World Religions & Their Mystical Cores

This section covers the major religious traditions and the contemplative currents at the centre of each.

It is the largest body of material on the site and the one where a short article is most obviously inadequate. A tradition followed by a billion people across two millennia, with internal schools that disagree profoundly, cannot be summarised in nine hundred words. What these articles try to do instead is give an accurate shape — what the tradition takes itself to be about, where it came from, what its adherents actually do, and where the arguments are — with enough sourcing that a reader can go further.

Four commitments shape how they are written.

Internal diversity comes first. There is no such thing as what Hindus believe, or what Muslims believe. Every tradition here contains monists and dualists, literalists and allegorists, reformers and traditionalists, and disputes between them that are older and sharper than any disagreement with outsiders. Where this site says "the tradition holds", it is generally wrong, and the articles try to say which part of it holds what.

The mystical core is not the whole tradition, and treating it as the real version is a mistake this site could easily make. A great deal of Western spiritual interest goes to Sufism, Kabbalah, Zen and Vedānta while skipping the law, the community, the liturgy and the ordinary observance that most adherents' lives actually consist of. The contemplative currents are covered here and elsewhere on the site, and they are described as parts of their traditions rather than as their distilled essence.

The harm is in the articles, not in a separate section. Every tradition here has been used to justify violence, exclusion and abuse, and several have institutional records that are documented and severe. That belongs in the description of the tradition rather than quarantined, and so does the fact that critics of each have most often come from inside it.

And several of these are living faiths with their own rules about what outsiders may say and teach. Nothing here is instruction, restricted material is not reproduced, and where a tradition has been misrepresented in the West — the erasure of Islam from Rūmī, the reduction of Hinduism to a single philosophy, the presentation of Buddhism as a therapy — the article says so.