Cosmos & reality
26 related entries. Shared tags aid navigation; they do not imply identical beliefs or practices.
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Kongo cosmology
Related Kongo-speaking traditions that connect cycles of life, the ancestral realm, ritual specialists, and community concerns.
West Central Africa · 5 highlights↗Ancient Egyptian wisdom
Ethical teaching, ritual, cosmology, and conceptions of order from ancient Egypt, firmly part of African history.
Northeast Africa · 5 highlights↗Hindu traditions
A vast family of devotional, philosophical, ritual, and contemplative traditions.
South Asia · 5 highlights↗Buddhist traditions
A family of traditions concerned with suffering, impermanence, ethical action, and paths of liberation.
South · East · Southeast Asia · 5 highlights↗Daoist traditions
Classical texts, later religious communities, and practices concerning the Dao, naturalness, and skilful action.
China · 5 highlights↗Jaina philosophy
A living tradition with rigorous ethics, accounts of living beings, and disciplined paths of liberation.
South Asia · 5 highlights↗Shintō traditions
Japanese shrine traditions and practices relating kami, place, festivals, and community.
Japan · 5 highlights↗Mesopotamian wisdom and Gilgamesh
Mesopotamian literature asks how people face mortality, friendship, rule, and loss.
Iraq · ancient Near East · 5 highlights↗Zoroastrian traditions
Zoroastrian traditions join worship, ethical choice, prayer, and the ideal of truth.
Iran · South Asia · diaspora · 5 highlights↗Yijing and Chinese philosophy of change
The Yijing, or Book of Changes, is an ancient text used for divination and philosophical reflection.
China · 5 highlights↗Neoplatonism and Plotinus
Neoplatonist thinkers developed accounts of reality, mind, soul, and return toward the One.
Roman world · 5 highlights↗Hermetica and Hermes Trismegistus
The Hermetica are varied late antique writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus.
Egypt · Mediterranean · 5 highlights↗Gnostic movements and the problem of the label
Gnosticism is a modern umbrella for varied ancient writings and groups concerned with knowledge, divine reality, and human estrangement.
Late antique Mediterranean · 6 highlights↗Sethian writings
Sethian is a scholarly name for a group of ancient writings that give Seth, son of Adam and Eve, a distinctive place in stories of origin and revelation.
Late antiquity · 6 highlights↗Valentinian Christianity
Valentinian Christians drew on the teaching associated with Valentinus and developed diverse interpretations of God, Christ, ignorance, and restoration.
Second century and later · 6 highlights↗Manichaeism and Mani
Manichaeism was a distinct religion founded by Mani in the third century.
Sasanian Iran · Silk Roads · 6 highlights↗Mandaeism
Mandaeism is a living religion with its own scriptures, priesthood, and repeated rites in flowing water.
Iraq · Iran · diaspora · 6 highlights↗Jewish Kabbalah and the Zohar
Kabbalah is a family of Jewish mystical traditions rooted in texts, interpretation, prayer, and communal life.
Medieval Spain · wider Jewish worlds · 5 highlights↗Renaissance Christian Kabbalah
Christian Kabbalah was a Renaissance Christian reinterpretation of Jewish Kabbalistic texts and methods.
Italy · Europe · 5 highlights↗Western esotericism
A research umbrella for historically distinct currents such as Hermeticism, alchemy, Kabbalah, and ceremonial magic.
Multiple periods · 5 highlights↗Advaita Vedānta: inquiry into nonduality
Advaita Vedānta interprets the Upaniṣads as teaching a nondual reality, brahman, and asks how the apparently separate self relates to it.
India · 6 highlights↗Madhyamaka: the middle way and emptiness
Madhyamaka argues that things lack an independent, fixed nature because they arise through conditions.
India · Tibet · East Asia · 6 highlights↗Yogācāra: experience and the making of a world
Yogācāra examines how consciousness, habits, and interpretation shape experience.
India · East Asia · Tibet · 6 highlights↗Sāṃkhya: discernment and the changing world
Classical Sāṃkhya distinguishes puruṣa, conscious witness, from prakṛti, the source of changing mental and material processes.
India · 6 highlights↗Suhrawardī and the philosophy of illumination
Suhrawardī's philosophy of illumination joins criticism of earlier philosophy with an account of knowledge by presence and a metaphysics expressed through light.
Iran · Syria · 6 highlights↗Bön traditions
Bön is a distinct living Tibetan religious tradition with its own texts, lineages, and monastic institutions.
Tibet · Himalayan communities · 5 highlights↗