World Religions

overview#

six traditions account for most of humanity’s religious life: hinduism, buddhism, judaism, christianity, islam and daoism. studied side by side they stop being a list of exotic facts and start being a set of answers to the same handful of questions — what is ultimately real, what is a human life for, how should we act, and what do we do about death. 𐃏

a first cut at organising them:

three clusters fall out immediately. the abrahamic religions (judaism, christianity, islam) share one personal creator God, prophets, a linear once-lived life ending in judgment. the dharmic pair (hinduism, buddhism) share the wheel of samsara, karma as the engine of rebirth, and liberation as the goal. daoism sits apart: a pantheon in front, an impersonal absolute — the Dao — behind, and harmony rather than salvation as the aim. 𐃏

the six, briefly#

hinduism#

the oldest of the six, rooted in the vedas (~1500 BCE). the absolute is brahman — one reality embracing the entire cosmos — worshipped through the forms of vishnu, shiva or shakti; which form you centre determines your sect (vaishnavism, shaivism, shaktism). the soul (atman) is reborn according to karma, and the hope across hundreds or thousands of lifetimes is escape: moksha, reached by three paths — knowledge (jnana-marga), moral action (karma-marga), or devotion (bhakti-marga).

sixteen life-cycle rituals (samskaras) run from prenatal ceremonies through the sacred-thread initiation to funeral rites. scripture splits into shruti (“heard”: vedas, upanishads) and smriti (“remembered”: the mahabharata — which contains the bhagavad gita — the ramayana, the puranas, and the laws of manu).

buddhism#

siddhartha gautama (c. 560–480 BCE), a prince on the india/nepal border, left the palace, saw the four sights — old age, sickness, death, and a holy man — and after seven ascetic years grasped the four noble truths under the tree at bodhgaya: suffering is universal; its root is craving; nirvana is its end; and the way there is the noble eightfold path. 𐃏 he rejected both brahman and atman: no god to appease, no permanent soul to save — liberation is from craving itself.

three vehicles: theravada (sri lanka, thailand; monastic, self-disciplined), mahayana (east asia; compassion-centred, home of the bodhisattva who postpones nirvana to help others), vajrayana (tibet; tantras, mantras, mandalas). the theravada canon is the threefold tipitaka; mahayana elevates texts like the lotus sutra.

judaism#

begins in covenant: God’s agreement with abraham (~1800 BCE), passed to isaac and jacob, sealed in the exodus from egypt under moses (~1250 BCE) and the giving of the torah at sinai. one supreme, personal, incorporeal God — maimonides’ third principle — who acts in history to save his people. humans are created in the image of God, live once, and face judgment.

the canon is the tanach: torah (5 books), neviyim (8), ketuvim (11); the talmud (~500 CE) is its great commentary. observance is structured by 613 commandments, distilled in the decalogue. modern subdivisions — orthodox, conservative, reform — differ over tradition and change.

christianity#

the largest religion on earth. jesus of nazareth (c. 6 BCE – 30 CE), understood by christians as the awaited jewish messiah and the incarnate son of God: baptised in the jordan, preaching the kingdom of God, healing in the tradition of moses and elijah, executed by crucifixion, and — the claim on which everything turns — raised from the dead. the incarnation forces the trinity: three divine persons in one divine essence.

history split it twice: east and west in the great schism of 1054 (orthodoxy vs rome), then the west again in the 16th-century reformation (catholic vs protestant: lutheran, anglican, calvinist, baptist…). the bible is the jewish tanach rearranged as the old testament plus 27 new testament books. seven sacraments punctuate life from baptism to the anointing of the sick.

islam#

muhammad (c. 570–632 CE), a merchant of mecca, began receiving revelations at forty — collected as the qur’an — and preached the absolute oneness of God against meccan opposition, migrating to medina in 622 (the hijra, year zero of the muslim calendar). mecca surrendered; its shrine, the ka’bah, became islam’s centre. muhammad is the last and greatest in the line of prophets that includes moses and jesus.

practice rests on the five pillars: shahadah (profession), salat (prayer), zakat (alms), sawm (the ramadan fast), hajj (pilgrimage). the hadith — sayings of the prophet — complement the qur’an. the great division is over succession: sunnis accept abu bakr and the elected caliphs; shi’ites hold that leadership belonged to ali, muhammad’s son-in-law. 𐃏

daoism#

the tradition least interested in being one: daoists historically don’t self-identify. the legendary founder laozi (“old master”), a contemporary of confucius, wrote the daode jing and disappeared westward; organised daoism emerges in the late han (1st c. CE) with laozi deified as lord lao. the pantheon is a heavenly bureaucracy crowned by the three pure ones, but above even them lies the Dao — the way, the unfathomable origin — and the daoist aim is to harmonise thought and action effortlessly with it (wu wei).

two living schools: zhengyi (south; married priests, exorcisms, healings) and quanzhen (north; ascetic, mystical, buddhist-influenced, headquartered at the white cloud monastery in beijing). the daozang collects 1400+ scrolls in three “caverns”; the daode jing and the zhuangzi matter to everyone.

themes across traditions#

images of the divine#

the sharpest possible contrast. judaism and islam forbid images of God outright — any finite image of infinite transcendence can only mislead, so aesthetic energy pours into calligraphy, geometry and ornament instead. 𐃏 hinduism takes the opposite bet: the murti is a consecrated statue — honey- and butter-purified, prayer-installed — through which the infinite (nirguna, beyond attributes) is made graspable (saguna, with attributes); worship before it is darshana, seeking a hearing. buddhism began aniconic — the wheel, the bodhi tree, the lotus stood in for the teacher, reportedly at his own request — until anthropomorphic buddhas appear in the 1st c. CE, their hand positions (mudras) encoding meditation, alms, temptation resisted, teaching. christianity splits internally: icons in the east (defended through the iconoclasm crises), statues in the catholic west, bare walls in much of protestantism.

food#

hinduism ties diet directly to liberation: food affects karma, karma gates moksha. vaishnavas rank foods by the gunas — sattva (vegetables, fruit, dairy: “smooth, firm and pleasant” per the gita), rajas (meat, spice: excites passion), tamas (lethargy and dullness) — and the laws of manu are blunt: “meat can never be obtained without injury to living creatures… let him shun the use of meat.” ahimsa (non-violence) plus higher sattvic expectations make the brahmin class especially vegetarian, and the kitchen the purest room in the house. christianity dropped food law almost entirely on jesus’ authority — “whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile” (mark) — keeping only seasonal discipline: lent’s fasting, entered through mardi gras, “greasy tuesday”, the last blowout before austerity. daoism aims diet, like everything, at harmony with the dao and the cultivation of internal energy. (judaism’s kashrut and islam’s halal are the other great food codes — law persisting where christianity let it lapse.)

morals#

arranged by where the moral law comes from. in hinduism, dharma is not decreed by a creator — it is a natural law intrinsic to the universe, split into vishesha dharma (duties of your particular station: caste, gender, age) and sadharana dharma (universal norms), catalogued in patanjali’s five yamas (restraints: non-violence, honesty, non-theft, continence, non-greed) and five niyamas (purity, contentment, perseverance, study, devotion). in judaism, by contrast, God personally imposes ethical integrity — through 613 commandments distilled into the decalogue: the first tablet governs the vertical relationship with God, the second the horizontal norms that underpin every human culture. the talmud adds the seven noahide laws, a pre-sinai moral floor for all humanity. buddhism relocates authority again — neither cosmos nor creator but the diagnosis of suffering itself: the four noble truths ground the eightfold path, whose practical core is the pancasila: refrain from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, false speech, intoxicants. 𐃏

pilgrimage#

islam binds it tightest: the hajj is the fifth pillar, qur’anically incumbent on every muslim able to make it — “pilgrimage to the House is a duty owed to Allah by all who can find a way” — and mecca’s inner precinct has admitted only muslims since 632. hinduism pilgrimages (tirtha-yatra) for many reasons — answered prayers, gratitude, vows, purification — with bathing as the physical form of the last; the ganges, flowing in myth from the milky way through shiva’s hair, is the most sacred water, and to die at varanasi with your ashes in the river is held to grant instant moksha. buddhism walks the founder’s biography: lumbini (birth), bodhgaya (awakening), sarnath (first sermon), kusinagara (death). (judaism had the temple pilgrimage festivals; christianity its jerusalem, rome and santiago roads — devotional rather than obligatory.)

sun and moon#

calendars are theology you can date things by. christianity runs solar — but on two clocks: gregory XIII’s 1582 reform corrected the julian year (365.25 days) to 365.2425, close to the true 365.2422; the east kept julius caesar’s calendar, the 10-day gap has stretched to 13, and orthodox festivals now trail western ones. islam runs purely lunar: twelve months of 29 or 30 days, decreed by qur’an 9:36, so every festival drifts through the seasons on a 33-year cycle — which muslims read as mercy, since ramadan’s dawn-to-dusk fast is not condemned to perpetual summer. daoist festivals follow the chinese lunisolar reckoning, requiring, like islam’s, an actual study of the sky.

a closing symmetry#

the deepest split isn’t east/west but once vs again: the abrahamic once-lived life aimed at judgment, versus the dharmic wheel aimed at release. yet the practical advice converges from both directions — restrain violence, appetite and dishonesty; make the journey; mark the milestones; eat as if it mattered. the religions disagree profoundly about why those things matter, and agree almost completely that they do. 𐃏