches that the earlier paths — those of the śrāvaka, pratyekabuddha, and bodhisattva — are provisional upāya (skilful means), all pointing toward a single vehicle (ekayāna) and full Buddhahood. It is the central scripture of the Chinese Tiantai and Japanese Tendai schools, the operative text of the Nichiren lineages, and a foundational reference across East Asian Mahāyāna for fifteen centuries. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Lower Realms

concept
three realms of dukkha The lower realms are the three unfavorable domains of rebirth in Buddhist cosmology: the hell realm (naraka), the hungry-ghost realm (preta), and the animal realm (tiryak). They form the lower half of the six realms of samsara, distinguished from the upper three by the dominance of suffering and the near-absence of conditions favourable to practice. Rebirth in a lower realm is said to result from karma rooted in hatred, craving, or delusion, and to persist until that karma is exhausted. 2 linked entries, 7 see also

Madhva (Madhvācārya)

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Dvaita Vedānta South Indian Vaiṣṇava theologian (c. 1238–1317), founder of Dvaita Vedānta, the dualist school of Vedānta that holds the jīva, the world, and brahman are eternally distinct. Against Ādi Śaṅkara's Advaita and Rāmānuja's Viśiṣṭādvaita, Madhva insisted that the individual soul and God (Viṣṇu) can never merge. He systematised a strict bhakti theology centred on Viṣṇu and anchored the Haridāsa devotional movement. He is the third of the three formative Vedāntic philosophers, after Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja, in the tradition's thousand-year disputation over the Upaniṣads. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Madhyamaka

tradition
Middle Way school The Middle Way school of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy, founded in second-century India by Nāgārjuna and developed by his commentator Āryadeva. Its central argument is that no phenomenon has independent self-existence (svabhāva). This includes the elements of mind, the objects of mind, the practitioner, and even nirvāṇa itself. The result is the emptiness (śūnyatā) doctrine, foundational to every later Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna lineage. Madhyamaka is not a nihilism. Its claim is the absence of svabhāva, not the absence of phenomena. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Magick

concept
intentional ritual practice Magick, spelled with a k to set it apart from stage conjuring, is the practice of causing deliberate change through focused will, ritual, and symbol. The spelling was introduced by Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), who placed it at the center of Thelema, his early-twentieth-century esoteric system. Its philosophical roots stretch through Hermeticism, Kabbalah, astrology, and the ceremonial traditions of the Western occult revival. 0 linked entries, 13 see also

Mahābhārata

text
ancient Sanskrit epic The longer of the two great Sanskrit epics of ancient India (the other being the Rāmāyaṇa), traditionally attributed to the sage Vyāsa and compiled by many hands from c. 400 BCE to 400 CE. The narrative frame is a dynastic war between two branches of the Bharata family, but the work is also the principal vehicle of Hindu cosmology, ethics, and yogic teaching. The Bhagavad Gītā is drawn from a single eighteen-chapter dialogue inside its sixth book. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Mahāmudrā

practice
Tibetan Great Seal teaching Great Seal — a Tibetan Buddhist contemplative tradition of the Kagyu school in which a teacher points directly to the nature of awareness and the student stabilises that recognition through formless practice. The same Sanskrit name also applies to a distinct Hindu tantric technique: the Shambhavi Mahāmudrā kriyā taught by Sadhguru is a Śaiva yogic practice with its own lineage, unrelated to the Tibetan transmission despite sharing the name. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

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founder of TM Indian guru (1918–2008) who developed Transcendental Meditation, the proprietary silent-mantra technique he taught from 1955, and took it to the West in a series of world tours from 1958. The Beatles' ten-week stay at his Rishikesh āśrama in 1968 made him the most-photographed yogi of the late 1960s and seeded a generation's interest in Indian meditation. His guru lineage runs through Swami Brahmānanda Saraswatī, the Śaṅkarāchārya of Jyotirmaṭh, into the Daśanāmi monastic order Ādi Śaṅkara systematised in the eighth century. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Mahāsamādhi

concept
conscious exit from body Sanskrit mahā-samādhi, meaning great absorption: the term Indian yogic tradition uses for the conscious exit from the body by an advanced practitioner. It frames death as a final, voluntary settling into the samādhi state from which there is no return. The practitioner is said to depart at a chosen moment, sometimes with weeks or months of forewarning to disciples, in a state of full awareness. This distinguishes it from ordinary dying, which the tradition frames as an involuntary dimming of consciousness. The claim is contested; independent verification of the reported features has not been conducted in any specific case. But the term is load-bearing in the yoga and kriyā literatures, and it stands for a distinct view of what dying can be. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Mahasi Sayadaw

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vipassanā teacher Burmese Buddhist monk (1904–1982), ordained name Bhaddanta Sobhana, who codified the noting method of vipassanā meditation. The method derives from his reading of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta and trains bare attention through continuous mental labelling of experience. His students carried the practice out of Burma; it became the template for the IMS teaching lineage and, at further remove, for Jon Kabat-Zinn's clinical mindfulness. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Mahāsiddha

concept
great tantric adept Sanskrit mahā-siddha means 'great accomplished one'. The term names the wandering tantric practitioners who flourished in north-eastern India between roughly the eighth and twelfth centuries, working outside the monastic universities and transmitting realisation through direct instruction and vernacular song. The Tibetan tradition counts eighty-four named mahāsiddhas; the line through Tilopa, Naropa, Marpa, and Milarepa is the principal channel through which the archetype entered Tibetan Buddhism. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Mahatma

concept
Sanskrit title, great soul Mahātmā is a Sanskrit compound meaning "great soul" (mahā, great; ātmā, soul). As an honorific it designates a person whose inner life is judged to have expanded far beyond the ordinary — whose awareness, compassion, or moral reach expresses the deeper ātman rather than the contracted personal self. The term appears in Hindu and Jain texts for sages of the highest order, was adopted by the Theosophical Society for its alleged brotherhood of Himalayan adepts, and became globally familiar when Rabindranath Tagore applied it to Mohandas Gandhi on his return to India in 1915. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

Mahāvākyas

concept
Vedānta's four utterances The four great utterances of the Upaniṣads — prajñānaṁ brahma (consciousness is brahman, Aitareya), aham brahmāsmi (I am brahman, Bṛhadāraṇyaka), tat tvam asi (that thou art, Chāndogya) and ayam ātmā brahma (this self is brahman, Māṇḍūkya). They are not propositions to be assented to but compressions of the Vedāntic recognition, used in the company of a teacher as objects of contemplation rather than as creedal statements. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

Mahavatar Babaji

figure
deathless yogi The legendary deathless yogi at the head of the modern kriyā yoga lineage. Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi names him as the Himalayan teacher who transmitted the practice to Lahiri Mahasaya at Ranikhet in 1861 and through him to every subsequent carrier of the lineage. No historical biography survives and no contemporary evidence of his physical existence has been produced. The lineage treats him as belonging to a different order of being than the householder masters who taught in his name. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Mahāyāna

tradition
Buddhist great vehicle The great vehicle is the second main branch of Buddhism. It is distinguished from the older Theravāda by three things: the bodhisattva as the central ideal (the being who postpones liberation to free all beings), the philosophy of emptiness (śūnyatā), and its reach across China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and the Tibetan plateau. Most Buddhist teachers familiar to Western readers, including Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chödrön, and the Dalai Lama, work from inside this stream. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Maitreya

figure
future Buddha Maitreya (Sanskrit from mitra, meaning friend or kindness; Pāli Metteyya) is the future bodhisattva in the Mahāyāna tradition, currently residing in the Tuṣita heaven, who will descend to become the next Buddha of this world after the present age of Gautama Buddha's teaching ends. The figure also has a second role in Yogācāra textual history: Asaṅga is said to have received the Five Treatises from him during a twelve-year retreat at Kukkuṭapāda. Modern scholarship treats that transmission as historical, visionary, or literary; the tradition itself treats the question as undecidable. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Manana

practice
second stage of jñāna-yoga Sanskrit, from √man (to think). The second of three stages in the Advaita Vedānta path of jñāna-yoga. It follows śravaṇa, hearing the teaching from a qualified teacher, and precedes nididhyāsana, sustained contemplation. The work of the stage is reasoning: turning a received mahāvākya over against every internal objection until the proposition no longer meets contradiction, so the contemplation that follows has something settled to rest on. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Maṇḍala

concept
centred ritual diagram From the Sanskrit maṇḍala, circle: a centred geometric image consisting of a circle within a square within an outer enclosure, populated with iconographic content the tradition reads as a map of a deity's enlightened environment. The Tibetan dkyil 'khor means centre-and-circumference. Hindu Tantric, Buddhist Vajrayāna and Jungian-psychological registers all treat the form as operative. Carl Jung, encountering it independently in the dream-imagery of his European patients in the 1910s, took it as evidence of the Self archetype of psychic wholeness. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad

text
Auṃ and four states The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad is the shortest of the principal Upaniṣads: twelve verses, traditionally dated between the fifth and second centuries BCE. It belongs to the Atharvaveda and takes the syllable Auṃ as its working object. The text reads the syllable's three sounds (A, U, M) and the silence that follows as a map of four states of consciousness: waking, dream, deep sleep, and the unconditioned turīya that knows all three. Its second verse contains the mahāvākya ayam ātmā brahma (this self is brahman). The text is the foundational scripture of Advaita Vedānta. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Manifestation

practice
New Thought practice The deliberate practice of bringing into outer circumstance what was first held as an inner state. The vocabulary comes from New Thought, where demonstration and manifestation mean roughly the same thing: the visible appearance of what was claimed inwardly. In its serious form, the practice is closer to disciplined attention than magical thinking. What changes, when it works, is the practitioner's available actions, not the laws of physics. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Mañjuśrī

figure
bodhisattva of wisdom The bodhisattva of wisdom in the Mahāyāna pantheon — Sanskrit mañju-śrī, the gentle glory. Depicted wielding the flaming sword of discriminating insight in his right hand and the Prajñāpāramitā sūtra on a lotus in his left. The structural counterpart to Avalokiteśvara: where Avalokiteśvara embodies karuṇā (compassion), Mañjuśrī embodies prajñā (wisdom). The sword cuts through conceptual obscurations; the Madhyamaka analysis of emptiness is the doctrine he figures. In Vajrayāna practice he becomes a yidam; in the Geluk curriculum Tsongkhapa is held to be his direct emanation. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Mansūr al-Ḥallāj

figure
Persian Sufi martyr Abū al-Mughīth al-Ḥusayn ibn Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj (c. 858–922) was a Sufi mystic from Fārs province in Persia, executed in Baghdad for a public theology built around the ecstatic utterance anā al-Ḥaqq, I am the Real. He is the most famous martyr of the early Sufi tradition and the longest-running flashpoint in its argument about whether the recognition the practice produces can ever be spoken aloud. The orthodox-mystical synthesis of Junayd of Baghdad organised itself partly against his example. Rumi's Masnavī and Hafiz's Dīvān organised themselves partly in his defence. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Mantak Chia

figure
founder of Healing Tao Thai-Chinese teacher (b. 1944, Bangkok) who founded the Universal Healing Tao, a modern system of qigong and Taoist inner-alchemy practices. He draws on the energy work of Taoism, organising it into a graded curriculum he calls the Nine Formulas and teaching it to a worldwide lay audience. He is also a prolific author. His framing of these practices for Western readers is influential, and contested: scholars note it packages traditional material in a self-help idiom, and its claims about qi have no scientific support. 0 linked entries, 10 see also

Mantra

practice
sacred sound or phrase A mantra is a sound, syllable, word, or phrase held in the mind as an object of attention or chanted aloud as a vehicle of devotion. The Sanskrit word combines manas (mind) with tra (instrument): a tool for the mind. Hindu and Buddhist traditions each carry extensive mantra repertoires. Comparable practices appear under different names in other traditions: dhikr in Sufism, the Jesus Prayer in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and the repetition of a divine name across most theistic settings. 5 linked entries, 9 see also

Mantra meditation

practice
silent focus method Mantra meditation is the practice of using a chosen sound, syllable, or phrase as the primary object of attention in seated practice. The meditator returns to the mantra each time attention drifts, training concentration in much the same way breath-based traditions train it on the breath. The practice is rooted in Hindu japa and Vedic sound practice and appears in distinct forms across Buddhist, Sufi, and Christian traditions. In the West it is most widely known through Transcendental Meditation, introduced by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the late 1950s. 3 linked entries, 7 see also

Mappō

concept
doctrine of the latter dharma Japanese rendering of the Chinese mòfǎ, meaning the latter dharma. The Mahāyāna doctrine that the Buddha’s teaching passes through three successive ages of declining support for practice. In the third and present age, mappō, the canonical texts remain but the conditions for ordinary practice to reach its results no longer obtain. The doctrine is the frame inside which the medieval Japanese reformers Hōnen, Shinran, Nichiren and Dōgen argued that the practices each made central were the practices the degenerate age actually permitted. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Marianne Williamson

figure
spiritual teacher American spiritual teacher (born 1952, Houston, Texas) and the principal living interpreter of A Course in Miracles. Her 1992 book A Return to Love, featured by Oprah Winfrey shortly after publication, reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list and remained the Course's most widely read popular introduction through the 1990s and 2000s. She founded two AIDS-era community organisations, Project Angel Food (1989) and the Manhattan Center for Living (1991), and ran two presidential campaigns (2020 and 2024) that pressed the Course's metaphysics into questions of public policy. 3 linked entries, 6 see also

Marpa

figure
Tibetan translator, 1012–1097 Marpa Chöki Lodrö (1012–1097) was a Tibetan translator and lay teacher from Lhodrak. He crossed the Himalayas three or four times to study Mahāmudrā and the Six Yogas under Naropa in north India, then brought the teachings back to Tibet and transmitted them to Milarepa. In the lineage's own account, he is the principal human founder of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism, and the figure through whom the Indian mahāsiddha tradition entered Tibet. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Mary

figure
mother of Jesus Mary of Nazareth (c. 1st century BCE) was a Jewish woman from Galilee and the mother of Jesus of Nazareth in the Christian Gospels. The title Theotokos, God-bearer or Mother of God, was formally defined at the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE. In Islam she is Maryam, the most honoured woman named in the Quran, and her son Isa is acknowledged as a prophet. The primary text attributed to her voice is the Magnificat in Luke 1:46–55. 3 linked entries, 7 see also

Masnavi

text
Rumi's Persian mystical poem The Masnavī (Masnavī-yi maʿnavī) is a Persian poem of roughly 25,000 couplets by Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (1207–1273), dictated over the last thirteen years of his life. Six books of rhyming couplets built from parables, Quranic exegesis, and folk tales. The Sufi tradition regards it as the most influential single work in the Persian mystical canon, earning it the honorific the Quran in Persian. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Mauna

practice
vow of silence Sanskrit for silence: the deliberate, time-bound practice of refraining from speech as part of a wider sādhana. The vow form, mauna-vrata, is taken for a stated period: an afternoon, a day, a week, or the eleventh and twelfth lunar phases of a brahmacarya training cycle. The longest sustained mauna in modern memory is the years Ramana Maharshi sat in silence on Arunachala before resuming verbal teaching. The same discipline appears across traditions as ariya tuṇhī-bhāva in Pāli, hesychia in the Greek of the Desert Fathers, and al-ṣamt in the Sufi vocabulary. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

Maurice Frydman

figure
I Am That translator Polish-Jewish engineer (1901–1976) who recorded, translated and edited the Marathi dialogues of Nisargadatta Maharaj into the two-volume English compilation I Am That (Chetana Press, 1973). Trained as an electrical engineer in Warsaw and Paris, he emigrated to India in the mid-1930s and never returned. He worked alongside Gandhi at Sevagram, took informal sannyāsa in the Ramanasramam orbit, and in his final years proposed the recording project that produced the book. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Māyā

concept
cosmic illusion in Vedānta Sanskrit māyā, derived from the verbal root mā-, to measure, to lay out — the Vedāntic term for the apparent multiplicity of the world. Often translated illusion, but the Sanskrit carries no implication that what is named does not exist; māyā is what makes the one Brahman appear as many, the way a single rope is mistaken for a snake in dim light. Distinct from the Western category of delusion and from the popular new-age use of the term. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

MBSR

practice
eight-week mindfulness programme Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction is an eight-week clinical programme designed in 1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. It brought vipassanā practice into a secular healthcare setting, stripping the Buddhist vocabulary while preserving the practice itself: body scan, sitting meditation, gentle yoga, and walking, with weekly group classes and one all-day silent retreat. It remains the most influential transmission of contemplative practice into Anglophone healthcare and the starting point of the broader mindfulness movement. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Meditation

practice
training of attention The deliberate training of attention. Across traditions it takes many forms: śamatha (calming), vipassanā (insight), zazen (just sitting), dhikr (remembrance), centering prayer. The underlying move is the same. Place attention on a chosen object, notice when it has wandered, return. The neuroscience of the last thirty years has confirmed what practitioners reported for two millennia: sustained practice measurably restructures the brain. 2 linked entries, 14 see also

Meister Eckhart

figure
apophatic mystic Dominican friar, preacher, and theologian (c. 1260–1328). His German vernacular sermons remain the most precise account in the Christian tradition of the apophatic path, the via negativa by which the soul approaches what cannot be named. His distinction between God and Godhead, his teaching of the Birth of the Word in the Soul, and the disposition of Gelassenheit (releasement) place him at the centre of the contemplative and mystical current of Christianity. Twenty-eight propositions from his sermons were condemned by Pope John XXII the year after his death. 0 linked entries, 10 see also

Meridians

concept
qi pathways of Taoism The network of channels through which qi (vital energy) is said to flow in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). The Chinese term is jīngluò, meaning channels and collaterals. The classical system maps twelve primary meridians, each paired as yin or yang and linked to an organ network, plus eight extraordinary vessels. Acupuncture, moxibustion, and qigong work with these channels directly. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Messiah

concept
anointed deliverer Messiah (Hebrew māšīaḥ, 'anointed one') is the promised deliverer in Abrahamic religion: a figure expected to restore justice, gather the scattered, and usher in a lasting peace. In Judaism the Messiah is a fully human king descended from David, still awaited. In Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth fulfils this role. In Islam, Jesus (Isa) is acknowledged as the Messiah who will return at the end of times. 1 linked entries, 10 see also

Metatron's Cube

concept
sacred geometry form Metatron's Cube is a sacred geometry figure built from thirteen circles drawn in the Flower of Life pattern. Connecting all their centres produces a web of lines that contains the outlines of all five Platonic solids. The figure is named after Metatron, a celestial scribe and archangel in Jewish Kabbalistic mysticism. Its contemporary role as a teaching symbol and Mer-Ka-Ba meditation template was largely established by Drunvalo Melchizedek from the early 1990s. 3 linked entries, 6 see also

Mettā

practice
Buddhist loving-kindness Pāli for loving-kindness or benevolence (Sanskrit maitrī), a foundational Buddhist practice in which the meditator deliberately cultivates a felt wish for the well-being of self, of loved ones, of strangers, of difficult people, and finally of all beings. One of the four brahmavihārās (the divine abodes), alongside compassion (karuṇā), sympathetic joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekkhā). 0 linked entries, 11 see also

Mevlevi

practice
Sufi whirling-dervish order The Sufi order founded in thirteenth-century Konya by the successors of Rumi, best known in the West for the samāʿ: the ceremonial whirling in which a practitioner rotates around a fixed inner axis. The samāʿ is one ritual form of dhikr, the practice of remembrance of God. The order's curriculum extends further: music, silence, fasting, and a disciplined seclusion that the visible ceremony only partly reveals. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Michael Singer

figure
contemplative teacher American spiritual teacher and author (born 1947), founder of the Temple of the Universe meditation centre in Alachua, Florida (1975). His two New York Times bestsellers, The Untethered Soul (2007) and The Surrender Experiment (2015), frame the spiritual path as the progressive release of the contracted self. He calls the practice just relax. Both books have become standard reading in contemporary contemplative life. The 1971 inner awakening that led him to abandon an economics doctorate is described candidly in The Surrender Experiment. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Milarepa

figure
Tibetan yogi-poet Tibetan yogi and saint (c. 1052–1135), the most beloved figure of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. He turned from murder to years of ordeal under his teacher Marpa, then spent decades in Himalayan caves practising and composing the vernacular songs of realisation that became the literary heart of the Kagyu lineage. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Mindfulness

practice
present-moment attention The English-language name for the contemplative discipline of paying deliberate, non-judgmental attention to present-moment experience. The word translates the Pāli sati, a technical term in early Buddhist psychology. Jon Kabat-Zinn's MBSR programme, launched in 1979, adapted the practice into a secular clinical form that has since spread to hospitals, schools, and corporations across the English-speaking world. 0 linked entries, 11 see also

Moha

concept
delusion in Buddhist analysis Pāli and Sanskrit moha means delusion or bewilderment. It is the third of the three poisons in Buddhist analysis, alongside lobha (greed) and dosa (hatred), and the cognitive root the other two depend on. Related to but distinct from avidyā, moha is the felt cloudedness in present cognition that lets attachment and aversion proceed without recognising their objects as constructed. The classical antidote is paññā (wisdom) cultivated through vipassanā. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Mokṣa

concept
liberation in Hindu thought Sanskrit mokṣa means release or liberation. It names the highest of the four classical aims of human life (puruṣārthas: dharma, artha, kāma, mokṣa) in Hindu thought. The Upaniṣadic and Vedāntic literatures treat it as the way out of saṃsāra, the cycle of conditioned existence. In the Advaita Vedānta reading systematised by Ādi Śaṅkara, mokṣa is not an attainment in time but the recognition that the bondage assumed was always apparent rather than real. 7 linked entries, 10 see also

Monastery

concept
contemplative community A monastery is a community of monks or nuns who withdraw from ordinary life to live under a shared rule of prayer, work, and practice. The oldest surviving forms trace to Buddhist sangha communities in India in the 5th century BCE and to Christian desert communities in 3rd-century Egypt. Monasteries have been the primary institutional vehicle for transmitting contemplative knowledge across almost every major tradition. 5 linked entries, 9 see also

Mongolian shamanism

tradition
Böö Mörgöl The indigenous animistic and shamanic tradition of the Mongolian steppe, known in Mongolian as Böö Mörgöl. At its centre is Tengri, the eternal blue sky treated as the supreme deity and source of all things. Shamans — male böö and female udgan — serve as intermediaries between the human community and the spirit world, conducting healing, divination, and ancestor propitiation. The tradition was heavily repressed during Mongolia's Soviet era (1924–1990) but has undergone significant revival since. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Mooji

figure
Papaji-lineage Advaita teacher Jamaican-born teacher (b. 1954, Anthony Paul Moo-Young), now based at Monte Sahaja in Portugal. He stands in the lineage of Ramana Maharshi, received through his own teacher Sri H. W. L. Poonja (Papaji). His satsang style is warm and uncompromising at once. Strangers are met with the single question Ramana gave: who is this who claims to suffer? 1 linked entries, 8 see also

Morphic Resonance

concept
Sheldrake's theory The hypothesis, proposed by British biologist Rupert Sheldrake in 1981, that living organisms accumulate collective memory through morphic fields: invisible organizing fields shared across a species. Through morphic resonance, later members of that species can draw on what earlier members experienced, in a process Sheldrake argues operates alongside genetics but cannot be explained by it. The mainstream scientific community has not accepted the hypothesis; it is widely discussed in consciousness studies and alternative science. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Mosque

concept
Islamic House of Prayer A mosque (Arabic masjid, 'place of prostration') is the house of worship in Islam, the building where Muslims gather for the five daily prayers and the Friday congregation. Its defining feature is the miḥrāb, a niche in the wall marking the qibla, the direction of the Kaʿba in Mecca that worshippers face. Islamic practice is largely aniconic, so the interior is shaped by calligraphy, geometry and open floor rather than figurative images. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Mount Athos

tradition
Greek monastic peninsula Mount Athos — Hagion Oros, the Holy Mountain — is the autonomous monastic peninsula in northern Greece that has been the centre of Eastern Orthodox contemplative life since the ninth century. It is the institutional home of the hesychast tradition: the living source of the uncreated light doctrine, the Jesus Prayer as continuous interior practice, and the essence-energies distinction that Gregory Palamas articulated and the fourteenth-century Constantinople councils ratified. The peninsula houses twenty principal monasteries, several sketes, and hundreds of hermitages, and has been restricted to male inhabitants under the avaton rule since 1060. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Mozi

figure
founder of Mohism Mozi (c. 470–391 BCE) was a Chinese philosopher of the Warring States period and the founder of Mohism, one of the Hundred Schools of Thought that competed for influence before the Qin unification of China. He taught jiān ài, universal love: equal moral concern for every person, not graded by family relation. His school also developed some of the earliest formal logic in Chinese intellectual history. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Muditā

concept
sympathetic joy Pāli and Sanskrit for sympathetic joy: the trained capacity to feel genuine gladness at others' good fortune, free from envy or comparison. One of the four Buddhist brahmavihārās (the divine abodes), alongside loving-kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), and equanimity (upekkha). In the Theravāda tradition, muditā is the specific antidote to envy and the practice that most directly extends the circle of identification beyond the small group it defaults to. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Mudrā

practice
ritual gesture and body seal Sanskrit mudrā means seal or gesture. The term names a family of bodily configurations used in Indian and Tibetan contemplative traditions as energetic, symbolic, and pedagogic instruments. The range is wide: the añjali mudrā (palms together) of devotional iconography; the hand seals of Vajrayāna deity practice paired with mantra and visualisation; the advanced khecarī mudrā and mahāmudrā of the haṭha-yogic curriculum; the cosmic mudrā of Sōtō Zen sitting. The English word gesture catches the surface. The technical contemplative content is closer to seal: that which fixes a current of attention or energy in a recognisable configuration. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Mūlamadhyamakakārikā

text
Nāgārjuna’s text A Sanskrit philosophical treatise composed by Nāgārjuna in second-century south India. It is the founding document of the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) school of Mahāyāna Buddhist thought. The text runs to twenty-seven chapters and roughly four hundred and fifty compressed verses (kārikās). Each applies the same dialectical move to a philosophical category, including causation, motion, the self, time, and even nirvāṇa, and shows by reductio that none possesses svabhāva (intrinsic self-existence). The result is the emptiness (śūnyatā) doctrine on which every subsequent Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna lineage builds. 2 linked entries, 7 see also

Mystical Communion

concept
divine union Mystical communion (unio mystica) is the direct, felt union with God or ultimate reality that the contemplative traditions describe as the summit of the inner life. It appears across Christianity, Sufism, Hinduism, and Buddhism under different names — theosis, fanāʾ, samādhi, kenshō — but with a consistent structure: the knower's usual sense of separation from the divine falls away. What remains is described not as a belief about God but as an immediate knowing in which subject and ultimate reality are no longer experienced as two. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Mysticism

concept
Direct knowing of reality The strand of contemplative practice, common to many religious traditions and to several non-religious ones, that aims at direct, unmediated experience of ultimate reality, however that reality is named. Where doctrine asks what to believe, mysticism asks what is actually here when belief and disbelief are both set aside. The vocabularies differ. Unio mystica in Christian Latin, fanāʾ in Sufi Arabic, advaita in Sanskrit, kenshō in Japanese. The territory described is recognisably one. 5 linked entries, 21 see also

Nāgārjuna

figure
founder of Madhyamaka Indian Buddhist philosopher of the second or third century CE, founder of the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) school of Mahāyāna thought and author of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. His central argument was that no phenomenon possesses a self-existing essence. The tradition calls this śūnyatā, or emptiness. This insight became the conceptual ground of the bodhisattva path and most subsequent Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna practice. The Tibetan tradition regards him as a second Buddha. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Nakshatras

concept
Hindu lunar mansions Nakshatras are the twenty-seven lunar mansions of Hindu astronomy and Vedic astrology. Each covers 13°20’ of the ecliptic and marks one station of the Moon in its monthly journey through the sky. The system appears first in the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa, the astronomical arm of the Vedas, where it served to fix the timing of ritual observances. In Jyotiṣa birth-chart analysis, the nakshatra the Moon occupied at birth is treated as a primary indicator of character and life path. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Naqshbandi

tradition
Sufi order of silent dhikr The Naqshbandi is a Sufi order (ṭarīqa) descending from Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband Bukhārī (d. 1389) of Central Asia. It differs from most other orders in two features: its practice is the dhikr-i khafī, silent remembrance of God held inwardly in the heart rather than recited aloud, and its silsila traces to the Prophet through Abū Bakr rather than through ʿAlī. From its Timurid Central Asian base the order spread across Mughal India and Ottoman Anatolia. Its two main sub-branches, the Mujaddidīyya and the Khālidīyya, remain active across the contemporary Muslim world and have historically been among the most politically embedded of the classical Sufi orders. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Nāropa

figure
Indian mahāsiddha Nāropa (c. 1016–1100 CE) was an Indian Buddhist mahāsiddha who rose to abbot at the monastic university of Nālandā before leaving to seek the wandering teacher Tilopa. After twelve trials at Tilopa's hands, he received the Mahāmudrā transmission and the curriculum of the Six Yogas of Nāropa. He transmitted these to the Tibetan translator Marpa, and through Marpa they became the founding curriculum of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, founded by Chögyam Trungpa in 1974, carries his name. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Near-Death Experience

concept
death threshold A near-death experience is a set of vivid perceptions reported by people who have been clinically dead and then revived. The typical features include out-of-body awareness, a life review, contact with deceased relatives, an encounter with a being of light, and a sense of unconditional love. The phenomenon entered systematic study with Raymond Moody's Life After Life (1975). Several thousand cases have since been documented by researchers including Bruce Greyson (University of Virginia), Pim van Lommel, and Sam Parnia. Anita Moorjani's account is among the most prominent first-person reports in the index. 0 linked entries, 11 see also

Neem Karoli Baba

figure
Hindu guru, d. 1973 Indian Hindu guru (c. 1900–1973), born Lakshman Narayan Sharma, best known in the West as Maharaji. He was the teacher of Ram Dass, Krishna Das, Jai Uttal, Larry Brilliant, and Steve Jobs. He left no formal teaching, no books, and no institutional lineage. What he passed on was a lived demonstration of unconditional love. His Western students returned home with a simple instruction: love everyone, feed everyone, remember God. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Nembutsu

practice
Pure Land name recitation The recitation of the name of the Buddha Amitābha, the operative practice of Pure Land Buddhism. The formula takes three forms: Sanskrit namo Amitābhāya Buddhāya, Chinese namo amitofo, Japanese namu amida butsu. It is repeated aloud or under the breath as the school's principal contemplative discipline. The immediate goal is rebirth in the Buddha's pure land of Sukhāvatī; full awakening is the longer horizon. The doctrinal basis is the eighteenth of Amitābha's forty-eight vows as the bodhisattva Dharmākara: that anyone who calls his name with sincere mind will be reborn in that land. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Neoplatonism

tradition
Late-antique Platonism The late-antique current of Greek philosophy running from Plotinus (c. 204–270 CE) through Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Damascius, called Platonism by the philosophers themselves — the prefix Neo- is an eighteenth-century scholarly coinage. Its central claim is that all multiplicity emanates from, and returns to, an absolute and ineffable One that is not a being among beings but the condition of possibility for being itself. Neoplatonism is the channel through which the non-dual recognition entered the Christian, Islamic, and Jewish mystical traditions of the medieval Mediterranean, and through them much of what is now called Western mysticism. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Nephilim

concept
figures from Genesis 6 The fallen (or, transitively, the fellers): the Hebrew term in Genesis 6:1–4 for the offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of men, said to have been on the earth in those days, and also after. The Septuagint renders the word as γίγαντες (giants); the Vulgate and King James inherit the gloss. In the Anunnaki reception of Zecharia Sitchin, Paul Wallis and Mauro Biglino, the Nephilim are the hybrid product of Anunnaki interbreeding with the Homo sapiens worker line and the same figures the Sumerian texts describe under different names. 7 linked entries, 6 see also

Nepsis

concept
Christian watchfulness Greek for watchfulness or sobriety. The Desert Fathers used the term for the discipline of attending to the logismoi, the intrusive trains of thought that arise in solitude before they consolidate into assent and action. Evagrius Ponticus gave the analysis its first systematic shape in the fourth century. The Philokalia carried it into the Byzantine hesychast tradition, and the twentieth-century recovery of the desert curriculum returned it to Western contemplative literature under translations such as vigilance, attentiveness, and interior watchfulness. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Neti Neti

practice
not this, not this Sanskrit for not this, not this. The apophatic method of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, used in Advaita Vedānta to point toward what the practitioner is by refusing every available description of what they appear to be. The instruction is not to deny that body, breath, thought and personality exist, but to notice that none of them is the awareness in which they appear. What remains when every predicate has been refused is, by construction, what the procedure was for. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Neville Goddard

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New Thought mystic American author and lecturer (1905–1972), born in Barbados, who became one of the central voices of mid-twentieth-century New Thought. His work brings together Hermetic mentalism, a Christian-mystical reading of scripture, and a precise imaginal practice he called the law. His major books (Feeling Is the Secret, 1944; The Power of Awareness, 1952; The Law and the Promise, 1961; Awakened Imagination, 1954) and his Los Angeles lectures from the 1950s and 60s remain the cleanest single body of teaching on the imaginal-state-as-cause thesis that the broader law of attraction literature later popularised. 4 linked entries, 7 see also

New Seeds of Contemplation

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Merton book A 1962 rewriting and major expansion of Thomas Merton's 1949 Seeds of Contemplation. It is a Trappist monk's compact working theology of contemplative prayer and of the false-self/true-self distinction, which this book made standard vocabulary for twentieth-century English-speaking Catholic and post-Catholic readers. Merton wrote it at Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey in central Kentucky. It is the late work of a contemplative who had spent two decades in monastic enclosure and was nearing the inter-religious openness of his final years. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

New Thought

tradition
mind over matter movement New Thought is an American spiritual movement that grew from Phineas Quimby's mind-cure practice in the 1830s. It crystallised in the late nineteenth century through writers including Ralph Waldo Trine, Charles Fillmore (Unity), Ernest Holmes (Science of Mind), Wallace Wattles, William Walker Atkinson, Florence Scovel Shinn, and Napoleon Hill. The movement treats consciousness as causally primary, reads scripture symbolically rather than literally, and gave rise to both the modern Law of Attraction literature and most twentieth-century self-help. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Ngöndro

practice
Tibetan preliminary practice Ngöndro (sngon 'gro, that which goes before) is the required foundational curriculum of Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism. The outer sequence is four analytic reflections on the human situation. The inner sequence is 100,000 repetitions each of four practices: refuge prostrations, Vajrasattva mantra recitation, maṇḍala offering, and guru yoga. Practitioners complete it before receiving the higher Mahāmudrā or Dzogchen instructions. The details vary between Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and Gelug, but all four schools share the same structure: earn access to the higher teachings by working through their prerequisites. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Nichiren

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founder of Nichiren Buddhism Japanese Mahāyāna monk (1222–1282) who trained in the Tendai tradition on Mount Hiei, then narrowed its Lotus Sūtra-centric curriculum to a single practice: the recitation of Namu myōhō renge kyō, the daimoku or sūtra-title. He founded the school that bears his name. His public career brought polemical attacks on every other Buddhist school of medieval Japan, two exiles, and one near-execution, all framed as warnings for the degenerate age (mappō) the Lotus itself had predicted. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Nididhyāsana

practice
sustained contemplation Nididhyāsana is the third stage of Advaita Vedanta's jñāna-yoga path. It is sustained contemplation: holding the recognition that ātman and brahman are one under steady attention until that recognition settles into lived experience. It follows śravaṇa (hearing the teaching) and manana (reasoning through it until objections are resolved). Contemporary direct path teachers like Rupert Spira and Francis Lucille carry the same practice in twenty-first-century English. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Nirmāṇakāya

concept
the buddha's third body Sanskrit nirmāṇa (emanation, construction) + kāya (body). The third and most concrete of the three buddha-bodies in the Mahāyāna trikāya doctrine. The nirmāṇakāya is the buddha in history: the form ordinary beings can perceive. The historical Śākyamuni walking the roads of Magadha is the paradigm case. The Tibetan institution of recognised tulku rebirths extends the category into the ongoing teaching activity of the Vajrayāna lineages. It is the doctrinal hinge under which the historical Buddha and the cosmic buddhahood the dharmakāya names are the same awakening appearing in three modes. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Nirodha

concept
Sanskrit term for cessation Sanskrit and Pāli nirodha — cessation, settling — from the root rudh (to obstruct, to enclose) with the prefix ni (down, into). In Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras, nirodha names the settling of vṛtti, the modifications of citta: yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ (I.2), yoga is the cessation of the mind's modifications. In the Buddhist Four Noble Truths, dukkha-nirodha is the third truth: the cessation of suffering that the Eightfold Path leads toward. Both traditions share the same basic claim: something the practitioner is presently doing can be brought to a stop, and what remains is what the path was for. 9 linked entries, 8 see also

Nirvāṇa

concept
the extinction of craving Sanskrit nirvāṇa, Pāli nibbāna, literally blowing out, as of a flame. The cessation of dukkha: achieved when the three fires of greed, hatred, and delusion are extinguished. Not the annihilation of the person. The dissolution of the craving and misperception that constituted the apparent person as a separate, contracted thing in the first place. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Nirvikalpa Samādhi

concept
pure absorption Sanskrit nirvikalpa (without conceptual construction) combined with samādhi (absorption). In nirvikalpa samādhi, the subject-object structure of ordinary cognition has dissolved and only undifferentiated awareness remains. Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras catalogue it as the higher of two graded samādhis, distinct from savikalpa samādhi in which the subject-object structure is still in place. Advaita Vedānta treats it as a deep but transient absorption, and holds that it must be stabilised as sahaja to count as liberation rather than a passing state. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Nisargadatta Maharaj

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I Am That sage Indian sage (1897–1981), second only to Ramana Maharshi among the modern exponents of advaita. He kept a small tobacco shop in a Bombay tenement and rolled bidis for a living. For nearly forty years he received seekers in a low-ceilinged loft above the shop. His dialogues were recorded and translated from the Marathi by Maurice Frydman, then published in 1973 as I Am That. The book is the most widely circulated non-dual text in English after Ramana's writings, and one of the foundational documents of the modern Western non-dual lineage. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Niṣkāma karma

practice
desireless action Sanskrit niṣkāma karma, desireless action. It is the Bhagavad Gītā's technical formulation of the practice at the heart of karma yoga: act rightly, fully and skilfully, but do not insist on a particular outcome. Krishna's instruction to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukṣetra is the central source, you have a right to action alone, never to its fruits, and the practice is the lifelong work of unhooking action from the egoic claim on its result. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Niyama

practice
inner observances in yoga Sanskrit niyama means observance. In Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras, it names the second of the eight limbs: five inner commitments the practitioner holds toward herself. They pair with the five outward yamas. The five are śauca (purity), santoṣa (contentment), tapas (austerity), svādhyāya (self-study and study of sacred text), and Īśvara-praṇidhāna (surrender to the Lord). The yamas govern conduct toward others; the niyamas govern conduct toward oneself. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Non-duality

concept
reality as not two The teaching that there is, ultimately, only one undivided reality. The felt separation between self and world is an appearance, not a fact. The English word translates the Sanskrit advaita and the Tamil siddhar lineage usage. In modern Western teaching it covers a stream that runs from Ramana Maharshi through Nisargadatta Maharaj into living teachers like Rupert Spira, Adyashanti, Mooji and Francis Lucille. 11 linked entries, 9 see also

Nonviolent Communication

practice
empathy path Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a practice developed by Marshall Rosenberg in the 1960s to help people express what they observe, feel, and need, and to make clear requests without blame. The model has four steps: observation, feeling, need, and request. It draws on humanistic psychology and the principle of ahimsa (non-harm), and is applied globally in conflict mediation, parenting, education, and organizational work. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Noting

practice
Mahasi vipassanā label technique The technique codified by Mahasi Sayadaw in twentieth-century Burma and exported into the modern Western vipassanā lineage. The practitioner applies a soft mental label (rising, falling, thinking, hearing) to each event in awareness as it arises. The label is held close enough to the moment that the impression of a continuous, stable self begins to dissolve into the discrete arising and passing of sense-events. The technique is the working unit of the Insight Meditation Society curriculum and of the secularised MBSR and clinical-mindfulness programmes that descend from it. The labelling is not analytical commentary. It is a device for keeping attention close enough to the moment that the satipaṭṭhāna recognitions the Theravāda tradition treats as the operative content of vipassanā become available not as doctrines to be accepted but as recognitions that arise in the practitioner's own awareness. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Nyingma

tradition
Tibet's oldest school The Nyingma (rnying ma, 'the ancient ones') is the oldest of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. It descends from the first transmission of Vajrayāna Buddhism to Tibet, brought by Padmasambhava and his contemporaries in the eighth century. Its path is centred on the Dzogchen curriculum, placed at the summit of its nine-vehicle classification, and on the gter ma (treasure-revelation) tradition that distinguishes it from the later Kagyu, Sakya and Gelug schools. The lineage was largely non-monastic and yogic in character until the seventeenth century, when its great institutional seats at Mindrolling and Dorje Drak were established. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Ordo Templi Orientis

tradition
Thelemic order A Western esoteric fraternal order founded around 1900 by Carl Kellner and Theodor Reuss, initially modelled on Freemasonry. After Aleister Crowley assumed leadership around 1912, the order was restructured around Thelema, centred on the law Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. O.T.O. continues today as a legally recognised initiatory organisation, conducting initiations and the Gnostic Mass Crowley wrote in 1913, with lodges in many countries. 1 linked entries, 7 see also

Origen

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early Christian theologian Third-century Christian theologian (c. 185–253) of Alexandria and Caesarea. He was the first systematic biblical exegete in the church's history and the principal channel through which Platonic philosophy entered Christian doctrine. The allegorical method he gave the church, reading scripture for its spiritual sense beneath the literal, set the operating frame for the Desert Fathers, the Cappadocians, and the entire medieval Latin and Greek contemplative inheritance, even after his speculative cosmology was posthumously condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Orphism

tradition
Greek mystery religion Orphism is the name given to a set of ancient Greek religious beliefs and practices tied to poems credited to the mythical poet Orpheus. Its central myth tells how the infant god Dionysus was killed by the Titans, from whose ashes humanity arose, so that each person carries a divine spark held inside a mortal body. The aim was to free the soul from a long cycle of rebirth through initiation, ritual purity, and an Orphikos bios, an Orphic way of life that often meant vegetarianism. It flourished from around the 6th to 5th century BCE and is known mainly from fragments, inscribed gold burial tablets, and the Derveni papyrus. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Ouroboros

concept
serpent eating its own tail An ancient symbol of a serpent or dragon biting its own tail, forming a closed circle. The name comes from the Greek oura (tail) and boros (eating). The image first appears in Egyptian funerary texts of the 14th century BCE and was adopted in Gnostic, Hermetic, and alchemical traditions to represent the self-sustaining cycle of creation, dissolution, and renewal. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

P. D. Ouspensky

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Fourth Way theorist Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky (1878–1947) was the Russian mathematician, journalist and esoteric writer who became G. I. Gurdjieff's principal interpreter and the systematiser of what came to be called the Fourth Way. His posthumous In Search of the Miraculous (1949) reconstructs Gurdjieff's Russian-period lectures of 1915–1917 in stenographic form. It is the single most-read document of the teaching and the channel through which most subsequent readers have approached it. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Padmasambhava

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Indian tantric master Padmasambhava (the lotus-born) was an eighth-century Indian tantric master credited by the Nyingma tradition with bringing Vajrayāna Buddhism to Tibet. He worked under the patronage of King Trisong Detsen and helped found the first Tibetan monastery at Samye, around 779 CE. Known as Guru Rinpoche (Precious Teacher), he is the figure from whom the Nyingma school traces its principal lineages, including the Dzogchen curriculum it treats as the summit of the Buddhist path. Very little securely datable biography survives; the figure is best understood as a historical kernel inside a rich hagiographic tradition. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Pāli Canon

text
Theravāda scripture The Tipiṭaka (three baskets), the canonical scripture of Theravāda Buddhism. Preserved orally for several centuries before being committed to writing on palm leaves in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE. Three divisions: the Vinaya Piṭaka of monastic discipline, the Sutta Piṭaka of discourses, and the Abhidhamma Piṭaka of systematic analysis. The textual base of the twentieth-century Western vipassanā revival. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Pam Gregory

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evolutionary astrologer British astrologer (b. 1949) whose YouTube channel, opened in 2010, is one of the most-watched sources for psychological-evolutionary astrology in English. She works in the lineage running from Dane Rudhyar's mid-twentieth-century reform through Stephen Arroyo, Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas into the evolutionary school. That school reads the natal chart as the psyche's developmental task rather than a prediction of external events. Her work on the Pluto-in-Capricorn and Pluto-in-Aquarius transits is the index's principal source on the collective astrological framing of the 2008–2044 period. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Pañcakośa

concept
five sheaths of the self The Vedāntic doctrine of five sheaths through which the unconditioned ātman appears to be wrapped: annamaya (food), prāṇamaya (breath), manomaya (mind), vijñānamaya (intellect), and ānandamaya (bliss). The Taittirīya Upaniṣad is the canonical source. Later Advaita Vedānta reads the kośa model as a discrimination instrument: the seeker works through each sheath in turn, recognising what they are not, until what remains is the ātman itself. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Paramahansa Yogananda

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Indian yogi Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) was an Indian teacher who founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles in 1920. He brought kriyā yoga, a meditative-energetic discipline of the Hindu householder lineage, to a wide American audience. His 1946 Autobiography of a Yogi became one of the most widely read English-language spiritual books of the twentieth century. It sustained the Western reception of yoga as inner discipline rather than postural practice. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Pāramitā

practice
Buddhist perfections The Sanskrit term pāramitā (Pāli: pāramī) means perfection, sometimes glossed as that which has gone to the other shore. The Buddhist tradition uses it for the virtues the bodhisattva cultivates on the path to bodhi. The standard Mahāyāna list is six: dāna (generosity), sīla (ethics), kṣānti (patience), vīrya (effort), dhyāna (meditation), and prajñā (wisdom). The Theravāda tradition uses ten pāramī, overlapping but reordered. The Tibetan tradition extends the Mahāyāna six to ten by adding upāya, praṇidhāna, bala, and jñāna. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Patañjali

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compiler of the Yoga Sūtras The figure to whom the Yoga Sūtras are attributed: 196 aphorisms, composed somewhere between the 2nd century BCE and the 4th century CE, that gave the Indian discipline of yoga its classical formulation as an eight-limbed path (aṣṭāṅga). Almost nothing biographical is known about him. His text carried the architecture of rāja yoga, the yoga of meditative discipline, across two millennia, through the Hindu philosophical schools and into the modern Western reception of yoga as a contemplative practice rather than a postural one. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Paul Brunton

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philosopher and author British journalist and author (1898–1981), born Hyman Raphael Hurst, whose 1934 book A Search in Secret India introduced Ramana Maharshi to the English-speaking world. Brunton spent the 1930s travelling the East in search of practising contemplatives and produced a series of bestselling first-person accounts that helped seed the Western interest in Indian wisdom traditions decades before the 1960s wave. His later writing turned to a denser philosophical project he called the philosophy of truth, gathered posthumously in the sixteen-volume Notebooks of Paul Brunton. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Paul Wallis

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paleocontact theologian Former Anglican archdeacon (b. 1962, Australia) who now argues that the early Hebrew Bible, and especially the plural Elohim of Genesis, describes beings continuous with the Sumerian Anunnaki. His 2020 book Escaping from Eden is the canonical statement of the thesis. He arrived at the hypothesis independently, working from the Masoretic Hebrew rather than from Mesopotamian texts, after thirty years in institutional ministry. His YouTube channel and The Fifth Interview Hub are the main distribution points today. 5 linked entries, 6 see also

Pema Chödrön

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Tibetan Buddhist nun American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun (born 1936) in the Karma Kagyü lineage, and one of the most widely read Buddhist teachers in English. A student of the Tibetan master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, she was ordained in 1981. She later became director of Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery for Western students in North America. Her books on working with difficulty and groundlessness, above all When Things Fall Apart, have found readers far beyond the practising Buddhist community. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

Perennial philosophy

concept
mystical unity The view that the world's wisdom traditions, despite different theologies, all point toward one underlying recognition. It is named unio mystica in Christian mysticism, fanāʾ in Sufism, kenshō in Zen, mokṣa in Hinduism. The Latin term philosophia perennis was coined by Augustinus Steuchus in 1540. Aldous Huxley brought it into modern English with his 1945 anthology. Frithjof Schuon gave it its most rigorous theological form; Steven Katz's 1978 constructivist critique remains the sharpest challenge to it. Huston Smith carried it to a broad readership. 6 linked entries, 9 see also

Philokalia

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hesychast prayer anthology The Philokalia is a five-volume anthology of hesychast writings compiled at Mount Athos in 1782 by Nicodemus the Hagiorite and Macarius of Corinth. It draws on Greek patristic and Byzantine authors from the fourth through the fourteenth centuries. The title means love of the beautiful in Greek, naming the editors' guiding principle: to collect the operative literature of the Jesus Prayer and the hesychast interior discipline. The Slavonic translation by Paisius Velichkovsky (1793) and the Russian translation by Theophan the Recluse (1877) carried the work into the Slavic Orthodox world, indirectly producing the nineteenth-century Way of a Pilgrim renewal. The English translation by Kallistos Ware, G. E. H. Palmer, and Philip Sherrard (1979–2023) is the channel through which the corpus has reached the contemporary English-language reader. 9 linked entries, 8 see also

Pilgrimage

practice
journey as spiritual work Travel to a sacred site, a teacher, or a tradition's centre, undertaken as spiritual practice. The displacement itself is treated as the work. This frame sets pilgrimage apart from tourism, which treats the destination as something to consume, and from migration, which is one-way. The pilgrim returns. Pilgrimage is present in every major tradition: the Hindu yātrā to Arunachala or Mount Kailash, the Buddhist circumambulation of Bodh Gaya and Lumbinī, the Muslim ḥajj to Mecca, the Christian peregrinatio to Jerusalem, Rome, or Santiago de Compostela, and the Sufi ziyāra to the tombs of the saints. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Platform Sūtra

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founding Chán text The Liùzǔ Tánjīng, or Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch, is the only Chinese-composed work in the East Asian Buddhist canon to carry the title sūtra, a designation classically reserved for the discourses of the Buddha. It is attributed to Huineng (638–713), the illiterate woodcutter from Lingnan who, in the text's own narrative, won the Fifth Patriarch Hongren's dharma transmission in a verse contest and became the founding patriarch of the Southern School of Chán. It is the text that gives the doctrine of sudden awakening its canonical form: the seeing-into-one's-own-nature carried by the Zen and Sŏn lineages. From it descends every East Asian patriarchal meditation lineage. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Plotinus

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Neoplatonist philosopher Greek philosopher (c. 204–270 CE), born in Lykopolis in Roman Egypt and active in Rome from 244. His student Porphyry collected his fifty-four treatises posthumously as the Enneads. They set out the most fully developed non-dual metaphysics in the Western philosophical tradition before the medieval Christian and Islamic mystical syntheses absorbed it. The One at the centre of his system is the closest Western analogue to Brahman that the perennial-philosophy reading has to work with. 4 linked entries, 7 see also

Plum Village

tradition
Buddhist monastery A Mahāyāna Buddhist monastery founded in 1982 by Thich Nhat Hanh in the Dordogne, France. For four decades it was the largest residential Buddhist practice centre in the West and the main carrier of the Vietnamese Thiền lineage. Its sister centres in California, Germany, Thailand, and Australia continue the same lay-friendly training, rooted in interbeing and engaged Buddhism. 5 linked entries, 9 see also

Pointing-out instruction

practice
ngo sprod Tibetan ngo sprod — to introduce, to bring face-to-face — is the method by which a teacher engineers the student's direct recognition of the nature of mind rather than explaining it. It is central to the Mahāmudrā curriculum of the Kagyu tradition and to the rigpa-introduction of Dzogchen in the Nyingma. The same operation reappears in the direct-path teachings of Jean Klein, Francis Lucille, and Rupert Spira, rearticulated for English-speaking students without the tantric apparatus. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Pope

concept
head of the Catholic Church The Pope (Latin papa, 'father') is the Bishop of Rome and head of the Roman Catholic Church. Catholics regard the office as the continuation of the authority given to the apostle Peter by Jesus in the first century CE. The papacy has been held by 266 individuals and guides approximately 1.4 billion faithful worldwide. 2 linked entries, 6 see also

Prajñā

concept
wisdom, not knowledge Sanskrit prajñā (Pāli paññā) is the Buddhist and Vedāntic term for wisdom in the strong sense. Not accumulated knowledge, but direct insight into things as they are. It is the third of the classical three trainings (sīla, samādhi, prajñā), arrived at through sustained ethics and concentration. The word also appears in the mahāvākya prajñānaṃ brahma (consciousness is brahman), which places it at the heart of Advaita Vedānta. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Prajñāpāramitā

concept
perfection of wisdom Sanskrit for perfection of wisdom. It names two things: a cognitive capacity that Mahāyāna Buddhism treats as the bodhisattva's defining attainment, and a corpus of sūtras including the Heart Sūtra, the Diamond Sūtra, and the longer Aṣṭasāhasrikā and Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā. It differs from prajñā as the perfection of generosity differs from generosity: the literature applies the analysis of emptiness to wisdom itself. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Prakṛti

concept
nature in Sāṃkhya yoga In Sāṃkhya, prakṛti is the entire manifest world — mind, senses, body, and everything that is not puruṣa (pure consciousness). It is composed of three qualities (guṇas): sattva (clarity), rajas (activity), and tamas (inertia). Classical teaching holds that bondage is mistaking puruṣa for the prakṛti flowing through it. Patañjali's yoga is the practice that surfaces and dissolves that confusion. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Pralaya

concept
cosmic dissolution In Hindu cosmology, pralaya is the period of dissolution that follows each kalpa, the cosmic day of Brahmā. The manifest universe is reabsorbed into unmanifest potentiality before the next cycle of creation begins. Hindu texts identify several grades of pralaya, from the nightly cosmic sleep to the total dissolution at the close of Brahmā's entire lifespan, and extend the term inward to name individual liberation from rebirth. 3 linked entries, 7 see also

Prāṇa

concept
Sanskrit vital life-force The Sanskrit term for the vital life-force that animates the body. It is cognate with the Chinese qi/chi, the Japanese ki, the Greek pneuma, and the Polynesian mana. Central to Indian medicine (āyurveda), yoga, and tantric practice. Patañjali's eighth-limbed path includes prāṇāyāma as its fourth limb, between āsana and the inner concentrative limbs. Prāṇāyāma is the disciplined regulation of prāṇa through the breath. 0 linked entries, 15 see also

Prāṇāyāma

practice
yogic breath regulation Sanskrit prāṇa (vital energy) + āyāma (extension or restraint): the disciplined regulation of the breath, fourth limb of Patañjali's aṣṭāṅga yoga. The classical premise is that breath and attention are tightly coupled. Working on the breath directly conditions consciousness, with the vital energy it carries as the operative variable. Modern physiology, including vagal-tone and heart-rate-variability research, has begun to corroborate the broad outlines. The contemplative vocabulary preceded the science by twenty-five centuries. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Pranic Healing

practice
healing with prana A non-touch energy therapy developed by the Filipino teacher Choa Kok Sui and introduced publicly in 1987. The practice claims that prāṇa, the vital energy of the yogic tradition, can be directed by a trained healer to cleanse and supplement the subtle body of another person without physical contact. The system maps eleven major chakras and draws on the energy anatomy of Indian yogic sources. Its claimed effects have not been validated by reproducible scientific measurement. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Prārabdha Karma

concept
karma set in motion Sanskrit prārabdha means begun or already set in motion. In Vedāntic analysis, it names the portion of karma that has already begun fructifying in the present life. It is one of three classes the analysis distinguishes, alongside sañcita (the accumulated karmic store) and āgāmin (newly generated karma). On the Advaita Vedānta reading, the prārabdha of a jīvanmukta continues to play itself out after liberation. The body still ages, the biography still unfolds, the personality may continue with its recognisable habits, but no felt observer takes itself any longer to be its bearer. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Pratyabhijñā

concept
Shaiva recognition Sanskrit pratyabhijñā means recognition. The prefix prati- does the work of re-cognition: recognising as already known something that had appeared to be unknown. The central claim of the Kashmir Shaiva school, formalised by Utpaladeva (c. 925–975) in the Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā, is that the practitioner is already the single self-aware consciousness (Paramaśiva) the tradition takes as the ground of everything. What is missing is not the underlying identity but the re-cognition of it. The recognition is the path; nothing is constructed, nothing acquired. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Pratyāhāra

concept
withdrawal of the senses Pratyāhāra (Sanskrit: withdrawal) is the fifth of the eight limbs in Patañjali's yoga. It is the point where attention is withdrawn from sense-objects and turned inward. It sits between the outer four limbs (yama, niyama, āsana, prāṇāyāma) and the inner three (dhāraṇā, dhyāna, samādhi), the door from preparation into meditation. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Prayer

practice
addressing the sacred The practice of directing attention toward the sacred. Prayer appears in every major religious tradition, taking forms that range from verbal petition and praise to wordless silence. It is addressed to God, gods, an impersonal absolute, or one's own deeper nature, depending on the framework. 3 linked entries, 13 see also

Presence

concept
direct awareness of now The bare fact of being here, now, aware — before any thought about being here arises. Presence is the central term in Eckhart Tolle's work. It names the immediate awareness that remains when the mind's running commentary is no longer taken as the whole of experience. The same recognition appears in non-duality as being aware of being aware, in Zen as just sitting, and in contemplative Christianity as the practice of the presence of God. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Priestess

concept
female religious officiant A priestess is a woman who holds the religious authority to perform the sacred rites of a tradition. In the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, priestesses presided over temples, led public sacrifices, and in some cities held high civic standing. The title faded under the male-only clergy of the major institutional religions, then returned in the 20th century through Wiccan, Pagan, Druidic, and Goddess-centred movements. It names a religious office, not a personal spiritual attainment. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Prophet

concept
spiritual messenger and seer A prophet is a person believed to receive messages from a divine source and convey them to humanity. The concept appears in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, and Sikhism, each tradition defining its own criteria for prophethood. In Islam, Muhammad is understood to be the final prophet; in Christianity, whether prophecy continues after the apostolic age is an ongoing denominational debate. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

Prostration

practice
full-body devotional bow A full-body bow used across contemplative traditions as the physical enactment of taking refuge, receiving teaching, or offering the self before what the practice holds as larger than the self. In Tibetan Vajrayāna it is the load-bearing element of the ngöndro: the hundred-thousand prostrations accumulated one body-length at a time, on a wooden board, as the first of the four foundational practices. In Japanese Zen it frames the student's entry and exit from dokusan with the rōshi. In the bhakti register the Bhāgavata Purāṇa names it vandana, the sixth of the nine forms of devotion. Across traditions the logic is consistent: the body is asked to enact, before the mind raises an objection, what the practice will eventually claim as its operative ground. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Pseudo-Dionysius

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apophatic theologian An anonymous Christian theologian writing in northern Syria around 500 CE who composed four Greek treatises under the name Dionysius the Areopagite: The Divine Names, The Mystical Theology, The Celestial Hierarchy, and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. The corpus gave the Christian East and the Latin West their vocabulary of apophatic theology, the via negativa, and the contemplative ascent through unknowing into divine darkness. The true author's identity remains unknown; the texts were accepted as apostolic-era originals until Renaissance philology exposed the attribution in the fifteenth century. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Psychic abilities

concept
the psi phenomenon The term psychic abilities covers a family of claimed human capacities that fall outside ordinary sensory and physical channels. The two main categories are extrasensory perception (ESP), which includes telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, and psychokinesis (PK), the claimed ability to influence physical systems through intention. The yogic tradition catalogues both under the Sanskrit term siddhi. Parapsychology has studied them experimentally since the late nineteenth century with no result accepted by the mainstream scientific community. 4 linked entries, 7 see also

Pūjā

practice
Hindu ritual worship Sanskrit pūjā, worship or honour — in Hinduism the central rite of devotion, in which a deity, sacred image or teacher is received and honoured as a living guest. The worshipper offers light, water, flowers, incense, food and sound through a fixed sequence of ritual gestures (upacāra), at a home shrine or in a temple. What is offered is hospitality rather than petition: the form is treated as an actual presence to be served, not a symbol to be addressed. Closely tied to bhakti, devotional love, and to darśan, the mutual seeing of the holy. 3 linked entries, 12 see also

Purāṇas

text
ancient Hindu sacred texts A genre of ancient Sanskrit Hindu texts that sit alongside the epics as the encyclopedic layer of the tradition. The eighteen Mahāpurāṇas cover cosmology, mythology, genealogy, and the histories of gods and kings. The most widely-read is the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, whose tenth book tells the life of Krishna and became the foundational scripture of the bhakti tradition. Traditionally attributed to the sage Vyāsa, they were composed roughly between 300 and 1500 CE. 2 linked entries, 7 see also

Pure Land Buddhism

tradition
Mahāyāna tradition The branch of Mahāyāna Buddhism centred on devotion to the Buddha Amitābha and the recitation of his name (nianfo in Chinese, nembutsu in Japanese). Its immediate goal is rebirth in the Pure Land of Sukhāvatī, with full awakening as the longer horizon. The largest Buddhist tradition by practitioner count in East Asia, it is the one least represented in Western convert circles. That asymmetry is part of what this entry names. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Purgatory

concept
purification after death Purgatory is the Catholic doctrine of a temporary intermediate state between death and heaven. Souls who die in God's grace but still carry the effects of sin pass through it, undergoing a final purification before entering heaven. The doctrine is formally defined in Catholic teaching and rejected by Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Its closest structural parallels in other traditions are the Buddhist and Hindu concepts of temporary intermediate realms after death. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Puruṣa

concept
pure consciousness Sanskrit puruṣa means person at its root, but in the yoga tradition it names the consciousness pole of the Sāṃkhya dualist analysis that Patañjali inherited. Puruṣa is pure awareness: contentless, eternal, and plural in the strict classical reading. It is the witness that illumines whatever passes through it without ever becoming those contents. Its pair is prakṛti, the manifest field of mind, body, and world. The disentanglement of the two is kaivalya, the goal the Yoga Sūtras work toward. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Quantum Mysticism

concept
physics and spirit Quantum mysticism uses the vocabulary of quantum physics to support spiritual or mystical worldviews. Observer effects, entanglement, and non-locality are the most commonly borrowed concepts. The mainstream physics community treats such applications as pseudoscience; the practice became prominent through New Age writing from the 1970s, with figures such as Fritjof Capra and Deepak Chopra among its most widely read proponents. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Quran

text
sacred scripture of Islam The central scripture of Islam, believed by Muslims to be the literal word of God revealed in Arabic to the Prophet Muhammad between 610 and 632 CE. It contains 114 chapters (suras) spanning legal ordinances, creation narratives, eschatological visions, and prophetic stories shared with Jewish and Christian scripture. The Quran is the primary source for Islamic theology, law, and ethics, and the text that Sufi traditions read for an inner meaning alongside the outer through a practice of allegorical interpretation called taʾwīl. 0 linked entries, 10 see also

Rāja Yoga

practice
royal yoga of attention Sanskrit rāja means royal or kingly. Rāja yoga is the meditative branch of the four classical Indian yogas, built around the inward limbs of Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras. Its core is the withdrawal of attention from sense-objects (pratyāhāra) and the graded continuum of concentration, meditation, and absorption (dhāraṇā, dhyāna, samādhi) that Patañjali groups under the single name saṃyama. It stands alongside bhakti, karma, and jñāna yoga as the four entrances into a single recognition. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Ram Dass

figure
American bhakti teacher American spiritual teacher (1931–2019), born Richard Alpert. His arc from Harvard psychology professor to LSD researcher to bhakti devotee became one of the defining spiritual journeys of the twentieth century. His 1971 book Be Here Now, part autobiography and part graphic dharma manual, introduced a generation to Neem Karoli Baba and devotional Hinduism. It also pointed toward a rigorous inner life outside institutional religion. He died in Maui, Hawaii, having spent his final decade teaching from a wheelchair after a massive stroke he called fierce grace. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Ramana Maharshi

figure
Tamil advaita sage Indian sage (1879–1950), widely regarded as the most influential modern exponent of advaita, or non-duality. At sixteen he underwent a spontaneous death-experience that resolved into a stable recognition of the Self. He spent the rest of his life on the south slope of Arunachala mountain in Tamil Nadu, answering questions from visitors who came from across the world. His core instruction was a single practice: self-enquiry, the question Who am I? 3 linked entries, 9 see also

Rāmānuja

figure
Viśiṣṭādvaita founder South Indian Vaiṣṇava philosopher and saint (c. 1017–1137 CE), founder of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, the school of qualified non-dualism. Against Ādi Śaṅkara's Advaita, Rāmānuja argued that the ātman and the world are real and depend on brahman as the body depends on its soul. He gave the devotional bhakti current of the southern Āḻvār poets a philosophically rigorous Vedānta foundation, and became the formative figure of Śrī Vaiṣṇavism. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Rāmāyaṇa

text
Sanskrit epic of Rāma The shorter of the two great Sanskrit epics of ancient India, the other being the Mahābhārata. It runs to roughly twenty-four thousand verses across seven books, is traditionally attributed to the sage Vālmīki, and is conventionally dated in its core form to between the seventh and fourth centuries BCE. Its story is Prince Rāma's exile, the abduction of his wife Sītā by the demon king Rāvaṇa, the war to recover her, and Rāma's return as king. It is the central devotional and ethical narrative of the Vaiṣṇava wing of Hinduism, and the main source for the figure of Hanumān, whose chanting tradition entered the English-language bhakti revival through the Maharaji lineage. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Ramesh Balsekar

figure
Advaita teacher Indian banker and Advaita teacher (1917–2009), the principal English-language interpreter of Nisargadatta Maharaj and a close disciple of his final decade. After retiring as President of the Bank of India, Balsekar taught from his Bombay apartment for nearly thirty years, translating Nisargadatta's late dialogues and developing a distinctive insistence on the no-doer recognition: the conclusion that every action and every choice arises without an individual author behind it. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Rebirth

concept
consciousness after death The doctrine, held in different forms across Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and the modern Theosophical and New Thought currents, that consciousness or some functional analogue continues across the death of one body into another, structuring the cycle of saṃsāra and the ethical mechanism of karma. The traditions disagree, sometimes sharply, about what persists: an eternal ātman (the orthodox Hindu and Jain reading), a stream of conditioned aggregates with no persisting self (Buddhism's anattā-compatible reformulation), or an evolving soul climbing toward final liberation (the Theosophical synthesis). It is also the point where contemporary contemplative traditions diverge most visibly from the cosmologies they inherited. 7 linked entries, 10 see also

Reclaiming Tradition

tradition
feminist pagan Reclaiming is a feminist neopagan tradition founded in San Francisco in 1979 by Starhawk and Diane Baker. It weaves Goddess-centred spirituality, earth-based ritual, and progressive political activism into a decentralised practice with no fixed clergy or hierarchy. Its theology of immanence holds that the sacred is present in the natural world and in human bodies, not above or apart from them. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Redemption

concept
rescue from sin and guilt In the Abrahamic traditions, redemption names the act of being freed from sin, guilt, or bondage through divine action. In Christianity it centres on atonement: the doctrine that Christ's death reconciles humanity to God and cancels the debt of original sin. The same structure appears elsewhere under different names: Hindu moksha releases the self from karmic bondage; Sufi fanāʾ dissolves the self in God; Jewish teshuvah is a turning back toward God through repentance. 2 linked entries, 10 see also

Refuge

practice
Buddhist Three Refuges Refuge is the foundational Buddhist practice of entrusting oneself to the Three Jewels: the Buddha (the awakened teacher), the Dharma (his teaching), and the Sangha (the community that preserves and embodies it). The refuge formula — I go for refuge to the Buddha, to the Dharma, to the Sangha — is recited three times. Doing so is what makes a person formally Buddhist across every tradition that uses the term. In Mahāyāna it grounds the bodhisattva and bodhicitta vows. In Vajrayāna it anchors every ngöndro preliminary practice. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Reincarnation

concept
soul rebirth doctrine Reincarnation, in Western popular spirituality, is the belief that the soul survives death and is reborn in a new body. Moral consequences accumulate across lives through karma, shaping the conditions of each return. The English term was popularized by the 19th-century Theosophical movement as a translation of Indian rebirth doctrine into terms a Western reader could follow without engaging the full doctrinal apparatus of Buddhism or Hinduism. The key disambiguation: the popular framing assumes a persisting soul, which the Buddhist doctrine of anattā explicitly denies. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

Renunciation

concept
Leaving household life The deliberate leaving of householder life: possessions, social position, sexual partnership, and the economic apparatus set aside to free the practitioner's attention for contemplative work. The technical vocabulary varies across traditions: Sanskrit sannyāsa, Pāli pabbajjā, Greek anachōrēsis, Arabic zuhd, Latin renuntiatio. The structural pattern is stable: a formal vow, a change of name and dress, a relocation away from the previous social field, and a sustained training in the disciplines the new condition makes available. Not the only path the traditions recognise: householder paths exist alongside the renunciant one, but most traditions treat the renunciant path as high-bandwidth. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Retreat

practice
a time apart for practice A period set apart from ordinary life for intensive meditation, prayer, or contemplative practice. Found across Buddhism, Christianity, Sufism, and yoga traditions, a retreat may last a weekend or several years. The term covers communal formats (a Zen sesshin, a Vipassanā ten-day course, a Christian Ignatian month) and solitary forms such as a forest monk's rainy-season residence or a Tibetan cave practice. 1 linked entries, 7 see also

Richard Rohr

figure
Franciscan mystic American Franciscan friar (b. 1943), founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque (1987), and the most widely read contemporary Christian contemplative writer in English. His books, including The Naked Now, Falling Upward, The Universal Christ, and Breathing Under Water, translate the apophatic Christian inheritance into a comparative-religion register that reads Christian contemplation, Sufi fanāʾ, Hindu jñāna, and Buddhist emptiness as siblings of one recognition. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Rigpa

concept
primordial awareness Tibetan rig pa means knowing or natural cognisance. In Dzogchen, it names the unfabricated awareness that recognises its own nature when a teacher's pointing-out instruction reveals it. The lineage holds it is not a state that practice produces. It is what awareness has been doing all along, now met directly rather than through the filter of thought. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Rinzai

tradition
Japanese Zen school One of the two main Japanese Zen schools, Rinzai-shū (臨済宗) is descended from the Chinese Línjì lineage of Linji Yixuan (d. 866) and was transmitted to Japan by Eisai in 1191. Its training centers on kōan study designed to provoke kenshō, the first decisive insight into one's own nature. The eighteenth-century reformer Hakuin reorganised the kōan curriculum still used in Rinzai monasteries today. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Rumi

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Persian Sufi poet Persian-language poet and Islamic jurist (1207–1273). Born Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī in Balkh, he lived most of his adult life in Konya, in the Anatolian region Persian-speakers called Rūm, from which his epithet derives. His encounter with the wandering dervish Shams of Tabrīz in 1244 transformed a respected Hanafi jurist into the author of the Masnavī-ye Maʿnavī and the Dīvān-e Shams-e Tabrīzī, together the largest body of mystical poetry produced by any single author in any tradition. Through his successors, he became the founding spiritual figure of the Mevlevi ṭarīqa, whose whirling samāʿ is the Sufi ritual most recognisable in Western imagination. 0 linked entries, 10 see also

Runes

concept
Germanic writing and oracle Runes are the letters of the ancient Germanic alphabets, known as futharks, in documented use from at least AD 150. They served as a writing system for inscriptions on stone, metal, and wood across Northern Europe. Within Norse cosmology, the Hávamál describes Odin sacrificing himself on the World Tree to receive the runes, giving them a sacred dimension that outlasted their use as a script. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Rupert Spira

figure
Non-duality teacher English ceramicist and spiritual teacher (born 1960). Many regard him as the clearest contemporary exponent of non-duality in the direct-path tradition. He was a student of Francis Lucille, who received from Jean Klein. Spira brings unusual philosophical precision to the inquiry into the nature of awareness. He draws on Advaita Vedānta, Kashmiri Shaivism, and the Western philosophical tradition. His extended dialogues and books are among the most widely shared in contemporary Western contemplative circles. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

S. N. Goenka

figure
lay vipassanā teacher Burmese-Indian lay teacher (1924–2013) who brought the vedanā-based vipassanā method of U Ba Khin to India in 1969 and spent four decades building the largest free meditation network in the world. His ten-day silent retreat is now offered at over two hundred centres on every inhabited continent and has reached several million students. Goenka framed the practice as a universal technique, open to people of any faith, rather than as a Buddhist religious commitment. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Sacred Geometry

concept
symbolic proportions Sacred geometry is the cross-cultural study of geometric forms treated as encoding the structure of reality. Forms like the circle, the vesica piscis, the Platonic solids, the golden ratio, the flower of life, the Sri Yantra, and cathedral proportions recur in widely separated traditions. The claim is that certain forms appear in nature and in human-made structures because they express how reality is built. In Hermeticism, sacred geometry is the visual face of as above, so below. 0 linked entries, 14 see also

Sacred River

concept
rivers revered as sacred A sacred river is a waterway that a religious tradition recognizes as inherently holy — not merely revered for scenic beauty or ecological value, but understood as a divine presence, a site of purification, or a threshold between the human and divine worlds. Hinduism venerates seven rivers, chief among them the Ganges, as living goddesses with purifying power. Christianity holds the Jordan as the site of Jesus's baptism and a place of divine encounter. Taoism and many indigenous traditions regard specific rivers as expressions of the living cosmos rather than mere waterways. 3 linked entries, 7 see also

Sacred swastika

concept
an auspicious sign From the Sanskrit svastika, meaning conducive to well-being. An equilateral cross with each arm bent at a right angle, used for thousands of years as a sign of good fortune and auspiciousness. It is sacred in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, where it marks thresholds, scriptures and temples. In the West the same shape is now bound up with its 20th-century appropriation by Nazi Germany, a meaning the Asian traditions never gave it. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Sacred Well

concept
spring revered as holy A sacred well is a natural spring or enclosed water source that a religious tradition has set apart as holy. Across Celtic, Christian, Hindu, and Islamic cultures, these sites mark a threshold where the human world touches the divine. They serve as places of healing, petition, and votive offering. The veneration of sacred water predates every living tradition and persists in the holy wells of Ireland and Britain, the Zamzam well of Mecca, and the tīrthas of the Indian subcontinent. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Sādhana

practice
means of accomplishment Sādhana is a Sanskrit term meaning means of accomplishment. In Indian traditions, it names any disciplined spiritual practice directed toward a defined goal. The practitioner is the sādhaka. The result, when the practice matures, is the siddhi: the realised attainment the practice was aimed at. Sādhana spans the daily disciplines of yoga, bhakti, jñāna and karma yoga, Tantric and Buddhist methods, and the householder's sustained accumulation of japa, seva and study. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Sadhguru

figure
Indian yogi and Isha founder Indian yogi, mystic and teacher, born in 1957 as Jagadish Vasudev in Mysore, Karnataka. He founded the Isha Foundation in 1992 near Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. His style is direct, often abrasive, and deliberately resistant to intellectual comfort. That combination has made him one of the most-watched spiritual figures on the English-language internet. His Inner Engineering and Shambhavi Mahamudra programmes have transmitted structured yogic initiation to several million practitioners. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Sahaja

concept
innate natural awakening Sanskrit sahaja means born together, innate, natural. Indian contemplative traditions use the term for a recognition that has become continuous through ordinary activity, not something maintained as a special state in formal practice. Classical Advaita Vedānta calls this sahaja samādhi and sets it apart from the savikalpa and nirvikalpa absorptions of meditation. Ramana Maharshi saw sahaja as the only stable goal: a recognition that cannot persist through eating, walking, and conversation is, in his view, a flash rather than a genuine recognition. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Saichō

figure
founder of Tendai Buddhism Japanese Mahāyāna monk (767–822), posthumously Dengyō Daishi, who brought the Chinese Tiantai textual tradition to Japan in 805 and founded Tendai on Mount Hiei north of Kyoto. The monastery he built there became the training ground from which nearly every major medieval Japanese Buddhist school emerged. Pure Land, Nichiren, and both Sōtō and Rinzai Zen were each founded by a teacher who first trained on Hiei. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Śakti

concept
divine energy, the Goddess Sanskrit śakti, power or energy. In Hindu metaphysics it is the active, dynamic aspect of the absolute, the energy through which the apparent universe is brought into being and sustained, and it is conventionally personified as the Goddess. The Śakti–Śiva polarity, found in some form across nearly every Indian non-dual school, treats the two not as separate principles but as the energetic and stative poles of a single reality. The Śākta reading reverses the usual priority of the masculine pole and locates the operative truth in Śakti. The same term names the energy worked with in kuṇḍalinī practice, in Kashmir Śaiva spanda metaphysics, and in the tantra curriculum more broadly. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Sakya

tradition
Tibetan Buddhist school One of the four major schools of Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism. The name sa skya means pale earth in Tibetan, after the hillside where the founding monastery was built in 1073 by Khön Könchok Gyalpo. The school is centred on the Lamdré (Path and Fruit) curriculum, which integrates Hevajra tantra with Madhyamaka philosophy. It is distinguished from the Kagyu, Nyingma and Geluk by its hereditary leadership through the Khön family and by the scholastic tradition that produced Sakya Paṇḍita's foundational thirteenth-century works on logic and epistemology. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Sam Harris

figure
secular meditation author American philosopher and neuroscientist (b. 1967) who founded the Waking Up meditation app and the Making Sense podcast. His 2014 book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion makes the contemplative recognition of no-self available in a secular, scientifically literate frame. Trained in Theravāda vipassanā under S.N. Goenka and at the Insight Meditation Society, in Dzogchen under Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, and a longstanding student of the Advaita Vedānta direct path. Also one of the New Atheists of the mid-2000s, a fact that complicates his contemplative reception in some quarters and clarifies it in others. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Samādhi

concept
meditative absorption The eighth and final limb of Patañjali's eight-limbed yoga. Absorption: the state in which meditator, act of meditation, and object of meditation collapse into a single undivided awareness. Samādhi is not one state but a graded family: savikalpa (with seed, with discrimination), nirvikalpa (without seed, without discrimination), and sahaja (natural, continuous, present through ordinary activity). Ramana Maharshi regarded sahaja samādhi as the only stable form of the attainment. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Śamatha

practice
calm-abiding meditation Pāli samatha, Sanskrit śamatha, meaning calm-abiding. The Buddhist training of single-pointed attention, classically paired with vipaśyanā (insight) as the two complementary axes of meditative practice. Where vipassanā trains the seeing of what is, śamatha trains the steadiness in which that seeing becomes possible. Concentration and calm are its immediate fruits. In the deepest forms, the jhāna states of absorption arise. Its first milestone is a mind that has become workable. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

Samaya

concept
Vajrayāna sacred vow Samaya is the Sanskrit term for the binding vows the Vajrayāna tradition uses to hold the tantric teacher-student relationship together. The word means coming together, agreement, or pledge. The obligation is bilateral: the teacher holds the transmission and the student keeps the daily practice the empowerment establishes. Either side's failure releases the other. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Sambhogakāya

concept
bliss body in Buddhism From Sanskrit sambhoga (enjoyment) and kāya (body). The second of the three buddha-bodies in the Mahāyāna Trikāya doctrine. The sambhogakāya is the luminous, deity-formed body through which a buddha appears to advanced bodhisattvas in pure visionary fields. It is the mode in which the highest Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna teachings are transmitted to practitioners whose contemplative capacity has been refined enough to receive them. It is the doctrinal basis for figures such as Avalokiteśvara, Tārā, and Mañjuśrī, who occupy a different ontological register than the historical Śākyamuni. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Sāṃkhya

tradition
Hindu dualist philosophy Sāṃkhya is the enumeration school, the oldest of the six classical philosophical schools of India. It analyses reality into twenty-five tattvas (principles). The core division is between puruṣa (consciousness) and prakṛti (everything else, mind included). Bondage is the misidentification of the two. Liberation is seeing them clearly apart. Sāṃkhya provides the metaphysical foundation for Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras, and its analysis has shaped Indian contemplative thought for over two millennia. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Saṃsāra

concept
the cycle of rebirth The Sanskrit and Pāli word saṃsāra means running together or wandering on. It names the cyclic, conditioned existence of beings in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, driven by karma through recurring rounds of birth, death, and rebirth. Both traditions present the spiritual path as a way out of saṃsāra. Mahāyāna Buddhism goes further: saṃsāra and nirvāṇa were never two distinct things. 6 linked entries, 12 see also

Saṃskāra

concept
mental imprint, karmic trace Sanskrit for impression, formation, or latent disposition. A saṃskāra is a conditioning imprint that every action, perception, or emotional state leaves in the mind-stream. These imprints accumulate and shape how future experience arises. The concept is central to the psychology of both Hindu yoga and Buddhism. It is the technical substrate of karma: the karmic consequence of an action is carried through the saṃskāra it deposits. In the Buddhist skandha analysis, saṃskāras (Pāli: saṅkhāra) constitute the fourth aggregate, the volitional formations, and one of the twelve links of dependent origination. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Saṃyama

practice
three inner limbs of yoga Sanskrit saṃyama means binding together or holding-as-one. It is the technical term Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras use for the inner three limbs of yoga treated as a single graded continuum: dhāraṇā (concentration), dhyāna (meditation), and samādhi (absorption). The third book of the Sūtras, the Vibhūti-pāda, describes the powers that arise when saṃyama is applied to chosen objects. The classical commentary warns against treating those powers as the goal. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Saṃyutta Nikāya

text
connected discourses The third of the four major Nikāyas of the Theravāda Pāli Canon. Known as the Connected Discourses of the Buddha, it is organised not by length but by topic into fifty-six saṃyuttas (connected groupings) and roughly 2,900 individual suttas. It contains the canonical formulations of dependent origination, the five aggregates, the four noble truths, and the analysis of the six sense bases. It is the principal scriptural reservoir from which the modern Western vipassānā movement has drawn its doctrinal material. The standard English translation is Bhikkhu Bodhi's two-volume The Connected Discourses of the Buddha (2000). 1 linked entries, 8 see also

San Pedro

practice
Andean mescaline cactus San Pedro (Echinopsis pachanoi), also called huachuma, is a tall columnar cactus native to the Andean highlands of Ecuador and Peru. It contains mescaline, the alkaloid responsible for its visionary properties, and has been used in indigenous healing ceremonies for at least three thousand years. In traditional practice, a curandero prepares and administers a brew from the cactus in all-night healing sessions, working to diagnose and treat illness on physical and spiritual levels. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Sangha

concept
Buddhist community The Buddhist term for spiritual community: the third of the Three Jewels alongside the Buddha and the Dharma. Classically it names the ordained monastic order and, more strictly, only those who have attained at least stream-entry. In contemporary English-language Buddhism, shaped largely by Thich Nhat Hanh and the Plum Village tradition, sangha covers any practising community held together by shared practice. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Santería

tradition
Afro-Cuban Orisha religion Santería — known within the tradition as Lucumí, Regla de Ocha, or simply La Religión — is an Afro-Cuban religion descended from the Yoruba tradition of West Africa. It emerged in Cuba from the 18th century onward among enslaved Yoruba communities, who preserved their religious practice under Catholic colonial pressure by pairing their divine beings, the Orishas, with Catholic saints. Ritual life centres on diloggún divination, initiation, spirit possession, and the cultivation of a personal relationship with one's tutelary Orisha. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Śāntideva

figure
8th-century Buddhist monk Eighth-century Mahāyāna monk at Nālandā university. His Bodhicaryāvatāra (Entering the Conduct of the Awakening Being) became the most widely studied root text on bodhicitta in the Tibetan and contemporary Western traditions. The traditional biography calls him a bhusuku, a lazy monk who only ate, slept, and excreted. When summoned to give a public exposition meant to humiliate him, he instead recited the entire 900-verse text from memory. His work is the source of every later Tibetan lojong curriculum and of the exchange of self and other practice the West knows as tonglen. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Santoṣa

practice
contentment in yoga Santoṣa (Sanskrit: contentment, satisfaction) is the second of the five niyamas in Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras II.32, the inner observances that form the second limb of the aṣṭāṅga curriculum. Verse II.42 states: santoṣād anuttamaḥ sukha-lābhaḥ, meaning from contentment, unsurpassed happiness is gained. On the tradition's own reading, santoṣa is not passive acceptance. It is the active discipline of withdrawing the demand that circumstances be other than they are. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Saraha

figure
Indian Buddhist mahāsiddha An 8th- or 9th-century Indian Buddhist mahāsiddha and the first named teacher in the lineage the Kagyu school traces to its source. A Brahmin scholar said to have left the monastic university for the marketplace, taken a low-caste arrow-maker as his teacher and consort, and composed three cycles of dohās: vernacular Apabhraṃśa song-poems that became the founding literature of the Mahāmudrā transmission. The name Saraha means the one who has shot the arrow. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Sarasvatī

figure
Hindu goddess of knowledge Sarasvatī is the Hindu goddess of knowledge, learning, music, speech, and the arts. One of the Tridevi alongside Lakṣmī and Pārvatī, she is among the oldest Vedic deities, first appearing in the Rigveda as the personification of a sacred river and of divine speech. Her festival, Vasant Pañcamī, is observed by students and artists across South Asia as the beginning of spring. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Śāriputra

figure
Buddha's chief disciple Chief disciple of the historical Buddha (Śāriputra in Sanskrit, Sāriputta in Pāli), born to a Brahmin family in the village of Nālaka near Rājagṛha. The early canon names him foremost among the disciples in wisdom (paññā) and analytical insight, and traces much of the later Theravāda Abhidharma literature to him. The Mahāyāna tradition addresses the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, including the Heart Sūtra, to him by name, using his analytic mastery as the foil for the teaching of emptiness. By the canonical account, he died three months before the Buddha, at Nālaka, under the care of his mother. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Sarvāstivāda

tradition
early Buddhist school The Sarvāstivāda, meaning the doctrine that all dharmas exist, was the dominant Buddhist Abhidharma school of north India from roughly the second century BCE to the seventh century CE. Based in Kashmir and Gandhāra, it produced the Mahāvibhāṣā commentaries, which analysed mind into momentary dharmas and taught that past, present, and future dharmas all exist. Both the Madhyamaka and Yogācāra wings of Buddhism defined themselves partly against this position, even while they kept its vocabulary. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Satchitānanda

concept
the Vedāntic absolute Sanskrit compound for brahman: sat (being), cit (consciousness), and ānanda (bliss). The three are not separate attributes. They are three inseparable aspects of one undivided reality: brahman is, it knows, and its nature from inside is unconditional ease. This is the Upaniṣadic answer to what remains when every changing object is set aside as not-self. A touchstone across the non-dual lineages descending from Advaita Vedānta. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Sati

concept
Buddhist mindfulness Pāli term, Sanskrit smṛti, for the faculty of remembering or holding in mind what is here, usually rendered into English as mindfulness. Sati is the seventh factor of the Buddhist Eightfold Path and the quality the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta trains the practitioner to cultivate across body, feeling, mind and dhammas. The clinical-secular mindfulness movement of the late twentieth century is the translation of sati into a vocabulary the West's hospitals and schools could meet. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

Satipaṭṭhāna

practice
mindfulness in Buddhism Pāli term for the four foundations of mindfulness, set out in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 10). The foundations are: body, felt tone (vedanā), mind-state, and the constituents of experience (dhammas). Theravāda Buddhism treats them as the operational core of the path to liberation. The Burmese twentieth-century vipassanā revival is their modern form, and almost every Western insight-meditation lineage derives its structure from a reading of the same sutta. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Satori

concept
lasting Zen awakening Japanese 悟り, meaning understanding, from the verb satoru (to know, to perceive directly): the Zen tradition's term for the lasting recognition that the initial flash of kenshō deepens into across years of further practice. Kenshō points to the breakthrough; satori points to the same recognition once it has settled into ordinary cognition and stopped behaving as an event. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably in popular Western writing on Zen; the lineages themselves preserve the distinction. 4 linked entries, 7 see also

Satsang

practice
gathering in truth Sanskrit sat-saṅga, meaning gathering in truth or company of truth. In the non-dual and Advaita traditions, satsang is the gathering in which a teacher sits with students for direct dialogue. A questioner presents a doubt, an experience, or a problem. The teacher responds, though less by answering than by inquiring into what underlies the question. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Satya

practice
truthfulness, second yama Sanskrit satya means truthfulness. It is the second of the five yamas in Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras, the practitioner's discipline of aligning speech and action with what is the case. Classically paired with ahiṃsā (non-injury), with ahiṃsā governing when the two conflict: truth is to be told, but not used as a weapon. The root sat, meaning being or what is, gives satsang (sitting with what is) and satchitananda (being-consciousness-bliss). The practice is not honesty as moral injunction, but as the condition under which the inner work can be conducted at all. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Śauca

practice
first niyama of yoga Sanskrit śauca — cleanness, clarity — the first of the five niyamas in Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras, paired with the five yamas as the ethical-dispositional foundation on which the subsequent six limbs of classical yoga are built. The term has an outer face — bodily and environmental cleanliness, regulation of food and surroundings — and an inner face the classical commentaries treat as the more operative: dispassion toward the body's constituent matter, steadiness of attention as the precondition for sustained practice, and the slow clearing of conditioned residues of past action the technical literature catalogues as saṃskāra. The yogic and Tantric lineages diverge on which face they emphasise; Patañjali names both. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Seer

concept
spiritual visionary A seer is a person believed to perceive what ordinary senses cannot reach: spiritual presences, hidden truths, or the nature of reality itself. In the Vedic tradition, seers (ṛṣi) were the receivers of the hymns of the Vedas, whose inner sight was their defining faculty. The word covers the Hebrew ro'eh, the shaman, and the contemplative who sees through the veil of appearances. 3 linked entries, 6 see also

Self-acceptance

concept
welcoming what is Self-acceptance is the practice of meeting one's own thoughts, feelings, and history with honesty and without judgment. Buddhist teachers call it a prerequisite for genuine inner work; Advaita Vedānta frames it as the recognition that awareness is already complete. Contemporary mindfulness traditions, particularly MBSR, treat it as the foundational attitude that makes any practice effective. 1 linked entries, 9 see also

Self-enquiry

practice
Advaita Vedānta method The principal meditative method of the Advaita Vedānta tradition, as taught by Ramana Maharshi. Where most methods concentrate the mind on a chosen object, self-enquiry asks the mind to locate itself: to find the one who is concentrating. The question Who am I? is not an invitation to autobiography. It is a sustained turning of attention toward the source of the sense 'I'. The source cannot be found as an object, because it is what is looking. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Self-Love

concept
love turned toward oneself Self-love is the quality of genuine goodwill toward oneself. The contemplative traditions distinguish it from narcissism: Buddhist mettā always begins with the self as the first circle of loving-kindness, moving outward to loved ones, strangers, and all beings. Aristotle called the higher form of self-love (philautia) the root of all virtue; the lower form, the pursuit of pleasure over character, he treated as a vice. That tension runs through the major contemplative traditions. 1 linked entries, 7 see also

Self-realization

concept
seeing the true Self The direct recognition of one's true nature. In Advaita Vedānta and the non-dual traditions, it is the liberating knowledge of the ātman, the pure awareness underlying all experience. In Buddhism, the parallel recognition is anattā, the absence of any fixed self. Both traditions hold that ordinary life rests on a mistaken identification, and that seeing through it is the beginning of freedom. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Self-remembering

practice
Fourth Way attention The core practice of the Fourth Way, G. I. Gurdjieff's contemplative system. In ordinary life, the teaching holds, attention flows entirely outward and the sense of one's own existence is lost — a state called waking sleep. Self-remembering breaks this: a deliberate effort to hold attention divided between the outer world and one's own presence as the perceiver, both at once. P. D. Ouspensky described it as the key to all else in the Work, in In Search of the Miraculous (1949). 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Servitor

concept
chaos-magic thoughtform A servitor is a thoughtform made on purpose rather than one that arises on its own. The practitioner splits off a portion of their own psyche, gives it a name, a single task, and an agreed lifespan, then lets it run with little conscious oversight. The idea belongs to chaos magic, a result-focused strand of Western magic that took shape in 1970s England, downstream of older currents like Hermeticism and Kabbalah. Whether the entity is genuinely real or a useful fiction is, in that tradition, treated as beside the point. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Sesshin

practice
intensive Zen retreat Sesshin (摂心 / 接心, meaning gathering the mind or touching the heart-mind) is the intensive group meditation retreat of Japanese Zen. It typically runs three to seven days. The schedule fills with zazen, chanting, work periods, formal silent meals (ōryōki), and brief private meetings with the teacher (dokusan in the Rinzai lineage, sanzen in some Sōtō houses). The form exists to do one thing: create conditions deep enough for the recognition that daily zazen points toward to actually arrive. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Sevā

practice
service as spiritual practice Sevā is Sanskrit for service. It names the practice, found in Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist traditions, of attending to others as a contemplative discipline. The classical claim is that sustained attention to a need that is not one's own gradually loosens the self-referential layer under which ordinary action runs. Structurally, it is the form karma yoga takes when the field of action is direct care for others rather than the broader category of right action in the world. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Shadow Work

practice
Jungian shadow practice Shadow work is the practice of making the Jungian shadow conscious. The shadow, as Carl Jung defined it, is the rejected, denied, or unknown dimension of the psyche. By deliberately engaging it, a person aims to stop projecting its contents onto others and to reclaim the energy locked in those disowned parts. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Shaivism

tradition
major branch of Hinduism The branch of Hinduism that takes Śiva as its supreme deity and the central object of devotion and contemplative practice. One of the four major Hindu denominations alongside Vaiṣṇavism, Śāktism and Smārtism. Its roots reach into the pre-Vedic period. Its philosophical apex is Kashmir Śaiva non-dualism. Its living transmission today runs through the Siddha, Nāth and Aghora lineages. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Shāktism

tradition
Hindu Goddess denomination Shāktism is the branch of Hinduism in which the Goddess, Devī or Śakti, the active creative power of the cosmos, is the supreme form of the divine. It is one of the four major Hindu denominations, alongside Vaiṣṇavism, Śaivism, and Smārtism. Its two principal currents are the Śrī-kula, centred on Lalitā Tripurasundarī in southern India, and the Kālī-kula, centred on Kālī in Bengal and the north-east. Together they carry most of the tantric methodology the Indian tradition has passed on. The figure of Ramakrishna most visibly represents the Kālī-kula current in the modern period. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Shamanism

tradition
spirit-world mediation The oldest cross-cultural family of spiritual practices. A designated practitioner enters altered states of consciousness on purpose, to negotiate with non-physical realms on behalf of their community. The word šaman comes from the Tungus language of Siberia, where European observers first recorded the practice. Recognisably similar complexes appear independently in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and most of pre-Christian Eurasia. Core functions include healing, divination, retrieval of lost soul-fragments, mediation with ancestors, and guidance through transitions including dying. 0 linked entries, 23 see also

Shambhala

tradition
secular sacred warrior path The body of teaching Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche presented from 1976 onward, and the institutional structure that grew around it. At its core is a non-sectarian secular sacred path articulated in the vocabulary of warriorship, offered as a complement to the Vajrayāna curriculum the same teacher transmitted. The name evokes the legendary kingdom of the Kālachakra Tantra, a hidden realm of awakened society. Trungpa used the imagery as the ground of a teaching aimed at the contemplative possibility of ordinary life. After his death in 1987, the lineage continued through his eldest son Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. Institutional reckonings since the late 2010s have left the future of the form unsettled. 4 linked entries, 29 see also

Shāmbhavī Mahāmudrā

practice
Isha yoga kriyā A twenty-one-minute seated yogic kriyā taught by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev as the centrepiece of the Isha Foundation's Inner Engineering curriculum. The practice integrates prāṇāyāma, seated posture, and a steady inward gaze, borrowing its name from the Śāmbhavī mudrā the medieval Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā catalogues. By the foundation's own count, between seven and ten million practitioners have received the initiation. It is the most widely transmitted instructed haṭha practice in the world by population. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Shams of Tabrīz

figure
Rumi's dervish teacher Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Malik-dād al-Tabrīzī (c. 1185–c. 1248) was a wandering Sufi dervish from Tabrīz whose three years of companionship with Rumi in Konya from 1244 onward transformed an established Hanafi jurist into the poet of the Dīvān-e Shams-e Tabrīzī and the Masnavī — the largest single body of mystical poetry by any author in any tradition. His own doctrinal contribution survives only in the Maqālāt-e Shams-e Tabrīzī, the Discourses, and in the lyrical record his presence and disappearance left in Rumi's verse. The historical figure is partly recoverable from the sources. The figure the Mevlevi tradition transmits is mostly Rumi's reconstruction. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Sharon Salzberg

figure
Buddhist teacher American Buddhist teacher (b. 1952) and co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, with Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield. Trained under Anagarika Munindra in Bodhgayā and under Dipa Mā in Calcutta. She is the principal English-language teacher of the mettā (loving-kindness) curriculum in the Theravāda tradition. Her books Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (1995) and Real Happiness (2010) are the standard English-language guides to the brahmavihāras. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Shikantaza

practice
Sōtō Zen just-sitting Japanese for just sitting. The central seated practice of Sōtō Zen, transmitted by Dōgen in the thirteenth century after his return from Song-dynasty China. Distinguished from broader zazen by its specific instruction: sit without object, without question, without any intention to attain. The Sōtō claim is not that sitting leads to awakening but that sitting is awakening. This puts it in long-running argument with the Rinzai school, which pairs seated practice with kōan study. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Shingon

tradition
Japanese esoteric Buddhism Shingon is the Japanese esoteric Buddhist school founded by the monk Kūkai in 816 CE on Mount Kōya, south of present-day Osaka. The name (true word, the Japanese reading of Chinese zhēnyán and Sanskrit mantra) names both the school and its central practice: reciting mantra, forming mudrā, and visualising maṇḍala. Kūkai had received the two principal tantric cycles (Mahāvairocana and Vajraśekhara) from the master Huiguo in Tang-dynasty Chang'an. The school's defining doctrine is sokushin jōbutsu (attaining buddhahood in this very body): the practitioner's body, speech and mind are held to be already not other than those of the cosmic Buddha Mahāvairocana. Shingon is the principal surviving Vajrayāna tradition outside the Tibetan world. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Shinto

tradition
Japan's indigenous tradition Shinto is Japan's indigenous religion, organised around kami, the spirits and sacred powers that inhabit natural features, ancestors, and consecrated places. It has no single founder, no fixed scripture, and no formal creed. Its expression is ritual: purification, offerings, procession, and the life of the jinja (shrine). Shinto coexisted with Buddhism in Japan for over a millennium, producing a complex of fused belief and practice known as shinbutsu-shūgō. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Shōbōgenzō

text
Dōgen's Zen masterwork Treasury of the True Dharma Eye is Dōgen's ninety-five-fascicle masterwork, composed between 1231 and his death in 1253. Written in middle Japanese, the fascicles cover shikantaza, the philosophy of being-time (Uji), the role of women in monastic life, and the argument that practice and realisation are not two separate things. It is the primary scriptural text of Sōtō Zen and one of the most studied premodern East Asian works in twentieth-century philosophy. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Shugendō

tradition
Japan's mountain asceticism Shugendō (修験道, 'the way of training and testing') is a Japanese syncretic tradition of mountain asceticism that evolved in the 7th century CE from a fusion of esoteric Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism, and indigenous mountain worship. Its practitioners, yamabushi or shugenja, undertake rigorous retreats in sacred mountain ranges to gain spiritual power and the capacity to help others. The tradition was suppressed by the Meiji government in 1872 but revived after World War II and continues today, mainly through Shingon and Tendai Buddhist temples. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Shunryū Suzuki

figure
Sōtō Zen teacher Sōtō Zen priest (1904–1971) who moved from Japan to San Francisco in 1959, founded the San Francisco Zen Center and Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, and wrote Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970). The book, a set of plain-spoken talks on zazen and shikantaza in the Dōgen lineage, has stayed in print for more than fifty years and remains the most widely-read introduction to Sōtō Zen practice in English. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Siddharameshwar Maharaj

figure
Advaita sage Indian sage (1888–1936), second teacher of the Maharashtran Inchagiri Sampradāya founded by Bhausaheb Maharaj. His instruction was abide in the I-am until the sense itself drops away, the formula Nisargadatta Maharaj made famous after three intensive years of satsang between 1933 and Siddharameshwar's death in November 1936. Through Nisargadatta, his transmission reached the small Bombay loft where I Am That was recorded. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Siddhi

concept
Supernormal spiritual powers Sanskrit siddhi (accomplishment, attainment, perfection) names the supernormal capacities that classical yoga and tantric Buddhist traditions treat as predictable side-effects of deep meditative concentration. Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras catalogues them in the third chapter and, in the same chapter, names their pursuit as the principal trap of advanced practice. The term also carries a quieter, primary sense: the attainment the practice itself was aimed at, the realisation that yoga, bhakti or jñāna was directed toward. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Sigil

concept
magical symbol of intent A sigil is a drawn symbol used in magic to carry a specific intention. The word comes from the Latin sigillum, meaning seal or small sign. In medieval and Renaissance ceremonial magic, sigils were the pictorial seals of angels, demons, and spirits. In the twentieth century, the occultist Austin Osman Spare adapted the form into a personal technique: a written desire reduced to an abstract glyph, worked below the threshold of conscious attention. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Sikhism

tradition
monotheistic Indian religion A monotheistic Indian religion founded by Gurū Nānak (1469–1539) in Punjab. It developed through ten Sikh gurūs; the human lineage closed in 1708 when Gurū Gobind Singh installed the Guru Granth Sāhib as the eternal living teacher. There are roughly 25–30 million adherents today, most in Punjab and the diaspora. The three core practices are interior name-repetition (nām simraṇ), congregational singing of scripture (kīrtan), and selfless service (sevā). Its poetic root is the Sant tradition — the same lineage Kabir and the medieval bhakti poets carried. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Sīla

concept
Buddhist ethical conduct Sīla (Pāli; Sanskrit śīla) is the Buddhist term for ethical conduct. It is the second of the three headings under which the Eightfold Path is organised, between wisdom (paññā) and mental discipline (samādhi). The tradition treats sīla not as moralism but as the conduct of body and speech that conditions a stable mind. For laity it takes the form of the Five Precepts; for monastics, the much longer Vinaya. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Silence

concept
contemplative stillness What the contemplative traditions cultivate as the active medium of insight, not merely the absence of noise. The Pāli calls it ariya tuṇhī-bhāva (noble silence), the Greek hesychia, Sanskrit mauna, and Sufi Arabic al-ṣamt. Across these vocabularies the claim is the same: the noticing-mind works more clearly when the discursive layer it ordinarily generates is allowed to settle. Teachers distinguish outer silence (no speech, no ambient noise), interior silence (no internal commentary), and a deeper register the non-dual traditions describe as the recognition of awareness as ground. 4 linked entries, 9 see also

Silsila

concept
Sufi teacher-succession chain Arabic for chain. In Sufism, the unbroken line of teacher-to-student succession through which a Sufi ṭarīqa traces its authority back to the Prophet Muḥammad through one of the early companions. The chain carries both the operative practice and the baraka, the spiritual charge the lineage's founder received. Without an authentic silsila, the orders do not consider a teacher's words to carry operative force. 0 linked entries, 15 see also

Sin

concept
transgression of divine law An act, thought, or condition that transgresses divine law or moral order. In the Abrahamic traditions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — sin names a rupture in the relationship between a person and God, repaired through repentance, atonement, or grace. Hindu and Buddhist thought has no exact equivalent; the nearest term, pāpa, works through karma rather than divine offense. In mystical traditions, sin is often read less as a list of forbidden acts than as the self turning away from the divine. 0 linked entries, 11 see also

Śiva

figure
Hindu god, ascetic and dancer The destroyer, ascetic and cosmic dancer of Hinduism: the third pole of the trimūrti alongside Brahmā the creator and Viṣṇu the preserver, and the supreme deity of the Śaiva traditions. Worshipped under three principal aspects: Mahādeva (the great god of the cosmos), Yogeśvara (the lord of yogis, the meditator on Mount Kailash whose stillness holds the world steady), and Naṭarāja (the cosmic dancer whose tāṇḍava dissolves and renews the cycles). In contemporary yogic teaching, the Ādiyogi: the first yogi, the source of the contemplative apparatus the yoga tradition transmits. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Six Yogas of Nāropa

practice
tantric practices Six tantric completion-stage practices at the heart of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism: gtum mo (inner heat), sgyu lus (illusory body), rmi lam (dream yoga), 'od gsal (clear light), bar do (intermediate state), and 'pho ba (consciousness transference). Said to have been transmitted by the eleventh-century Indian mahāsiddha Tilopa through Nāropa to the Tibetan translator Marpa, and from Marpa through Milarepa and Gampopa into the four major Kagyu sub-schools. In Tibetan: Nāro chos drug, the six doctrines of Nāropa. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Skandhas

concept
Five Buddhist aggregates Sanskrit (Pāli khandhā) for aggregates or heaps. The Buddha uses these five categories to analyse what a person actually consists of: form (rūpa), feeling (vedanā), perception (saññā), mental formations (saṅkhārā), and consciousness (viññāṇa). The doctrine is not metaphysics but an instrument of insight. Under sustained attention, each aggregate is shown to arise and pass without anything stable behind it. That observation is the experiential basis for the non-self recognition. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Smārtism

tradition
Hindu Advaita denomination Smārtism is one of Hinduism's four major denominations, alongside Vaiṣṇavism, Śaivism and Śāktism. It is historically aligned with Brahmin orthodoxy and the Advaita Vedānta philosophy of Ādi Śaṅkara. The name comes from smṛti, Sanskrit for that which is remembered, the secondary scriptural layer beneath the śruti of the Vedas. Its defining devotional practice is pañcāyatana pūjā, the household worship of five deities as equally valid forms of one absolute: Viṣṇu, Śiva, Devī, Sūrya and Gaṇeśa. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Smoke cleansing

practice
aromatic purification Smoke cleansing is the burning of dried herbs, resins, or sacred wood to produce fragrant smoke for purification. The practice appears across many traditions and millennia: Hindu puja, Christian liturgy, Buddhist ceremony, and European folk rite. The term distinguishes non-Indigenous herb-burning from smudging, the specific ceremonial practice of some Indigenous peoples of the Americas. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Sōtō Zen

tradition
Japan's largest Zen school The largest of the three traditional schools of Japanese Zen, Sōtō-shū (曹洞宗). It descends from the Chinese Caodong lineage and was transmitted to Japan in 1227 by Dōgen (1200–1253). Its central practice is shikantaza, just sitting, which Dōgen taught not as a method for reaching awakening but as awakening's own activity. Around 14,000 temples in Japan today. In North America, the school was established residentially by Shunryū Suzuki from 1959 and the Maezumi-Glassman lineage in the 1960s. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Soul

concept
animating spiritual principle The English umbrella term for the animating principle of a person. The word covers half a dozen technically distinct concepts across the traditions: Hebrew nephesh and ruaḥ, Greek psychē and pneuma, Latin anima and spiritus, Sanskrit ātman and jīva, and the Sufi nafs and rūḥ. The slippage between these terms is the substance of most debates the word is involved in. 13 linked entries, 8 see also

Soul energy

concept
the soul's active force The concept that the soul is not merely a static substance but carries an active, animating force. Across traditions this force has distinct names: ruaḥ (Hebrew), pneuma (Greek), rūḥ (Arabic/Islamic), and the prāṇamaya kosha layer in the Hindu kosha model. The concept covers both the soul's vitality at a given moment and its capacity to be cultivated, depleted, or renewed through practice and circumstance. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Soulmates

concept
souls destined to meet The idea that certain people are predestined to meet, as though bound by an agreement made at the level of the soul before birth. In popular spiritual teaching, soulmates are not necessarily singular: many teachers describe a soul group of companions who recur across lifetimes, each encounter carrying a particular lesson. The concept draws on Plato's Symposium, the Kabbalistic notion of bashert (destined), and the vocabulary of the nineteenth-century Theosophical movement. It sits closest to twin flames, but is generally treated as broader and less singular. 7 linked entries, 7 see also

Source energy

concept
New Thought energy idea In New Thought and New Age usage, Source energy names the single nonphysical creative power from which everything is said to arise. To feel good, the teaching goes, is to be aligned with it; to feel bad is to resist it. The term was popularised by the Abraham-Hicks teachings of Esther Hicks from the late 1980s, and it overlaps with older ideas of a universal life-force such as prana. It is presented as a metaphysical claim, not an empirical one. 2 linked entries, 6 see also

Spanda

concept
divine vibration Sanskrit vibration, pulsation, or throb — the Kashmir Śaiva term for the energetic aspect under which the single self-aware consciousness (Paramaśiva) displays itself as the world. The doctrine was articulated in the ninth-century Spanda Kārikā of Kallaṭa and integrated into the school's full philosophical apparatus by Abhinavagupta. Spanda names the pulse that tantric practice trains the practitioner to recognise as the operative ground of every moment of experience. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Spirit element

concept
the fifth element The Spirit element — also called ākāśa in Sanskrit, aether in ancient Greek, and quintessence in medieval Latin — is the fifth classical element alongside earth, water, fire and air. It is described as the most subtle of the five, pervading and underlying the other four. In Hindu and yogic philosophy, ākāśa means space and is associated with sound and the throat chakra. In Wicca and neopagan practice, Spirit is the fifth point of the pentagram, invoked as the centre of the ritual circle. 1 linked entries, 7 see also

Spiritual Bypassing

concept
avoid inner work Spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual beliefs or practice to sidestep unresolved psychological wounds, difficult emotions, or ordinary developmental needs. The term was coined by psychologist John Welwood in 1984. It appears as spiritual positivity used to suppress grief, non-dual philosophy used to dismiss the personal self before its wounds have been worked through, or meditation used as a technique for emotional avoidance rather than genuine inquiry. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Spiritual materialism

concept
ego in disguise Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's term, from his 1973 book of the same name, for the way spiritual practice becomes its own form of grasping. The ego does not retreat when someone meditates, studies, or receives transmission. It absorbs each gain and builds a new identity from it. Trungpa's argument: the spiritual path is where this substitution happens most invisibly, and real practice means noticing and refusing it. 6 linked entries, 7 see also

Śravaṇa

practice
first stage of jñāna-yoga Sanskrit, from the root √śru (to hear). The first of three stages by which classical Advaita Vedānta organises the path of jñāna-yoga. A student receives one of the mahāvākyas from a qualified teacher. That reception is what makes manana (reasoning) and nididhyāsana (sustained contemplation) possible. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Sri Aurobindo

figure
Integral Yoga founder Indian philosopher, yogi, poet, and nationalist (1872–1950), born Aurobindo Ghose in Calcutta. He led the early Bengali nationalist movement, was imprisoned in 1908, and in 1910 withdrew to Pondicherry, where he spent forty years developing Integral Yoga. Set out in The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, and the twenty-four-thousand-line poem Savitri, this path aimed not at liberation from the world but at the descent of what he called the Supermind into matter, with the transformation of the body as the intended outcome. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Sri Ramakrishna

figure
Bengali Hindu mystic Bengali Hindu mystic (1836–1886) born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay in Kamarpukur, Bengal, who served as priest at the Dakshineswar Kālī temple outside Calcutta. He practiced the disciplines of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity in sequence and reported the same direct recognition at the end of each. His disciple Narendranath Datta, taking the renunciate name Swāmī Vivekānanda, founded the Ramakrishna Mission in 1897 and carried the Vedānta his teacher had pointed at to the West through the 1893 Parliament of Religions in Chicago. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Sri Yukteswar Giri

figure
Yogananda's guru Priya Nath Karar (1855–1936), known as Sri Yukteswar Giri, was a Bengali jñānī and disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya. He became the guru of Paramahansa Yogananda, the bridge generation in the kriyā yoga line from the legendary Babaji through Lahiri to Yogananda's American mission. He authored Kaivalya Darsanam (The Holy Science, 1894), which sets the Christian gospels alongside Hindu Sānkhya inside a single contemplative framework. Yogananda's 1946 Autobiography of a Yogi gave him the title Jñānāvatāra, meaning incarnation of wisdom. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Subconscious Mind

concept
preconscious layer The layer of mental processing below the threshold of deliberate attention that drives perception, emotion, habit, and physiological response. The term is loose: unconscious (Freud), adaptive unconscious (cognitive science), and subconscious (the New Thought lineage) name overlapping but non-identical territories. In the contemplative and self-development corpus, the subconscious is the operative target of meditative, hypnotic, and visualisation practices aimed at altering the habituated patterns the conscious mind cannot reach by direct intention. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Subtle body

concept
yogic energetic anatomy The energetic-anatomical layer Indian yoga, tantra, and Tibetan Buddhism take as the operative ground of practice. In Sanskrit: sūkṣma śarīra. It consists of channels (nāḍī), energy centres (chakras), life-energy (prāṇa), and concentrated drops (bindu). The Tibetan tantric body carries a closely related architecture: rtsa-rlung-thig le. This is not a claim about anatomy in the medical sense. It is a map of the level at which yoga, tantra, and Vajrayāna are held to take effect. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Sufism

tradition
Mystical Inner Path of Islam The mystical and contemplative current within Islam, called taṣawwuf in Arabic. It is not a separate sect but an inner dimension running through Sunni and Shia practice alike. Sufis are organised into orders (ṭarīqas) descending from the Prophet through chains of teachers. Practices include dhikr (the repeated invocation of a name of God), samāʿ (listening, including the whirling of the Mevlevi order), and a deep poetic tradition that produced Rumi, Hafiz, Ibn ʿArabī and Attar. 0 linked entries, 14 see also

Śūnyatā

concept
emptiness in Buddhism The Mahāyāna Buddhist doctrine that all phenomena lack svabhāva, an independent, self-standing essence. Usually translated as emptiness, the Sanskrit names a relational claim rather than a void: nothing examined closely enough turns out to exist apart from its causes, conditions, and the mind that designates it. The systematic exposition belongs to Nāgārjuna and the Madhyamaka school; the Pāli precursor is the early canon's anattā teaching. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Surrender

practice
ceasing to control outcomes The deliberate practice, found across traditions, of releasing the controlling will and allowing what is happening to happen. Surrender is central to Sufism (the word islām itself means submission), to Christian mysticism (thy will be done), to bhakti yoga, and to most modern non-dual teaching. It is not passivity or fatalism. It is the cessation of the specific contraction by which a person tries to control what is not theirs to control. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Svabhāva

concept
own-being Svabhāva (Sanskrit: sva + bhāva, 'own-being') is the term for the kind of existence ordinary thought assumes phenomena have: intrinsic, self-contained, independent of conditions. The Madhyamaka school, founded by Nāgārjuna in second-century India, argues that no phenomenon possesses svabhāva. The corollary is the emptiness (śūnyatā) doctrine on which every Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna lineage builds. Emptiness means empty of svabhāva: not the absence of phenomena, but the absence of the independent existence they are assumed to have. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Svādhyāya

practice
self-study in Yoga Sanskrit svādhyāya — one's own study, from sva (own) and adhyāya (lesson, reading) — is the fourth of the five niyamas in Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras, and the second member of the kriyā-yoga triad. The term covers two operations the commentary tradition treats as inseparable: the disciplined study and recitation of canonical texts (the Vedas, the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad Gītā) and the recursive self-examination those texts make possible. On the classical reading, the practitioner reads herself through the texts and the texts through herself. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Swami

concept
Hindu monastic title The Sanskrit honorific for a Hindu monk who has formally renounced worldly life (sannyāsa). The word derives from svāmī, meaning owner or master: not of possessions, but of the self. Swamis are initiated into a monastic order, receive a new name, and observe vows of celibacy, non-possession, and service. The title is used across Hindu traditions and is distinct from guru, which names the teaching function rather than the monastic status. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Swami Lakshmanjoo

figure
last Trika master Kashmiri scholar-yogi (1907–1991) and the principal twentieth-century transmitter of the Kashmir Shaivism lineage. From his ashram at Ishber on Lake Nigeen above Srinagar, he gave decades of oral commentaries on the school's principal works: the Śiva Sūtras, the Vijñāna Bhairava, the Spanda Kārikās, and the Bhagavad Gītā in its Kashmiri recension. His students' translations and academic writing form the school's modern English-language reception. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Swami Sivananda

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yoga guru, 1887–1963 Indian physician and renunciate (1887–1963), founder of the Divine Life Society at Rishikesh in 1936. His teaching method, the Yoga of Synthesis, integrates karma, bhakti, rāja and jñāna yoga into one curriculum. Four of the largest twentieth-century Hindu teaching lineages descend from his āśrama: the Bihar School of Yoga of Swami Satyananda, the Sivananda Yoga Vedāṇta Centres of Swami Vishnudevananda, the Integral Yoga of Swami Satchidananda, and the Chinmaya Mission of Swami Chinmayānanda. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Swāmī Vivekānanda

figure
Indian Vedānta monk Bengali monk (1863–1902), born Narendranath Datta, and the foremost disciple of Ramakrishna. He is the figure through whom Advaita Vedānta entered the English-speaking world as a living teaching. His address to the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago on 11 September 1893, which opened with the words Sisters and brothers of America, was the upstream event of the modern Western reception of Indian contemplative thought. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Synchronicity

concept
meaningful coincidence Synchronicity is Carl Jung's term for coincidences that appear meaningfully related yet have no discoverable causal connection. He introduced the concept in 1952 alongside physicist Wolfgang Pauli, framing it as a principle alongside causality and chance. The concept appears across depth psychology, perennial philosophy, and non-dual teaching as a pointer toward an underlying order that ordinary cause-and-effect does not fully describe. 3 linked entries, 9 see also

Taizan Maezumi Rōshi

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Sōtō Zen teacher Japanese Sōtō Zen priest (1931–1995) who moved to Los Angeles in 1956, founded the Zen Center of Los Angeles in 1967, and trained twelve American dharma heirs. Through the White Plum Asanga his heirs established, most contemporary American Zen training traces back to him at one or two removes. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Talisman

concept
ritually charged object A talisman is an object inscribed with symbols, divine names, or geometric patterns and ritually consecrated to attract specific qualities or protect its bearer. The tradition distinguishes talismans from amulets: an amulet wards off harm, while a talisman draws something toward its holder. Talisman-making appears across Hermetic, Kabbalistic, Islamic, and Buddhist practice, each tradition specifying its own materials, inscriptions, and methods of consecration. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Tantra

tradition
Esoteric path through form A family of esoteric teachings and practices found in both Hindu and Buddhist lineages. Tantra uses the body, energy, mantra, ritual and symbol as vehicles for awakening rather than obstacles to it. The classical Vedāntic ascetic programme sought liberation by withdrawing from the world. Tantra seeks it by moving through the world, treating sensation, energy and form as raw material rather than distraction. The chakra system, kuṇḍalinī practice and much of yoga's inner technology are Tantric in origin. 2 linked entries, 10 see also

Tao

concept
the unnameable Way Chinese for the way: the unnameable ground from which all phenomena arise and to which they return. It is the central concept of Taoism. The Tao Te Ching fixes the term as apophatic from its opening line: the tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. The same character was later carried into Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen as a gloss for the underlying recognition both Buddhist schools were pointing at. 6 linked entries, 9 see also

Tao Te Ching

text
foundational Taoist text Eighty-one short chapters traditionally attributed to Lao Tzu, dated by modern scholarship to the fourth or third century BCE. The foundational classic of Taoism and one of the most translated books in human history. Tao names the way. Te names virtue or character. Ching names a classic. Five thousand Chinese characters of paradox and political counsel have shaped Chinese thought for two and a half millennia, reaching the English-speaking world through more than 250 distinct translations. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Taoism

tradition
Chinese way of the Tao The Chinese philosophical and spiritual tradition centred on the Tao, the unnameable ground from which all phenomena arise and to which they return. Its foundational texts are the Tao Te Ching attributed to Lao Tzu (c. 4th century BCE) and the Zhuangzi. The tradition has two main strands. The philosophical strand is Tao-chia. The religious strand is Tao-chiao, which adds ritual, priesthood and lineage. Common practices include wuwei (effortless action), qigong, inner alchemy, and forms of meditation that later shaped Chan and Zen Buddhism. 0 linked entries, 17 see also

Tapas

practice
disciplined effort in yoga From the Sanskrit tap, meaning to heat or to burn. Tapas is the disciplined effort and self-constraint that yoga uses as a contemplative instrument. Patañjali encodes it as the third niyama, the inner observances of the eight-limbed path. The English translations, austerity, asceticism, discipline, each carry part of the meaning but miss the active quality the root encodes: a heat that does work, burning away conditioned patterns. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Tārā

figure
bodhisattva of swift compassion The female bodhisattva of swift compassion in the Indo-Tibetan Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna traditions. Sanskrit tārā means the one who ferries across, from the root tṛ (to cross over). She appears in two main forms: Green Tārā as the active protector against danger, and White Tārā as the figure of long life and contemplative stability. She is the most widely recited female yidam in Tibetan practice, with the daily Praises to the Twenty-One Tārās as the standard morning recitation across all four schools — Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya and Geluk. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Tara Brach

figure
American Vipassanā teacher American Vipassanā teacher and clinical psychologist (b. 1953) whose work fuses Theravāda Buddhist meditation with Western psychotherapy. She is widely credited with popularising RAIN, a four-step practice (recognise, allow, investigate, nurture) for working with difficult emotions. It has become one of the most-taught contemplative tools in clinical mindfulness settings. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Ṭarīqa

concept
Sufi path and order Arabic ṭarīqa (طريقة), meaning path or way, is the standing term in Sufism for the interior route a seeker travels under disciplined instruction and for the institutional order that holds that route open across generations. The classical Sufi scheme distinguishes three terms: sharīʿa (the outer Islamic law), ṭarīqa (the inner way), and ḥaqīqa (the realised truth). The ṭarīqa is the middle term, the path the sharīʿa prepares the ground for and on which the ḥaqīqa is met. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Tat tvam asi

concept
Upanishadic mahāvākya That thou art: one of the four Mahāvākyas of the Upaniṣads, drawn from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (6.8.7). The Vedāntic reading holds that the apparent first-person (ātman) and the undivided ground of being (brahman) are not two. It is not a creedal proposition to assent to but a teaching utterance held under sustained contemplation in the company of a teacher. Ādi Śaṅkara organised it as the operative practice of jñāna yoga. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

Tathāgata

concept
the thus-gone Sanskrit tathāgata (the thus-gone, or the thus-come) is the principal epithet by which the early Buddhist canon names a fully awakened being. The compound parses both ways: tathā-gata names the one who has gone to suchness, tathā-āgata the one who has come from it. The classical commentaries treat the ambiguity as deliberate. In the later Mahāyāna, the title becomes the structural ground from which the doctrine of Buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha) is built. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Tathāgatagarbha

concept
innate buddha-nature Sanskrit compound: tathāgata (thus-gone, an epithet of the Buddha) plus garbha (womb, embryo, matrix). The Mahāyāna doctrine that awakened knowing is the latent ground of every sentient being's mind, present from the beginning and uncovered by the path rather than produced by it. Articulated across the Tathāgatagarbha, Śrīmālādevī, and Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa sūtras between the third and fifth centuries CE, given its philosophical compression in the Ratnagotravibhāga attributed to Maitreya through Asaṅga, and the doctrinal substrate of buddha-nature in every East Asian and Tibetan lineage that descends from the Yogācāra inheritance. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Tathatā

concept
suchness in Mahāyāna Sanskrit tathatā (suchness, thusness) is the Mahāyāna name for the way phenomena are when nothing is added by the conceptualising mind. Where śūnyatā names what phenomena lack (inherent existence, svabhāva), tathatā names what is left when that lack has been recognised. That remainder is not nothing: it is the unobstructed, unconfigured way the world appears once the cognitive overlay has been seen through. The term is the doctrinal hinge on which emptiness, Buddha-nature and the Tathāgata are all built. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Tendai

tradition
Japanese Mahāyāna school Japanese Mahāyāna school founded by Saichō in 805 CE on Mount Hiei, Kyoto, drawing on the Chinese Tiantai tradition of the scholar Zhiyi. Its doctrinal centre is the Lotus Sūtra, read as the Buddha's final and complete teaching. In practice it combines sūtra study, vinaya ethics, meditation, and esoteric ritual under one curriculum. Its lasting significance is historical: almost every major form of medieval Japanese Buddhism, including Pure Land, Nichiren, and Zen, was founded by a teacher who trained on Mount Hiei. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Tenzin Palmo

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Tibetan Buddhist nun British-born Tibetan Buddhist nun (b. 1943, née Diane Perry) of the Drukpa Kagyu lineage. She met her root teacher Khamtrul Rinpoche in India in 1964 and was ordained as one of the first Western women in the Tibetan Vajrayāna. From 1976 to 1988 she lived in solitary retreat in a Himalayan cave at 13,200 feet. In 2000 she founded Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in Himachal Pradesh, the principal training institution for Drukpa Kagyu nuns. She has also been a leading voice for restoring full bhikṣuṇī ordination for Tibetan Buddhist women. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Teresa of Ávila

figure
Carmelite mystic Spanish Carmelite nun, reformer, and mystical writer (1515–1582), the first woman named a Doctor of the Church. She co-founded the Discalced Carmelites with John of the Cross and wrote The Interior Castle (Las Moradas), The Book of Her Life, and The Way of Perfection, the central texts of the Spanish Christian mystical tradition. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Thai Forest Tradition

tradition
Theravada monks A 20th-century revival of thudong (wandering forest) monasticism within Thai Theravāda. It was founded by Ajahn Mun Bhūridatta (1870–1949) in northeast Thailand and carried forward by Ajahn Chah (1918–1992) at Wat Pah Pong. The tradition insists on strict vinaya, treats the forest setting as integral to practice, and cultivates samatha and vipassanā together. Western students including Jack Kornfield, Ajahn Sumedho and Ajahn Brahm spread it to Europe, North America and Australasia and seeded the Insight Meditation Society at Barre. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

The Absolute

concept
ultimate reality The Absolute is the term used across Western philosophy and the contemplative traditions for the ultimate reality that underlies all appearances. It is unconditioned, self-sufficient, and dependent on nothing outside itself. In Advaita Vedanta it corresponds to Brahman; in Neoplatonism, to Plotinus’s The One; in Christian mysticism, to Meister Eckhart’s Godhead; in Sufism, to al-Wujūd (the Real). Across all these uses the core claim is the same: one reality is not caused by anything else, and everything else is an expression of it. 6 linked entries, 9 see also

The Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna

text
Mahāyāna treatise on the One Mind Short Mahāyāna treatise composed in sixth-century China (Dàshèng Qǐxìn Lùn, Discourse on Awakening Mahāyāna Faith), traditionally attributed to the Indian poet Aśvaghoṣa but almost certainly the work of an anonymous Chinese author working inside the Yogācāra inheritance. The text is the single most influential carrier of the tathāgatagarbha (Buddha-nature) doctrine into East Asian Mahāyāna. It shaped the Chinese Chan, Korean Sŏn, and Japanese Zen traditions more deeply than almost any other post-canonical scripture. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

The Buddha

figure
Founder of Buddhism Siddhārtha Gautama (c. 480–400 BCE in current scholarly dating; c. 563–483 BCE in the older Theravāda reckoning) was the renunciate son of the ruling family of the Śākya clan. His awakening under a pīpal tree near Gayā, and forty-five years of teaching across the Gangetic plain, founded what would become Buddhism. The title buddha (awakened one) is a description rather than a personal name. The early canon is explicit that the historical figure was one of a class. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

The Cloud of Unknowing

text
apophatic text An anonymous 14th-century English manual in the apophatic tradition. It teaches that between the practitioner and God lies a cloud of unknowing that thought cannot cross, and that between the practitioner and all created things a cloud of forgetting must fall. The only way through is a silent act of love. Written probably by an East Midlands Carthusian monk for a young novice, it is the direct source of the modern centering prayer movement that Thomas Keating, William Meninger, and Basil Pennington developed at St Joseph's Abbey in the 1970s. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

The Doors of Perception

text
Huxley, 1954 Aldous Huxley's 1954 essay on his first mescaline session, supervised by psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in Los Angeles in May 1953. The text proposes the Mind at Large hypothesis: the brain ordinarily acts as a reducing valve, filtering consciousness to what is useful for survival, and mescaline temporarily dissolves that filter. The title comes from William Blake: if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite. The essay opened the modern Western conversation between psychedelic states and mystical experience. 3 linked entries, 6 see also

The Five Mindfulness Trainings

practice
ethics The Plum Village order's lay reformulation of the classical Buddhist pañca-sīla: the five lay precepts the Theravāda curriculum has carried as the ethical foundation of the path since the Buddha's lifetime. Thich Nhat Hanh redacted the prohibitive I undertake the training to refrain from... formula into an actively phrased I am determined to cultivate.... The structural categories of the source set (killing, taking, sexual misconduct, false speech, intoxication) are preserved; the grammar is reoriented toward what is to be developed rather than what is to be avoided. The trainings are recited at every Plum Village retreat and function as the community's ethical core. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

The Four Noble Truths

concept
Buddhism's core The foundational framework of Buddhist teaching, first given at the Deer Park in Sarnath. Suffering (dukkha) exists. Its cause (samudaya) is craving, conditioned by ignorance. Cessation (nirodha, also nirvāṇa) is possible. The path to cessation (magga) is the Noble Eightfold Path. The structure mirrors a physician's approach: symptom, cause, prognosis, treatment. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

The Fourth Way

tradition
Gurdjieff's teaching The body of contemplative teaching developed by G. I. Gurdjieff in Russia, France and the United States between roughly 1912 and 1949, and codified by his pupil P. D. Ouspensky. Named the fourth path to inner development, it supplements the traditional ways of the fakir (body), the monk (emotions) and the yogi (intellect) with conscious work carried out in ordinary life. The teaching holds that ordinary human existence is mechanical, and that liberation requires working on all three centres at once rather than withdrawing from the world. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

The Kybalion

text
1908 Hermetic primer The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece was published anonymously in 1908 by Three Initiates, widely attributed to William Walker Atkinson. It digests the Hermetic tradition into seven memorable principles and remains the most influential English-language presentation of esoteric Hermeticism in the twentieth century. Every major New Thought writer since has quoted, paraphrased, or built upon it. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

The Mystery

concept
the unknowable ground The Mystery is what contemplative traditions call the irreducible ground or source of existence, the reality that defies every name, concept, and theological formula. Christianity approaches it through apophatic prayer and the divine darkness. Hinduism through the 'not this, not this' of Advaita Vedanta. Buddhism through the logic of emptiness. Each tradition circles it from a different angle. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

The Power of Now

text
Tolle's 1997 classic Eckhart Tolle's 1997 book on escaping mental suffering by returning attention to the present moment. First published in Vancouver by Namaste Publishing, re-issued by New World Library in 1999, and launched onto bestseller lists by an Oprah Winfrey recommendation in 2000. The most widely read English-language presentation of non-dual awareness in plain prose, and the book that brought presence into contemporary spiritual language. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

The Three Jewels

concept
Buddhist triple gem The three refuges of Buddhist practice: Buddha, Dharma, and Saṅgha. Sanskrit triratna, Pāli tiratana. A practitioner takes refuge in all three at the start of any committed engagement with the path. The Buddha names the awakened teacher; the Dharma names the teaching he gave; the Saṅgha names the community that preserves and transmits both. The opening formula is the oldest and most consistent verse across every school of Buddhism: I take refuge in the Buddha; I take refuge in the Dharma; I take refuge in the Saṅgha. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

The Untethered Soul

text
Singer's classic Michael Singer's 2007 trade book. Twenty-five short chapters on disidentification from internal narration and the recognition of awareness as the witness that does the noticing. The book sold over four million copies and became one of the most-cited contemporary American works in the non-dual practical literature outside Tolle. Singer compresses contemplative material drawn from his decades at the Temple of the Universe into a self-help register that disguises its actual lineage. The prose reads as plain American but the recognitions it tracks are those of Advaita Vedānta and of Theravāda vipassanā. 15 linked entries, 7 see also

The Way of a Pilgrim

text
unceasing prayer Anonymous nineteenth-century Russian spiritual narrative, in Russian Откровенные рассказы странника духовному своему отцу (Candid Tales of a Pilgrim to His Spiritual Father), in which an unnamed peasant wanders across Russia and Siberia learning to practise the Jesus Prayer ceaselessly. First published in Kazan in 1884, the book carried the hesychast interior discipline out of the monasteries and into lay devotion. It is the single text most responsible for modern Western awareness of the Eastern Orthodox contemplative tradition that the Philokalia had codified a century earlier. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

The Way of the Bodhisattva

text
bodhicitta An eighth-century Sanskrit poem by the Mahāyāna monk Śāntideva. The title, Bodhicaryāvatāra, means entering the conduct of the awakening being. The most widely studied root text on bodhicitta — the resolve to awaken for the benefit of all beings — and the canonical source for the mind-training practices the Tibetan and Western Mahāyāna lineages have continued to teach for twelve centuries. Recited daily in monasteries across the Tibetan plateau; quoted by every teacher who works with tonglen or lojong. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

The Way of Zen

text
Alan Watts's 1957 book Alan Watts's 1957 synthesis of Zen Buddhist history, doctrine and practice. It is the book most responsible for placing the vocabulary of the Japanese tradition into English-language circulation. Watts built it on the preceding scholarship of D. T. Suzuki, as the preface acknowledges. Read today as a starting point rather than a finished doctrine: accurate on the trajectory from Chinese Chán into Japanese Zen, but less detailed on the points of practice. 7 linked entries, 6 see also

Theosis

concept
becoming god by participation From the Greek theōsis (deification), the Eastern Orthodox doctrine that humans can become god by participation, not by nature, taking on the divine likeness through the Holy Spirit while remaining creatures. Athanasius stated the formula: God became human so that humans might become god. The Cappadocian Fathers and Maximus the Confessor developed it further. Gregory Palamas gave it its mature shape in the fourteenth century, distinguishing God's unknowable essence from his shareable energies. This distinction underlies hesychasm, the Jesus Prayer, and the contemplative tradition of the Christian East. 8 linked entries, 9 see also

Theosophy

tradition
1875 esoteric movement Esoteric tradition founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907), and William Quan Judge (1851–1896). The Theosophical Society they formed claimed that the world's religions are surface forms of a single ancient Wisdom Religion preserved by a secret brotherhood of Masters. Its nineteenth-century synthesis, drawing on Hermetic and Kabbalistic materials alongside Buddhist and Hindu doctrines, is the prototype of every later Western spiritual but not religious tradition. 0 linked entries, 10 see also

Theravāda

tradition
Oldest Buddhist tradition The teaching of the elders — the older of the two main branches of Buddhism (the other being the Mahāyāna), preserving the Pāli scriptural canon and historically dominant in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. Its twentieth-century Western reception came largely through Vipassanā revival movements and the transmission of insight meditation into Europe and North America. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Thich Nhat Hanh

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Vietnamese Zen monk Vietnamese Thiền monk, poet and peacemaker (1926–2022). He synthesised Mahāyāna and Theravāda practice and brought both into the social sphere under the term engaged Buddhism. Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. He then spent nearly forty years in exile before returning to Vietnam to die at his root temple. His Plum Village community in France became one of the largest Buddhist practice centres in the Western world. His prose on mindfulness, interbeing and impermanence has reached readers who would not otherwise identify as Buddhist. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

Thiền

tradition
Vietnamese Zen The Vietnamese form of the Chán school of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Thiền is the Vietnamese reading of chán, itself a transliteration of the Sanskrit dhyāna. It was brought from China to northern Vietnam in 580 CE by the Indian monk Vinītaruci and renewed by later Chinese transmissions over the next thousand years. It developed its own register: more textual than Japanese Sōtō, quieter than Rinzai, and increasingly open to lay practice and to the political pressures of twentieth-century Vietnam. Most English-language readers meet it through Thich Nhat Hanh and the Plum Village community he founded in southern France in 1982. 9 linked entries, 8 see also

Thomas Keating

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Trappist monk Cistercian monk (1923–2018) who co-developed Centering Prayer with William Meninger and Basil Pennington at St Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, making it teachable to lay practitioners from the late 1970s onward. He founded Contemplative Outreach in 1984 and became the leading institutional figure of the Christian contemplative renewal in North America, returning the inheritance of the Desert Fathers, The Cloud of Unknowing, John of the Cross, and Meister Eckhart to the lay practice it had largely vanished from. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Thomas Merton

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Trappist monk & mystic American Trappist monk (1915–1968) of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and the most widely read Catholic contemplative of the twentieth century. His autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) renewed Anglophone interest in monastic life. His later writings, increasingly engaged with Zen, Sufism, and the apophatic mystics, opened a sustained dialogue between Christianity and the contemplative traditions of Asia. His correspondence with Thich Nhat Hanh, D.T. Suzuki, and the Dalai Lama is the canonical example of a serious Western Christian taking Buddhist meditative literature seriously on its own terms. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Three Marks of Existence

concept
dharma triad The Buddha's three-part analysis of all conditioned phenomena: anicca (impermanence), dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), and anattā (no-self). In Pāli: tilakkhaṇa; in Sanskrit: trilakṣaṇa. They appear as a doctrinal list in introductory Buddhism and as the explicit targets of direct insight in vipassanā practice. The tradition treats them as one recognition stated three times. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Three Poisons

concept
three root afflictions Pāli akusala-mūla, Sanskrit triviṣa. The three root unwholesome states identified by Buddhist analysis as the engine of dukkha: lobha (greed, attachment, craving), dosa (hatred, aversion, ill-will) and moha (delusion, basal misperception). Traditionally depicted at the centre of the Tibetan bhavacakra (the wheel of becoming) as a rooster, a snake and a pig biting one another's tails. Their cessation is the condition under which the path's terminus, nirvāṇa, is held to be reached. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Thudong (Dhutaṅga)

practice
forest austerities Thudong is the Thai pronunciation of the Pāli dhutaṅga, meaning that which shakes off. It is the wandering-ascetic practice of the Theravāda forest monk: a bhikkhu who travels with only eight requisites (three robes, alms-bowl, water-strainer, razor, sewing-needle, belt), lives outdoors, and eats once a day from what is offered into the bowl on the morning round. The thirteen canonical dhutaṅga austerities of the Pāli canon had become marginal in the urban Thai saṅgha by the late nineteenth century. Ajahn Mun recovered them in the impoverished northeast, and the practice now anchors the Thai Forest Tradition, whose Western descent reaches the Insight Meditation Society and the secularised mindfulness field. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

Tiantai

tradition
Chinese Buddhist school Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhist school founded by Zhiyi (538–597) on Mount Tiantai in present-day Zhejiang province, from which the school takes its name. Its doctrine centres on the Lotus Sūtra as the Buddha's final and complete teaching. Zhiyi paired Lotus-grounded doctrine with the zhǐguān (calming and insight) meditation method, and organised the entire Buddhist canon through the five periods and eight teachings schema. Its principal legacy is Japanese: Saichō carried the transmission to Japan in 805, founding the Tendai institution on Mount Hiei. From Mount Hiei almost every major medieval Japanese school descended, including Pure Land, Nichiren, and Rinzai and Sōtō Zen. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Tibetan Book of the Dead

text
bardo manual The Bar do thos grol chen mo (Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo) is a Vajrayāna gter ma (revealed text) attributed to the eighth-century master Padmasambhava and uncovered by the tertön Karma Lingpa in fourteenth-century Tibet. It is read aloud to a dying person and through the forty-nine days of the post-death bardo cycle. Three English translations shaped its Western reception: Evans-Wentz's 1927 edition, Carl Jung's 1957 psychological introduction, and the 1975 Chögyam Trungpa–Francesca Fremantle rendering. 6 linked entries, 8 see also

Tilopa

figure
mahāsiddha, Kagyu founder Indian mahāsiddha (c. 988–1069), born in Bengal, who wandered outside monastic Buddhism and is the founding figure of the Tibetan Kagyu lineage. The hagiographies show him pounding sesame seeds and working as a labourer in a brothel-keeper's household. He received the Mahāmudrā transmission directly from the dharmakāya Buddha Vajradhara, then passed it to his student Naropa. Naropa gave it to the Tibetan translator Marpa, who brought it across the Himalayas to Milarepa and on to Gampopa. Every Karma Kagyu teacher since, including Chögyam Trungpa and Pema Chödrön, traces unbroken descent from him. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Tirthankara

concept
Jain ford-maker In Jainism, a Tīrthaṅkara ('ford-maker') is a soul that has attained kevala jñāna (complete omniscience) and teaches the path to mokṣa before withdrawing into liberation. Exactly twenty-four appear in each descending half of the cosmic time cycle. Mahāvīra (c. 599–527 BCE), the twenty-fourth, is the historical teacher of the present Jain tradition. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

Tirumalai Krishnamacharya

figure
yoga master Indian yoga teacher (1888–1989) known as the father of modern yoga. His decades of teaching at the Mysore Palace reformed the haṭha tradition and produced four lineages the West now calls yoga. B.K.S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, T.K.V. Desikachar, and Indra Devi each carried a branch outward. Almost every contemporary postural studio traces back to his Mysore work of the 1930s and 1940s. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Tögal

practice
Dzogchen vision practice Tibetan thod rgal, meaning direct crossing or leaping over. The second formless practice in the Dzogchen man ngag sde (pith-instruction) curriculum, taught only after trekchö has stabilised. In dark retreat or sky-gazing, luminous appearances arise spontaneously. The practice works with those appearances as the self-display of rigpa. The tradition's literature says the full sequence culminates in the rainbow body ('ja' lus). 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Tomoe

concept
Japanese comma-swirl emblem Tomoe (巴) is a Japanese comma-shaped swirl, most familiar as the threefold mitsudomoe of three commas chasing each other around a ring. It marks Shinto shrines, the drums and banners of festivals, and the family crests of samurai clans. The pattern has been read as swirling water, as the souls of a kami, and as a charm against fire. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Tonglen

practice
Tibetan compassion practice A Tibetan Buddhist practice of sending and taking: tong means sending, len means taking. The breath reverses the conventional direction of self-protection. Breathe in suffering, your own or another's, as heat, heaviness, or smoke. Breathe out ease, coolness, light. It is the practical limb of the bodhisattva curriculum and one of the central exercises of the lojong (mind training) tradition. The Western teacher most associated with bringing it into English-speaking practice is Pema Chödrön. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Transcendental Meditation

practice
TM practice A silent mantra meditation taught by certified instructors of the Maharishi organisation. The protocol is standardised: twenty minutes twice daily, sitting with eyes closed, silently repeating a Sanskrit-derived bīja mantra assigned at initiation. Developed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1918–2008) and exported globally from 1958, TM was the principal Western vehicle by which Indian mantra-japa meditation entered Anglophone secular culture before the MBSR generation. Claimed initiates are in the millions. The movement keeps the technique proprietary and charges an initiation fee. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Transpersonal Psychology

concept
fourth force Transpersonal psychology is a school of academic psychology that studies spiritual experiences, peak states, and forms of consciousness that appear to go beyond the individual self. It was founded in the late 1960s by Abraham Maslow, Stanislav Grof, and Anthony Sutich, who named it the fourth force in psychology after behaviourism, psychoanalysis, and humanistic psychology. The field draws on Eastern contemplative traditions, the phenomenology of religious experience, and research into altered states. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Trauma Release

practice
body-based healing Trauma release describes a family of body-based practices that aim to discharge stored stress and shock from the nervous system rather than process it primarily through language. The two best-known systematic forms are Somatic Experiencing (SE), developed by Peter Levine from the 1970s, and Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE), developed by David Berceli. Both draw on the recognition that traumatic experience is held in the body's nervous system as much as in conscious memory, a view also central to the work of Gabor Maté. 1 linked entries, 8 see also

Trekchö

practice
cutting through in Dzogchen Tibetan khregs chod ('cutting through'): the foundational practice of the man ngag sde (pith-instruction) series of the Dzogchen lineage of Vajrayāna Buddhism. After receiving pointing-out instruction from a qualified teacher, the practitioner rests in rigpa, the direct recognition of awareness's own primordial nature, without modifying or elaborating it. Ordinary grasping dissolves on its own when no longer fed. Trekchö is the precondition for the more advanced practice of tögal (direct crossing) and the first of the two formless practices on which the school's curriculum culminates. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Trikāya

concept
Buddhist three-body doctrine Trikāya means three bodies in Sanskrit. It is the Mahāyāna doctrine that the Buddha exists in three distinct modes at once: the dharmakāya (the truth body or reality body), the sambhogakāya (the enjoyment body or bliss body), and the nirmāṇakāya (the transformation body or emanation body). The doctrine was developed by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu in the fourth-century Yogācāra school to explain how the historical Śākyamuni and the cosmic principle of awakening could be the same Buddha. It is the doctrinal foundation of every later Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna practice: deity visualisation, refuge taking, and dedication of merit. 9 linked entries, 8 see also

Tsongkhapa

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Gelug school founder Je Tsongkhapa (1357–1419), also known as Lobsang Drakpa, was a Tibetan scholar-monk who founded the Gelug school and shaped Tibetan Buddhism for the following six centuries. His Lamrim Chenmo and Ngagrim Chenmo remain the most extensive Tibetan expositions of the sūtra and tantra paths. His prāsaṅgika reading of Madhyamaka settled the central philosophical debate of fourteenth-century Tibet and shaped the training of every later Dalai Lama. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Tulku

concept
Tibetan reincarnate lama Tibetan sprul sku ('emanation body'): the institutional category under which the Vajrayāna schools identify and train recognised reincarnations of previous teachers. Each holder's death is treated as a deliberate exit from one nirmāṇakāya, and each subsequent recognition, through dreams, signs, oracle consultations, and child-recognition tests, as the same awakening taking a new body in a new generation. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Tummo

practice
Inner heat yoga Tibetan gtum mo, Sanskrit caṇḍālī, translated as inner heat or fierce woman: the first of the Six Yogas of Nāropa and the gateway practice of the Kagyu tantric curriculum. Through visualisation and breath-retention, subtle-body winds are redirected into the central channel, generating the bliss-emptiness conjoined awareness the lineage treats as the foundation for the rest of the completion-stage practices. Its most-tested external signature is the practitioner's ability to dry damp sheets on bare skin in sub-zero Himalayan cold, documented from Milarepa's eleventh-century winters in cotton robes to Tenzin Palmo's twelve years in a Lahaul cave. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Turīya

concept
awareness beyond all states Sanskrit turīya, literally the fourth: the unconditioned awareness in which the three ordinary states of consciousness (waking, dream, deep sleep) arise and pass without altering it. Not a fourth state alongside the other three, but what knows them. The standing object of Advaita Vedānta’s analysis of awareness, rooted in the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad and the textual ground of the witness model the modern non-dual lineage continues to work inside. 7 linked entries, 7 see also

Twin flames

concept
a New Age soulmate idea The New Age belief that a single soul splits into two bodies, who then seek reunion across lifetimes. A twin flame is said to mirror your own self back to you, which makes the relationship intense and often painful rather than simply harmonious. The modern concept was popularized by the American spiritualist Elizabeth Clare Prophet in 1999, building on a term coined by the novelist Marie Corelli in 1886. It overlaps with the older idea of soulmates but claims a rarer, more singular bond. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Two Truths

concept
conventional and ultimate Mādhyamaka Buddhist doctrine that any phenomenon can be described on two registers. On the conventional register (saṃvṛti-satya), the chair is a chair, suffering is suffering, and action has consequence. On the ultimate register (paramārtha-satya), the same phenomenon is found to lack the self-contained existence the ordinary description assumes. The two are not stacked layers of reality but two ways of describing the same dependent arising. Articulated by Nāgārjuna in chapter twenty-four of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, and operative throughout subsequent Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna thought. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Tzimtzum

concept
divine self-contraction The Lurianic Kabbalah doctrine of divine self-contraction. Before creation, the Ein Sof (the infinite) withdrew from a central point to make room for a finite world. The Hebrew root ts-m-ts means to constrict. Tzimtzum is the keystone of Isaac Luria's sixteenth-century reformulation of Kabbalah in Safed. It is also one of the few mystical doctrines that left lasting marks on modern Jewish ethics, philosophy of religion, and continental thought. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

U Ba Khin

figure
Vipassanā teacher 1899–1971 Burmese lay Theravāda meditation teacher (1899–1971) and Accountant General of independent Burma. He founded the International Meditation Centre in Rangoon in 1952 and taught a compressed ten-day householder version of vipassanā built on body-scan attention to vedanā. He transmitted the method to S.N. Goenka, through whom the lineage spread to over a hundred centres worldwide. The Burmese lay-teacher generation he belonged to is the upstream source of most of the contemporary English-language insight meditation movement, including the curriculum of MBSR. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Umbanda

tradition
Afro-Brazilian spirit faith Umbanda is a Brazilian religion that took shape in the 1920s, drawing together Kardecist Spiritism, Afro-Brazilian traditions such as Candomblé, and popular Roman Catholicism. It has no central authority and is organised around independent houses of worship called terreiros. Practitioners honour a distant creator God and a pantheon of orixás, but their working relationships are with the orixás' emissaries: the pretos velhos, spirits of old enslaved Africans, and the caboclos, spirits of indigenous Brazilians. In ritual, spirit mediums enter trance to channel these beings, offering healing, advice, and the charity the religion treats as the engine of spiritual evolution. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Upaniṣads

text
ancient Vedic wisdom texts The Upaniṣads are the philosophical conclusion of the Vedic corpus. Between one hundred and two hundred Sanskrit texts depending on canon, composed roughly between the eighth century BCE and the early centuries CE. The principal Upaniṣads, the dozen or so commented on by Adi Shankara, are the founding documents of Vedānta and the source of the mahāvākyas (great statements) on which non-dual teaching is built: that thou art (tat tvam asi), I am brahman (aham brahmāsmi), and all this is brahman (sarvaṁ khalv idaṁ brahma). 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Upāya

concept
skillful means in Buddhism Sanskrit upāya means skillful means or expedient method. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, it is the teaching that the dharma should be delivered in whatever form a particular listener can receive. The form is provisional and adjustable. The full compound upāya-kauśalya (skill in means) names the bodhisattva's ability to calibrate instruction to the audience's condition. The doctrine holds together an enormous range of Mahāyāna practice forms under one teaching. It is also the doctrine most often cited to justify whatever a contemporary teacher wanted to do anyway. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Upekkhā

concept
Buddhist equanimity Pāli upekkhā (Sanskrit upekṣā) means equanimity. In the Buddhist curriculum, it is the fourth and last of the brahmavihārās, following mettā, karuṇā, and muditā. The tradition distinguishes it from cool detachment: the near enemy of upekkhā is indifference, not distance. Its function is the steadiness that keeps the first three divine abodes in operation when conditions go in directions the practitioner did not want. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Vairāgya

concept
dispassion, non-attachment Sanskrit vairāgya, dispassion or non-attachment, is the active releasing of the grip on outcomes that yoga and Vedānta treat as the indispensable companion of abhyāsa, sustained practice. Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras (I.12) name the pair as the operative engine of the path. The tradition distinguishes vairāgya from indifference and from institutional renunciation: it keeps the field of action open and allows participation to continue while the grasping after particular outcomes is allowed to drop. 8 linked entries, 8 see also

Vaiṣṇavism

tradition
devotion to Viṣṇu Vaiṣṇavism is the largest strand of Hinduism. It is the family of devotional lineages that take Viṣṇu, and especially his avatars Krishna and Rāma, as the supreme form of the divine. It is the working metaphysics of the Bhagavad Gītā, the home of classical Indian bhakti, and the source of the Hare Krishna movement and the kīrtan culture that reached the West in the 1960s. Its core assumption is that liberation comes through devotional surrender to a personal God, not through abstract analysis or impersonal absorption alone. 5 linked entries, 10 see also

Vajrasattva

figure
purification deity Vajrasattva (Sanskrit Vajra-sattva; Tibetan rdo rje sems dpa', diamond-being or adamantine-mind) is the principal yidam of purification in Vajrayāna Buddhism. He is visualised above the practitioner's crown during the second of the four inner ngöndro preliminaries required before the higher Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen instructions. The practice centres on the hundred-syllable mantra (oṃ vajrasattva samayam anupālaya...), the longest mantra in common Tibetan use, recited to purify the karmic obscurations the tradition holds would otherwise prevent the higher recognition from landing. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Vajrayāna

tradition
Tibetan esoteric vehicle The Tibetan-Himalayan branch of Mahāyāna Buddhism, called the vehicle of the diamond-thunderbolt. It distinguishes itself from its Indian and Chinese relatives by an esoteric method in which mantra, visualisation, deity practice, and the teacher relationship are central rather than supplementary to sūtra study. The classical claim is that the bodhisattva path, which Mahāyāna treats as spanning many lifetimes, can be travelled in one through the directness of these methods. Most of what the West receives under the name Tibetan Buddhism — lojong, tonglen, the lay bond with a lama — is Vajrayāna in form. 2 linked entries, 9 see also

Valknut

concept
knot of the slain The Valknut (Old Norse for 'knot of the slain') is a symbol of three interlocked triangles found on pre-Christian Scandinavian grave markers, picture stones, and funerary artefacts dating from roughly the eighth to tenth centuries CE. The name is a modern scholarly coinage; no medieval Norse text records what the symbol was called or what it meant. It appears consistently near depictions of Odin and the warrior dead, and is generally interpreted as marking the threshold between life and the realm of the slain. Its precise ritual function remains a subject of scholarly debate. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Varanasi

concept
sacred city on the Ganges Varanasi (also called Kāśī, the city of light, and Benares) is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, standing on the west bank of the Ganges in Uttar Pradesh, India. Hindu tradition recognises it as the earthly abode of Śiva and one of the seven sacred pilgrimage cities (Saptapurī). Dying within the city is traditionally held to bring final liberation (mokṣa), with Śiva said to whisper the liberating mantra to each departing soul. Near Varanasi, at Sarnath, the Buddha gave his first sermon after enlightenment, making the area sacred to Buddhism as well. 2 linked entries, 7 see also

Varnashrama

concept
Hindu social-stage order The classical Hindu framework assigning duties by two coordinates: varna (social class) and āśrama (stage of life). The four varnas are Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra; the four āśramas run from student (brahmacharya) to householder (gṛhastha), forest dweller (vānaprastha), and renunciant (sannyāsa). Together they define right conduct (dharma) as personal and contextual: what is correct for a Brahmin student differs from what is correct for a Kshatriya householder. The framework is developed in texts including the Manusmriti, the Mahabharata, and the Bhagavad Gītā, and remains contested in modern Hindu thought. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Vasubandhu

figure
Buddhist philosopher Indian Buddhist philosopher of the 4th–5th century CE, traditionally the half-brother of Asaṅga and, alongside him, the principal systematiser of the Yogācāra school of Mahāyāna Buddhism. His early career produced the Abhidharmakośa, the standard Abhidharma textbook still used in the Tibetan monastic curriculum. After converting to Mahāyāna under Asaṅga's influence, he wrote the foundational Yogācāra treatises Viṃśatikā, Triṃśikā, and Trisvabhāva-nirdeśa, transmitting the doctrines of ālayavijñāna (storehouse consciousness) and vijñaptimātratā (representation-only) to the later Mahāyāna tradition. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Vedanā

concept
felt tone in Buddhist thought The Pāli term for the bare felt tone — pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral — that arises with every contact between a sense organ and its object. Conventionally translated as feeling, though the Pāli term is narrower: it names only the hedonic tone, not the emotions that form around it. The seventh link in dependent origination and the second foundation of mindfulness in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta — the gap in the chain where sustained attention can interrupt the slide from contact into craving. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Vedānta

tradition
school of Hindu philosophy The end of the Vedas. One of the six classical schools of Hindu philosophy, organised around the Upaniṣads, the Brahma Sūtras, and the Bhagavad Gītā. Vedānta divides into three sub-schools: advaita (non-dual, Ādi Śaṅkara), viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dual, Rāmānuja), and dvaita (dualistic, Madhva). The advaita branch underlies most contemporary Western non-dual teaching. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Vedas

text
ancient Hindu scriptures The foundational scriptural corpus of Hinduism. The Sanskrit word veda means knowledge, cognate with English wit and Latin videre. Composed in archaic Sanskrit and orally transmitted across north-west India from roughly 1500 BCE to 500 BCE, the Vedas comprise four collections (Saṃhitās) and the layered Brāhmaṇa, Āraṇyaka and Upaniṣad texts that grew around them. Every later Hindu school, whether accepting (āstika) or rejecting (nāstika) their authority, defines itself in relation to this corpus. 6 linked entries, 9 see also

Vedic Astrology

tradition
Hindu sidereal system Jyotisha ('science of light') is the traditional Hindu system of celestial divination. It reads a birth-moment chart against a sidereal zodiac, calibrated to actual star positions rather than the tropical equinox, to map karma and life path. One of the six Vedāṅgas, it traces to Vedic calendar science (~1400 BCE) and its horoscopic form to the early centuries CE. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Vidyā

concept
liberating knowledge in Vedānta The Sanskrit word for knowledge in the strong sense: not the accumulation of information but direct cognitive contact with what is real. Vidyā is the counterpart of avidyā (ignorance). In the Upaniṣads, composed from roughly the 8th century BCE onward, it names the liberating knowing that the teacher transmits and the student realises. In Advaita Vedānta, it is the operative recognition: the direct seeing of Brahman as the nature of the self, which dissolves māyā and opens the way to mokṣa. 4 linked entries, 7 see also

Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra

text
Śaiva tantra A short Kashmir Śaiva tantric text composed between the seventh and ninth centuries CE, embedded in the now-lost Rudrayāmala Tantra. It takes the form of a dialogue between Bhairava (Śiva) and his consort Bhairavī. Its core is a catalogue of 112 dhāraṇās: short attention-instructions, each designed to disclose the recognition of Paramaśiva from a different angle. The angles include the gap between two breaths, the pause between two thoughts, the centre of an emotion before it resolves, and the moment of dropping into sleep. The school's principal meditative manual. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Vimalakīrti Sūtra

text
Mahāyāna scripture An early Mahāyāna sūtra composed in Sanskrit between roughly the first and second centuries CE. A wealthy lay merchant named Vimalakīrti out-debates the Buddha’s senior monastic disciples and the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī on the doctrine of emptiness. The text’s central moment is the silence of Vimalakīrti, in which the lay master answers the assembled bodhisattvas’ question about non-duality without speaking. That silence became one of the most-cited passages in the East Asian Chan and Japanese Zen tradition. Its standing implication that awakening is not the structural property of the renunciate became the textual warrant for the lay-practitioner Mahāyāna the Tendai, Tiantai, and Chan schools built on. 4 linked entries, 8 see also

Vinaya

concept
Buddhist monastic code The Vinaya (Sanskrit and Pāli: that which leads away) is the monastic disciplinary code of Buddhism. It translates ethical conduct (sīla) into specific training rules for the ordained saṅgha. The central text is the Pātimokkha: 227 rules in the Theravāda recension, with higher counts in the Mahāyāna versions. These are recited fortnightly at the Uposatha observance. Each rule is a sikkhāpada, a training rule the practitioner undertakes voluntarily for the sake of the path. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Vipassanā

practice
Buddhist insight practice Pāli for insight. The contemplative practice, central to Theravāda Buddhism, of clear seeing into the nature of experience. It is structured as the cultivation of mindfulness (sati) toward the body, feelings, mind-states, and the dhammas themselves. The aim is direct insight into impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self. 1 linked entries, 10 see also

Visuddhimagga

text
Theravāda path manual The Path of Purification is Buddhaghosa's fifth-century Pāli compendium on ethics, meditation, and wisdom. Twenty-three chapters organised around three trainings catalogue the forty kammaṭṭhānas, the jhāna absorption sequence, the brahmavihāra curriculum with its near and far enemies, and the analytic vocabulary the modern vipassanā revival inherited. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Viveka

concept
discernment in Vedānta Sanskrit viveka means discrimination in the contemplative sense. It is the capacity to distinguish what is changing from what is not, the apparent from the real, the seen from the seer. Paired with vairāgya (dispassion), it is the classical instrument on which the path of knowledge in Advaita Vedānta operates. 5 linked entries, 10 see also

Vivekacūḍāmaṇi

text
Advaita Vedānta primer A Sanskrit poem of 580 verses in the Advaita Vedānta tradition, traditionally attributed to Ādi Śaṅkara and translated into English as The Crest-Jewel of Discrimination. The text is a sustained dialogue between a guru and a seeker working through the Advaita path: viveka (discrimination between the real and the apparent), the four qualifications of the aspirant, the koṣa (sheath) analysis, and the mahāvākya recognition. Swami Madhavananda's 1921 Advaita Ashrama edition became the standard English scholarly text and made the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi the most-read short Advaita Vedānta primer in English through the twentieth century. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Vṛtti

concept
mental modifications in Yoga Sanskrit vṛtti — modification, fluctuation, whirl, from the verbal root vṛt (to turn, to revolve) — the technical term in Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras for the activity of citta, the inner instrument of cognition. The text's second sūtra defines yoga as citta-vṛtti-nirodha — the cessation of the modifications of mind-stuff — and enumerates five kinds of vṛtti: pramāṇa (right cognition), viparyaya (mis-cognition), vikalpa (verbal construction without referent), nidrā (sleep) and smṛti (memory). 9 linked entries, 8 see also

Vyāsa

figure
Yoga-Bhāṣya commentator The Sanskrit commentator whose Yoga-Bhāṣya (4th–5th c. CE) is the foundational reading of Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras and the lens through which the lineage has carried the text forward. The classical tradition identifies him with the legendary Veda Vyāsa, compiler of the Vedas, redactor of the Mahābhārata, and attributed author of the Purāṇas. But textual scholarship, on chronological and stylistic grounds, treats the two as distinct figures. The Bhāṣya's settled positions on citta-vṛtti-nirodha, the eight limbs of aṣṭāṅga, and the Sāṃkhya framing of kaivalya operate as the standing background the Sūtras are read inside. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Waḥdat al-Wujūd

concept
Sufi unity of being Waḥdat al-wujūd, Arabic for the unity of being, is the Sufi metaphysical doctrine associated with Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240) and his commentator Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī. The doctrine holds that only one reality truly exists and the multiplicity of the world is its self-disclosure. Critics read this as pantheism; proponents read it as the Islamic formulation of non-duality. It is the metaphysical backbone behind the experiential vocabulary of fanāʾ, baqāʾ, and dhikr. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Walking Meditation

practice
mindful walking A contemplative practice in which slow, attentive walking is the meditation object rather than a backdrop to it. Found across Buddhist traditions: kinhin in Sōtō Zen, caṅkamana in Theravāda curricula, and the form Thich Nhat Hanh popularised in the West through Plum Village. The practice trains the same noticing as seated meditation, in a body that is moving and closer to the conditions of ordinary life. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Wayne Dyer

figure
self-help author American self-help author and motivational speaker (1940–2015). His 1976 debut, Your Erroneous Zones, sold over thirty-five million copies and launched a thirty-year career on the lecture circuit and PBS. His later books shifted toward spirituality, including a verse-by-verse commentary on the Tao Te Ching and several works in the New Thought tradition. He died in Maui in 2015. 15 linked entries, 8 see also

When Things Fall Apart

text
Vajrayāna book Pema Chödrön's 1997 book (When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times) is the most widely read English-language presentation of the Vajrayāna orientation toward suffering. Its central claim: the moments when ordinary identifications give way are precisely the moments when practice becomes operative rather than aspirational. The short chapters were edited from talks given at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia in the early 1990s and organised around groundlessness, tonglen, and the lojong slogans her teacher Chögyam Trungpa had carried out of the Karma Kagyu lineage. The book has remained in print continuously for nearly thirty years and is consistently the highest-selling Buddhist title in Western trade publishing. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Wicca

tradition
modern pagan witchcraft Wicca is a modern pagan religion founded in England in the 1950s by Gerald Gardner, drawing on ceremonial magic, folklore, and nature veneration. It centres on the worship of a Horned God and a Triple Goddess, the ritual cycle of eight seasonal festivals, and the practice of spellwork within a consecrated circle. The tradition was shaped by Gardner's engagement with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley's writings, and earlier folk-magic sources. 0 linked entries, 13 see also

Wiccan Rede

text
Wicca's primary ethic The Wiccan Rede is the primary ethical statement of Wicca, expressed most often as 'An ye harm none, do what ye will.' The couplet was first publicly recorded in a 1964 speech by Doreen Valiente. 'Rede' comes from Middle English meaning 'counsel' or 'advice'; 'An' is an archaic form of 'if.' A longer form, the Long Rede, is a 26-line poem circulated widely since 1974 but whose precise authorship is disputed. 0 linked entries, 6 see also

William James

figure
philosopher of religion An American philosopher and psychologist (1842–1910). His 1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience, the published Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh, established the comparative study of mystical experience as a serious academic project. The vocabulary James coined for that comparison — ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, passivity, the four marks of the mystical state — remains the working framework of much of the contemporary literature. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Witness

concept
pure witnessing awareness The Sanskrit sākṣin, the witness, is the Vedāntic term for the awareness that knows every experience without being altered by it. The witness is not the ego and not a separate observer; it is the field of knowing in which body, thought, and emotion appear. In the direct-path lineage from Ramana Maharshi through Atmananda Krishna Menon to Rupert Spira, witness consciousness names the first stable recognition on the way to the further dissolution of any subject-object distinction. 6 linked entries, 9 see also

World Tree

concept
mythological cosmic axis The World Tree is a mythological image of a cosmic axis: a vast tree whose roots reach the underworld, trunk anchors the earth, and branches support the heavens. The motif appears across Norse, Siberian, Hindu, Chinese, and many other traditions under different names. In Norse mythology it is Yggdrasil, the immense ash at the centre of nine worlds. In shamanic traditions worldwide it is the vertical axis along which practitioners travel between realms. 2 linked entries, 6 see also

Wuwei

concept
Taoist effortless action Wu means 'not'; wei means 'action'. Together they form wuwei, usually translated as non-action or effortless action, though neither phrase fully captures it. From the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi, wuwei is action that arises from accord with a situation rather than from imposed will. The cook's knife finds the spaces in the joint; the swimmer does not fight the current; the sage does nothing and nothing is left undone. It is the practical correlate of the Tao: the doing that remains when forcing stops. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Yama

practice
five yogic restraints Sanskrit yama means restraint. It names the first of the eight limbs of Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras: five ethical commitments the practitioner holds toward other beings and the world. The five are ahiṃsā (non-injury), satya (truthfulness), asteya (non-stealing), brahmacarya (continence), and aparigraha (non-grasping). The text calls them mahāvratam, the great vow, and holds them binding regardless of birth, place, time, or circumstance. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Yantra

concept
sacred geometric diagram Sanskrit yantra, device or instrument: a geometric figure used in tantric and Śākta Hindu practice as a focus for meditation and as a ritual support for the deity it represents. Canonical components: a central bindu (point); interlocking ascending and descending triangles (Śakti and Śiva); concentric circles; lotus petals; and an outer square frame (bhūpura) with four gates oriented to the cardinal directions. The most studied example is the Śrī Yantra of the Śrī Vidyā lineage, with nine interlocking triangles producing forty-three smaller triangles around the central bindu. The visual cognate of the mantra: where the mantra is the deity's speech, the yantra is the deity's body in geometric form. 3 linked entries, 8 see also

Yeshe Tsogyal

figure
tantric practitioner Eighth-century Tibetan queen and tantric practitioner (c. 757–817). She was the principal student of Padmasambhava and the figure the Nyingma tradition credits with recording and concealing the gter ma treasure-corpus the school has drawn on ever since. The historical kernel is small and the hagiography is large. What reaches the contemporary reader is the woman Tibetan tradition has carried for twelve centuries as its foundational female practitioner: the ḏākinī the lineage credits with making the first transmission of Vajrayāna into Tibet survive at all. 0 linked entries, 8 see also

Yidam

practice
meditational deity in Vajrayāna Tibetan term for the meditational deity at the centre of Vajrayāna practice. The practitioner visualises an enlightened figure, recites its mantra, and dissolves the visualisation back into emptiness. Well-known figures include Avalokiteśvara, Tārā, Vajrasattva, and Mañjuśrī. They are not external gods receiving petitions. They are sambhogakāya projections of awakened qualities such as compassion, wisdom, and fearlessness, used as scaffolds for recognising those qualities in one's own mind. The Mahāyāna doctrine is the foundation; the Tantric method builds on it. Without a qualified teacher's transmission, the classical tradition does not consider the practice operative. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Yoga

practice
8-limbed Indian path of union From the Sanskrit yuj, to yoke: the family of Indian disciplines that aim to unite the individual self with the absolute. Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras (c. 2nd century BCE) codify it as an eight-limbed path. The postural yoga most familiar in the West is one limb (āsana) of one branch (haṭha). There are four classical yogas: karma, bhakti, jñāna and rāja. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Yoga Nidra

practice
yogic sleep practice From the Sanskrit yoga (union) and nidrā (sleep): yogic sleep. In this guided practice, the practitioner lies in śavāsana and follows a systematic rotation of attention through the body while remaining conscious. The practice is rooted in tantric nyāsa and the pratyāhāra limb of classical yoga. The modern form was codified by Swami Satyananda Saraswati in 1976 and later adapted into the clinical iRest protocol by Richard Miller. Practitioners often describe a session as yielding the recuperative effect of several hours of ordinary sleep. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Yoga Sūtras

text
Patañjali's yoga text The Yoga Sūtras are 196 short Sanskrit aphorisms attributed to Patañjali, compiled somewhere between the second century BCE and the fourth century CE. They gave the Indian discipline of yoga its classical architecture: the eight-limbed (aṣṭāṅga) path, the definition yoga is the cessation of the modifications of mind-stuff, the Sāṃkhya dualist metaphysics of puruṣa and prakṛti, and the goal of kaivalya, disentanglement. The text has been the operating system of rāja yoga for two millennia. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Yoga Vāsiṣṭha

text
Sanskrit non-dual text A non-dual Sanskrit scripture of roughly 32,000 verses, also known as the Mokṣopāya, Mahā-Rāmāyaṇa, and Vāsiṣṭha-Rāmāyaṇa. Framed as the sage Vasiṣṭha's instruction to the young prince Rāma, the text teaches Advaita Vedānta through long narrative parables called kathās: the world is a movement of consciousness appearing to itself, and liberation is the recognition that the seeker was never other than Brahman. Composed in stages between the seventh and fourteenth centuries CE in Kashmir, it remains one of the most-cited non-dual scriptures in the teachings of Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj, and is the doctrinal substrate of the contemporary direct-path lineage. 7 linked entries, 8 see also

Yogācāra

tradition
Mind-Only Buddhist school The Mind-Only school of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy, founded in fourth-century India by the half-brothers Asaṅga and Vasubandhu alongside the older Madhyamaka school it complements. Its central claim is cittamātra, 'mind only': the world as experienced is the face of consciousness shaped by past action, not an independent external reality. This is not Western-style idealism. It concerns the structure of appearance, not a metaphysics of mental substance. Yogācāra's detailed analysis of mind, distinguishing eight functional layers including the ālayavijñāna (store-consciousness), became foundational for the Vajrayāna and East Asian Zen lineages. 2 linked entries, 8 see also

Yogini

concept
female adept of yoga & tantra From the Sanskrit feminine of yogin: a female master of yoga and tantra, and a term of respect for women teachers across Hindu and Buddhist traditions. In Hindu Tantra the word also names a class of fierce, powerful goddesses, most often grouped in sixty-fours and revered as aspects of the Great Goddess. They embody śakti, the sacred feminine power, and the old goal of their worship was the gaining of siddhis, extraordinary powers. 0 linked entries, 9 see also

Yoruba religion

tradition
West African religion Yoruba religion (Ìṣẹ̀ṣe) is the indigenous spiritual tradition of the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria and the Republic of Benin. It centers on a supreme and distant creator, Olódùmarè, and hundreds of divine intermediaries called orishas, each governing a domain of nature or human life. The Odù Ifá, a corpus of 256 sacred units transmitted orally by initiated priests called babaláwo, is its primary scripture. The tradition is the source from which Candomblé, Santería, and Umbanda descended during the Atlantic slave trade. 0 linked entries, 7 see also

Zazen

practice
seated Zen meditation The seated meditation at the centre of Zen Buddhism. In Japanese, zazen means seated absorption. It transmits the Chinese zuòchán, itself from the Sanskrit dhyāna. Zazen differs from broader meditation in three ways: its specific posture, its scepticism of technique, and the Sōtō claim that sitting is not a means to awakening but the direct activity of awakening itself. Sōtō Zen calls this shikantaza, just sitting. Rinzai Zen pairs the same posture with kōan contemplation. 2 linked entries, 9 see also

Zecharia Sitchin

figure
paleocontact author Researcher (1920–2010) who spent fifty years arguing that the Sumerian and Akkadian texts are a literal record of a flesh-and-blood Anunnaki civilisation from a planet called Nibiru. His seven-volume Earth Chronicles, beginning with The 12th Planet (1976), is the canonical ancient-astronaut reading of the Mesopotamian sources. His translations were never accepted by academic Sumerology. His readership never went away. 11 linked entries, 5 see also

Zen

tradition
Japanese Chán Buddhism The Japanese transmission of Chinese Chán, the meditation school of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Chán arrived in China in the 6th century CE, traditionally with Bodhidharma, and reached Japan in the 12th. Zen points directly at the nature of mind, distrusts conceptual elaboration, and uses zazen (seated meditation) and kōan contemplation as its primary methods. 1 linked entries, 9 see also

Zhiyi

figure
founder of the Tiantai school Chinese Buddhist scholar-monk (538–597) and founder of the Tiantai school on Mount Tiantai in present-day Zhejiang province. His three major works — the Profound Meaning of the Lotus Sūtra, the Words and Phrases of the Lotus Sūtra, and the Great Calming and Insight — organised the entire Buddhist canon under a graded reading anchored in the Lotus Sūtra. They codified the zhǐguān meditation curriculum later carried to Japan as shikan and articulated the threefold-truth and five periods and eight teachings schemata that shaped almost every subsequent East Asian doctrinal school. 5 linked entries, 8 see also

Zhuangzi

figure
Taoist sage and storyteller Zhuang Zhou (c. 369–286 BCE) is the second foundational figure of Taoism, following Lao Tzu, and the namesake of the Zhuangzi. That text is the parabolic counterpart to the Tao Te Ching. Where Lao Tzu compresses, Zhuangzi tells stories. His butterfly dream, his cook Ding, his swimmer at the falls are the tradition's most-cited demonstrations of wuwei and the dissolving of fixed categories. East Asian readers have long received him as a comic philosopher of the first rank. 5 linked entries, 9 see also