Beliefs and Meaning A path through The Default Library ======================================== The world's religions in their own words and in historians' words, and the experiences beneath them. Step 1. The World's Religions, One Page Each -------------------------------------------- Why: The world's religions, one page each. About three in four people on Earth identify with a religion. Whatever your own beliefs, understanding what billions of people actually hold to be true — in their own terms — is one of the most direct ways to understand humanity itself. This is a fair, compact survey: what each tradition teaches, not what to think of it. A note on approach before we start: this piece describes what each tradition teaches and how its adherents understand it, without asserting any of it as objectively true or false, and without ranking traditions against each other. Each is vast, internally diverse, and lived differently by different communities and individuals — a page can only be a doorway, not the whole house. Adherent numbers are approximate global estimates. 🕉️ Hinduism~1.2 billion adherents No single founder · developed over ~3,500+ years in the Indian subcontinent Core teachingA vast family of traditions united by belief in a single underlying reality (Brahman) expressed through many forms and deities; the soul (atman) is reborn across lifetimes (samsara) according to one's actions (karma) until it achieves liberation (moksha). PracticesDevotional worship (puja) to chosen deities, temple ritual, yoga and meditation, pilgrimage, and a wide range of regional and family traditions — there is no single required practice for all Hindus. TextsThe Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, and epics like the Mahabharata and Ramayana. ☸️ Buddhism~320–500 million adherents (counts vary widely) Founded by Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), c. 5th century BCE, in what is now Nepal/India Core teachingLife involves suffering (dukkha) caused by craving and attachment; suffering can end by following the Eightfold Path — ethical conduct, mental discipline, and wisdom — toward liberation (nirvana). Notably, Buddhism does not center on a creator god. PracticesMeditation, mindfulness, ethical precepts (e.g., non-harm), monastic life for some, and devotional practice in many lay traditions. Major branches (Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana) vary significantly. TextsThe Pali Canon (Theravada), and a wide range of additional sutras in Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions. ✡️ Judaism~15 million adherents Traditionally traced to Abraham; the covenant at Sinai under Moses, c. 2nd millennium BCE, in the ancient Near East Core teachingOne God who entered into a covenant with the Jewish people, given through the Torah — a comprehensive body of law and ethical teaching intended to guide every part of life. Central to Judaism is being a distinct people bound by this covenant. PracticesTorah study, prayer (often communal, in a synagogue), Sabbath observance, dietary laws (kashrut), and a rich calendar of holy days (Passover, Yom Kippur, and others). TextsThe Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), the Talmud, and extensive later rabbinic commentary. ✝️ Christianity~2.3 billion adherents Founded on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, 1st century CE, in the Roman province of Judea Core teachingJesus is believed to be the Son of God, whose death and resurrection offer humanity reconciliation with God and eternal life; central teachings emphasize love of God and neighbor, grace, and forgiveness. Major branches (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant) share this core while differing on authority, sacraments, and practice. PracticesCommunal worship, prayer, the sacraments (baptism, communion, and others depending on tradition), and study of scripture. TextsThe Bible — the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament. ☪️ Islam~2 billion adherents Founded by the Prophet Muhammad, 7th century CE, in the Arabian Peninsula Core teachingSubmission to the one God (Allah), who revealed the Quran to Muhammad as the final prophet in a line including Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Life is oriented around the Five Pillars: faith, prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage. PracticesFive daily prayers, fasting during Ramadan, almsgiving (zakat), pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj) if able, and the declaration of faith (shahada). Major branches include Sunni and Shia Islam. TextsThe Quran, and the Hadith (recorded sayings and actions of Muhammad). 🪯 Sikhism~30 million adherents Founded by Guru Nanak, late 15th century CE, in the Punjab region of South Asia Core teachingOne formless God, equally present in all people regardless of caste, gender, or creed; a life devoted to honest work, sharing with others, and constant remembrance of God, taught through a line of ten human Gurus. PracticesDaily prayer and meditation on God's name, communal worship and shared meals (langar) open to all, and for initiated Sikhs, wearing the Five Ks (including uncut hair and a turban). TextsThe Guru Granth Sahib, regarded as the living, eternal Guru. ☯️ Taoism & Confucianism~few hundred million, esp. in China Traditionally linked to Laozi and Confucius, c. 6th century BCE, in ancient China Core teachingTwo intertwined threads of Chinese thought. Taoism teaches living in harmony with the Tao — the natural, underlying way of the universe — through simplicity, balance, and non-forcing (wu wei). Confucianism emphasizes ethical conduct, social harmony, and duty within relationships (family, ruler and subject, friend and friend) as the path to a good society. PracticesTaoist ritual, meditation, and practices like tai chi; Confucian emphasis on education, ritual propriety, and filial respect. Often practiced alongside Buddhism and folk traditions rather than exclusively. TextsThe Tao Te Ching (Taoism); the Analects (Confucianism). 🔥 Zoroastrianism~100,000–200,000 adherents today Founded by the prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra) in ancient Iran; scholars' dates for him range from about 1500 to 500 BCE Core teachingOne of the oldest continuously practiced monotheistic religions, centered on a single wise god (Ahura Mazda) and a cosmic struggle between truth/order and falsehood/chaos, with humans called to choose good thoughts, words, and deeds. Many scholars think its ideas shaped later Abrahamic beliefs about heaven, hell and a final judgment, though how much is still debated. PracticesPrayer facing a source of light (often fire, a symbol of purity), rituals maintained by priests, and ethical living as spiritual practice. TextsThe Avesta. 🌿 Indigenous & folk traditionshundreds of millions worldwide (estimates vary by method) Countless distinct traditions, many predating written history, across every inhabited continent Core teachingEnormously diverse, but many share a view of the natural and spiritual worlds as deeply interconnected, honoring ancestors, spirits, and the land, with knowledge often passed orally through generations rather than in a single text. PracticesHighly varied by culture: ceremony, storytelling, connection to specific sacred places, and practices tied closely to a community's particular land and history. TextsPrimarily oral tradition rather than a single scripture, though some traditions have written or recorded elements. 🚫 No religious affiliation~1.9 billion people ("nones") A large and growing global category, not a single movement Core teachingIncludes atheists (who don't believe in a god or gods), agnostics (who hold that a god's existence is unknown or unknowable), and people who simply don't identify with organized religion, some of whom still hold spiritual beliefs (see Spiritual, Not Religious, in this library). PracticesNo shared practice — approaches to meaning, ethics, and community vary widely and are often built through philosophy, humanism, science, family, or personal reflection. TextsNone shared; secular and humanist traditions each draw on their own literature. Each of these is a whole civilization's answer to being human. None fits on a page — but the doorway is worth opening. Why survey all of this? Not to flatten these traditions into trivia, and not to suggest they're interchangeable — they make genuinely different, often incompatible claims about reality, and taking any one of them seriously means taking its specific claims seriously. But most conflict and misunderstanding between people of different (or no) faith starts from not knowing what the other actually believes, filled in instead with assumption or caricature. A basic, accurate map is a small act of respect — for the traditions, and for the billions of people who structure their entire lives around them. From here, *What They All Seem to Agree On* looks at the surprising threads running underneath this diversity. The takeaway The great religious traditions each offer a distinct, coherent answer to ultimate questions — about God or gods, suffering, the soul, and how to live — practiced by billions of people in their own terms. Knowing the outline of each, accurately and without judgment, is a basic form of understanding the human family you actually belong to, whatever you personally believe. Try this: pick one tradition that isn't your own (or isn't the one you know best) and read one primary text passage from it — a psalm, a sutra, a sura, a verse of the Tao Te Ching. Encountering it in its own words, even briefly, teaches more than any summary. Sources & Further Reading Scope & sources. Adherent figures are rounded 2020 estimates from Pew Research Center, "How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020" (June 2025): Christians 2.3 billion, Muslims about 2 billion (25.6%), unaffiliated 1.9 billion, Hindus 1.2 billion, Buddhists 324 million, Jews 14.8 million; 75.8% of people identify with a religion. Pew's earlier 2010 count put Buddhists near 490 million and folk-religion followers near 400 million; its 2025 report folds folk religions into a 2.2% "other religions" group, so those numbers depend heavily on how blended practice in East Asia is counted. Figures shift over time and by methodology. Descriptions aim to state each tradition's core teachings as its adherents understand them, not to affirm or deny their truth, and necessarily compress traditions with enormous internal diversity. 📘 The World's Religions — Huston Smith (a classic, respectful, readable survey) 🌐 Pew Research Center — Religion (adherent data and global surveys) 📘 God: A Human History — Reza Aslan 🌐 BBC Religion — accessible overviews of each tradition Step 2. What They All Seem to Agree On -------------------------------------- Why: What they all seem to agree on. Different gods, different scriptures, different rituals, born on different continents thousands of years apart, often with no contact between them. And yet, look closely, and the world's wisdom traditions keep landing on a strikingly similar handful of ideas. That convergence is worth taking seriously — not as proof of any one religion, but as a clue about something true about being human. This isn't an argument that all religions are "really the same" — they aren't, and their differences matter deeply to the people who hold them (see The World's Religions, One Page Each). It's something more interesting: independent traditions, isolated by geography and centuries, kept arriving at overlapping answers to the hardest human questions. When separate minds converge on the same idea without copying each other, it's usually because they're all looking at something real. The Golden Rule, everywhere Perhaps the most famous convergence: some version of "treat others as you wish to be treated" appears, independently, across nearly every major tradition. Christianity: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Judaism: Rabbi Hillel's "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow." Confucianism: "Do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself." Buddhism: "Treat not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful." Islam: "None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself." Hinduism's Mahabharata offers a near-identical line. This same ethical core, arrived at separately by traditions with no shared origin, suggests something close to a universal moral intuition — reciprocity as the seed of ethics — that different cultures each dressed in their own language. Suffering comes from clinging, and letting go is the cure Buddhism builds an entire philosophy around this insight: craving and attachment generate suffering, and release from that grasping brings peace. But the same intuition surfaces well beyond Buddhism. The Stoics taught that suffering comes from over-attaching to things outside our control, and peace comes from releasing that grip (see Stoicism for Real Life). Many Christian and Sufi mystics describe a similar surrender — releasing ego and personal will as the doorway to grace. Taoism's wu wei teaches flowing with reality rather than straining against it. Different vocabularies, strikingly similar core diagnosis: much of our suffering is self-manufactured by our grip, not forced on us by the world. Something within us exceeds the ordinary self Across traditions, there's a recurring claim that beneath the everyday, chattering self lies something deeper — a soul, an inner divine spark, a "true nature," a witness beyond thought. Hinduism's atman is described as ultimately continuous with Brahman, the ground of all being. Christian and Islamic mysticism speak of an inner light or divine image within each person. Buddhism, distinctively, teaches no fixed permanent self (anatta) — yet even here, the practice aims at a spacious awareness beneath the surface noise of ordinary identity. However each tradition frames it, there's a shared conviction that who you take yourself to be, day to day, is not the whole story — and that touching what's beneath it changes everything. (See Mysticism 101 for more.) Across cultures with no contact, humans keep reporting the same discovery: there's more beneath the self than the self usually notices. This life is not the whole of reality Nearly every tradition insists that the visible, everyday world is not all there is — whether that's expressed as an afterlife, reincarnation, a spiritual realm interpenetrating this one, or a transcendent reality beneath appearances. The specifics diverge enormously and matter enormously to believers. But the shared intuition — that mundane, everyday reality doesn't exhaust what's real — appears almost universally, suggesting either a very old, very widespread human need, or a very old, very widespread human insight, or both at once. Practices for quieting the mind converge too Nearly every tradition independently developed some version of contemplative practice — prayer, meditation, chanting, fasting, silence, repetitive movement — aimed at quieting the ordinary mind. Christian centering prayer, Buddhist and Hindu meditation, Islamic dhikr (rhythmic remembrance), Jewish contemplative prayer, Indigenous ceremony and vision practices: different theologies, remarkably similar technology for altering ordinary consciousness. That convergence on method, independent of the convergence on belief, is one of the strongest hints that something real and reproducible is being accessed. Ethical conduct, humility, and compassion are universally prized Set aside metaphysics entirely and look only at the character each tradition holds up as admirable: humility over pride, compassion over cruelty, generosity over greed, self-control over indulgence, honesty over deceit. This near-universal moral core is why people raised in entirely different traditions can still recognize a "good person" in each other on sight — the ethical vocabulary differs, but the shape of the virtue looks remarkably the same. Why this convergence matters, whatever you believe Three honest ways to read this pattern, none requiring you to accept any one religion's specific claims: If you're religious, the convergence can be read as evidence of a shared spiritual reality that different cultures, in their own idioms, each managed to glimpse. If you're skeptical of the supernatural, the convergence still points to something real: durable psychological and social truths — about ego, suffering, ethics, and altered states of mind — that many independent human societies discovered through millennia of lived trial and error, long before psychology existed as a formal science. Either way, the practical wisdom is worth taking on its own terms: reciprocity as the root of ethics, non-attachment as a path through suffering, a "deeper self" worth attending to, and contemplative practice as a real tool for the mind. You don't have to sign onto a religion's full cosmology to benefit from noticing what its wisest practitioners, across every culture, kept independently discovering. The takeaway Despite radically different gods, texts, and origins, the world's wisdom traditions converge on a striking set of ideas: some form of the Golden Rule, suffering traced to clinging and eased by release, a self deeper than the everyday one, a reality larger than the visible world, contemplative practices for quieting the mind, and a shared core of admired virtues. This convergence, arrived at independently, is worth taking seriously as a clue about something real in human nature — whether you read it as spiritual evidence or as hard-won, cross-cultural psychological wisdom. Try this: think of one piece of "wisdom" you've absorbed from your own background (religious or not) and see if you can find its echo in a tradition far from your own. Finding the same insight wearing different clothes is one of the most quietly moving discoveries available to a curious mind. Sources & Further Reading Sources - The cross-cultural recurrence of the Golden Rule is well documented in comparative religious studies (e.g., collected in interfaith and Parliament of the World's Religions materials). - The perennialist observation of convergent themes across mystical and wisdom traditions is most associated with Aldous Huxley's concept of a "perennial philosophy," though it remains a debated interpretive lens rather than a settled consensus among scholars of religion. Go deeper - 📘 The Perennial Philosophy — Aldous Huxley (the classic statement of this convergence thesis) - 📘 The World's Religions — Huston Smith - 📘 The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James (a foundational, evenhanded psychological study) - 🌐 Companion pieces in this library: The World's Religions, One Page Each and Mysticism 101 Step 3. Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It ---------------------------------------- Why: Ritual: why humans can't quit it. You have rituals. Not "spiritual" ones, necessarily — the specific way you make coffee, the words you say at a birthday, the handshake, the graduation gown, the moment of silence. No known human culture, past or present, has ever existed without ritual. That universality is a clue: ritual isn't decoration on top of being human. It's doing real psychological work. A ritual is a formal, repeated action performed the same way each time, often symbolic, whose meaning comes less from its practical effect and more from the doing itself. Blowing out candles doesn't do anything to the cake. Standing for a national anthem doesn't do anything physical at all. And yet skip these, and something clearly feels missing. That gap between "does nothing functional" and "clearly matters" is exactly what makes ritual worth examining. Ritual marks the boundaries of time One of ritual's oldest jobs is turning the vague passage of time into meaningful chapters. A wedding doesn't just formalize a relationship that already existed — it creates a felt, remembered before and after, a line the couple and everyone watching can point to. Birthdays, graduations, funerals, New Year's — each takes something that happens gradually and continuously (aging, learning, grief, the calendar turning) and gives it a sharp, marked moment. Humans seem to need these markers; without them, life can feel like an undifferentiated blur. A ritual takes a fact and turns it into an experience. That's not decoration — it's how meaning gets installed. Ritual regulates emotion — and the body backs this up This isn't just poetic language. Research on ritual behavior finds it genuinely calms the nervous system: the repetitive, structured nature of ritual action is associated with reduced anxiety, particularly around uncertainty and loss. This is likely why grief rituals — wakes, sitting shiva, specific mourning customs — appear in virtually every culture: they give devastated, disoriented people something to physically do, and structured doing is a documented salve for chaotic feeling (The 90-Second Rule looks at the other half of handling strong feeling: letting the physical surge pass before you act on it). Pre-performance rituals among athletes and performers work similarly, channeling anxiety into controlled, familiar motion rather than raw nerves. Ritual builds group identity out of separate individuals Sharing a synchronized action — a chant, a shared meal, standing together, moving in unison — produces a well-documented psychological effect: people who ritualize together feel measurably more bonded, trusting, and willing to cooperate afterward than people who simply spend the same time together without shared ritual. Military drilling, religious liturgy, sports chants, and team huddles all lean on this same mechanism, whether or not anyone involved thinks of it as "ritual." Synchrony, it turns out, is one of the most efficient tools humans have for turning a collection of strangers into something that feels like "us." Ritual makes the intangible feel real Some of what matters most in life — commitment, respect, gratitude, loss — has no physical form. You can't hold "I take this seriously" in your hand. Ritual solves this by giving abstract commitments a concrete, repeatable shell: a ring, a vow spoken aloud, a moment of silence, a specific gesture of respect. The action becomes a container the feeling can live in and be remembered by — which is also why rituals performed carelessly ("going through the motions") feel hollow: the container is there, but nothing was poured into it. Why ritual survives even where religion has receded This is the striking part: as formal religious participation has declined in many places, ritual itself hasn't gone anywhere — it's simply migrated into secular life. Graduation ceremonies, sports pre-game traditions, personal morning routines, retirement parties, moments of silence for tragedy, even a gym-goer's exact pre-workout sequence: all genuine rituals, doing the same psychological work religious rituals always did, stripped of any specific cosmology. This strongly suggests ritual isn't a religious phenomenon that happens to have psychological side-effects — it's a human need that religion has historically been one especially rich vessel for meeting, but never the only possible one. Building rituals of your own You don't need a tradition's permission to use this. Deliberately marking a transition (a small personal ceremony when you finish a hard chapter), creating a repeated shared action with people you love (a specific weekly dinner, a phrase said at parting), or giving a recurring practice a consistent form (the same few steps, in the same order, every time) all tap the same mechanism traditions have refined for millennia. The action doesn't need cosmic backing to do its psychological work — it needs repetition, intention, and a bit of your genuine attention. The takeaway Every known human culture practices ritual because it does real, measurable psychological work: marking the boundaries of time so life doesn't blur together, regulating emotion (especially grief and anxiety) through structured repeated action, bonding groups through synchronized behavior, and giving intangible things like commitment and respect a concrete form to live in. As formal religion has declined in places, ritual has simply migrated into secular life rather than disappearing — a strong sign it's a human need, not merely a religious one. Try this: notice one ritual you already have without calling it that — a routine, a phrase, a small repeated gesture — and ask what psychological work it's quietly doing for you. Then consider deliberately creating one small ritual for a transition or relationship that currently has none. Sources & Further Reading Sources - Research on ritual reducing anxiety and its physiological correlates includes work by Nicholas Hobson, Francesca Gino, and colleagues in behavioral science and psychology. - The bonding effects of synchronized ritual behavior are documented in social psychology (e.g., research on "synchrony" and cooperation by Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath, among others). - The universality of ritual across human cultures is a foundational finding of anthropology. Go deeper - 📘 Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living — Dimitris Xygalatas (a researcher's accessible synthesis of the science) - 📘 The Power of Ritual — Casper ter Kuile (secular ritual-building, practically applied) - 📺 Search "the psychology of ritual" — accessible summaries of the anxiety-reduction and bonding research - 🌐 Companion piece: The 90-Second Rule (in this library) — on letting an emotion's physical surge pass Step 4. Meditation, Without the Woo ----------------------------------- Why: Meditation without the woo. Strip away the incense and the mystique and meditation is a simple, trainable skill with some of the best-replicated evidence in psychology behind it. Here's what it actually does, how to do it correctly, and a working timer to start right now. Meditation has ancient roots across many traditions (see Mysticism 101), and it's genuinely fine to practice it as a spiritual discipline if that's meaningful to you. But you don't need any belief system to benefit. At its core, meditation is simply structured attention training — repeatedly noticing when your mind has wandered and gently bringing it back. That's it. Everything else is technique variation on that one move. What the evidence actually shows Meditation research has matured a great deal, including large studies and neuroimaging — with the important honest caveat that some early, flashier claims haven't fully held up under later scrutiny. What's reasonably well-supported: Attention & focusRegular practice is associated with measurable improvements in sustained attention and reduced mind-wandering — the core skill directly being trained. Stress reactivityPractices like mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) show real, replicated reductions in stress and anxiety symptoms in clinical studies. Emotional regulationfMRI studies show meditators showing different patterns of amygdala reactivity to stressors — consistent with the subjective reports of feeling less "hijacked" by emotion (see Why You Feel Before You Think). Brain structureSome studies find modest structural changes in long-term meditators' brains (e.g., in regions tied to attention and interoception) — an active, still-developing area of research. The honest caveat: effect sizes in this field are often modest, not miraculous, and meditation is not a cure-all — some research syntheses (e.g., a widely-cited 2014 JAMA meta-analysis) find moderate evidence for anxiety, depression, and pain, but insufficient evidence for many broader claims sometimes made about it. Meditation isn't about emptying your mind. It's about noticing when it wanders — and coming back, without self-judgment, again and again. The one thing beginners get wrong People often quit because they believe meditation should feel like calm, blank stillness — and when their mind keeps producing thoughts anyway, they conclude they're "bad at it." This gets the practice backwards. The wandering is not a failure of meditation — noticing the wandering and returning is the entire exercise, the mental equivalent of a rep in the gym. A session full of distraction, where you notice and return fifty times, is not a bad session. It's fifty reps of exactly the skill you're building. Try it now: a timer Pick a length, sit comfortably, and press start. A gentle tone marks the beginning and end — no app, no account, no distraction. Meditation Timer 1 min 3 min 5 min 10 min 3:00 Ready ▶ Start Stop Sit comfortably, breathe naturally, eyes open or closed. When your mind wanders — it will — just notice, and gently return to your breath. That's the whole practice. Three ways in, if you want variety Breath focus. Rest attention on the physical sensation of breathing — air at the nostrils, or the rise and fall of the chest. When you notice you've drifted into thought, gently return. The most common starting technique for good reason: simple, portable, always available. Body scan. Slowly move attention through the body, region by region, noticing sensation without trying to change anything. Good for settling into the body and often easier for restless beginners than pure breath focus. Open awareness. Rather than anchoring to one thing, simply notice whatever arises — sounds, sensations, thoughts — without grabbing onto any of it. Usually easier after some practice with the more structured techniques above. Making it stick Consistency matters more than duration — a daily 3-minute practice reliably outperforms an occasional 30-minute one, mirroring the same "small and consistent beats large and sporadic" pattern behind habit formation generally (see How Habits Actually Form). Anchor it to an existing habit (right after you wake, right after brushing your teeth) rather than relying on remembering. And expect a wandering mind forever — even experienced meditators report constant mental chatter. The skill isn't a quiet mind; it's a practiced, non-judgmental return. The takeaway Meditation is attention training: noticing when the mind wanders and returning, repeatedly, without judgment. It has real, replicated (if modest) evidence for attention, stress, and emotional reactivity — not a cure-all, but a genuinely useful trainable skill, available with or without any spiritual framework. The wandering mind isn't failure; noticing and returning to it is the entire exercise. Try this: use the timer above right now for just three minutes. Don't aim for a blank mind — aim to notice wandering and return, even if that happens twenty times in three minutes. That's a complete, successful session. Sources & Further Reading Sources. Attention, stress-reduction, and emotional-regulation findings draw on mindfulness research including MBSR studies (Jon Kabat-Zinn's foundational work) and neuroimaging research (e.g., Richard Davidson, Sara Lazar). The caveat on modest effect sizes and mixed evidence for broader claims reflects meta-analyses such as Goyal et al., JAMA Internal Medicine, 2014. Not a substitute for treatment of clinical anxiety or depression. 📘 Altered Traits — Daniel Goleman & Richard Davidson (a rigorous, evidence-focused look at what meditation does and doesn't do) 📘 Wherever You Go, There You Are — Jon Kabat-Zinn (the accessible classic on secular mindfulness) 🌐 Free guided practice: Ten Percent Happier and UCLA Mindful (free guided sessions) 🌐 Companion piece: Mysticism 101 (in this library) — for the contemplative traditions this practice is drawn from Step 5. How the Sacred Texts Were Written ----------------------------------------- Why: How the sacred texts were written. In the winter of 1946–47, Bedouin shepherds exploring caves above the Dead Sea found clay jars holding ancient scrolls. Among them was an almost complete copy of the Book of Isaiah, made more than two thousand years ago, about a millennium older than the oldest full Hebrew Bible manuscripts scholars had worked from until then. Overnight, people could check how faithfully a sacred text had been copied across ten centuries. How did the world's scriptures come to exist, and how did they reach us? Every tradition has its own answer, and modern scholarship has another. This piece describes both, respectfully, without deciding between them. Two ways of asking the question The tradition's question: where does this text come from? The answers are religious: given by God to Moses, revealed to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, inspired by the Holy Spirit, "heard" by ancient seers, spoken by the Buddha. The historian's question: how did this text take the form we now hold? The answers come from manuscripts, languages, archaeology and comparison: who wrote things down, when, how texts were copied, edited and collected. Many believers see no conflict between the two. A text can be divinely inspired and have a human history of being written, copied and gathered. Others hold that some scholarly conclusions do conflict with their faith. What follows is the mainstream scholarly picture, with each tradition's own view alongside. Scholarship can tell you how a text travelled through time. It cannot tell you whether God spoke it. Those are different questions. The Vedas: a library carried in memory The Rigveda, the oldest of Hinduism's Vedas, is a collection of more than a thousand hymns in an early form of Sanskrit. Hindu tradition regards the Vedas as śruti, "that which is heard": eternal truth perceived by ancient seers, not composed by them. Scholars generally date the bulk of the hymns to somewhere around 1500–1000 BCE. For well over a thousand years, the Rigveda was passed on almost entirely by memory. Priestly families developed ingenious recitation methods, chanting the text word by word, in pairs, and in patterned sequences, so that any slip would be caught. The oldest surviving written manuscripts date only to around the 11th century CE. Scholars regard the precision of this oral transmission as one of the great feats of human memory. The Pali Canon: the Buddha's words, recited The Buddha taught in the 5th century BCE (the exact dates are debated), and left no writings. According to Theravada tradition, his followers gathered soon after his death to recite his teachings together, and the teachings were then passed on orally by communities of monks for centuries. In Sri Lanka, in the 1st century BCE, monks wrote the collection down on palm leaves because, the island's chronicles say, famine and war threatened to kill the reciters who carried it. That collection, in the Pali language, is the Pali Canon. How much goes back to the Buddha himself? Scholars disagree. Some argue the core teachings are so coherent they must come from one mind; others think much was shaped over the following centuries. Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism also hold many further scriptures, the sutras, which emerged in later centuries. The Hebrew Bible: centuries of writing and gathering Jewish tradition holds that God gave the Torah, the first five books, to Moses. Most modern scholars see the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh, which Christians call the Old Testament) as written, edited and collected over many centuries in the first millennium BCE, with much of it reaching its final shape after the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BCE. The Book of Daniel is generally dated to around 164 BCE. The Dead Sea Scrolls, from roughly the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, gave scholars a window onto that process. They show both remarkable stability in the tradition that became the standard Hebrew text and real variety in other copies circulating before the text was standardised. The New Testament: letters first, then Gospels The oldest Christian writings are not the Gospels but letters from the apostle Paul, written to young churches in the late 40s and 50s CE. Most scholars date the Gospel of Mark, the earliest Gospel, to around 70 CE, and Matthew, Luke and John to the decades after. Christians hold these texts to be inspired by God. Which books belonged in the collection was settled gradually. The earliest list matching the 27 books of today's New Testament comes from Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria in 367 CE, and regional church councils in North Africa in 393 and 397 confirmed a list that churches already largely used. The Quran: revelation, memory and a standard text Muslims believe the Quran is the literal word of God, revealed to the Prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel over about 23 years, from around 610 CE until his death in 632. It was memorised by his companions and written on whatever materials were at hand. According to Islamic tradition, the first caliph, Abu Bakr, had the text gathered into a single collection, and the third caliph, Uthman, around 650 CE, had a standard written copy made and sent to the main cities. In 2015 the University of Birmingham announced that two parchment leaves of a Quran manuscript in its collection had been radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 CE, at 95 percent confidence, placing them among the oldest Quran fragments known. (Radiocarbon dates the animal skin, not the writing, so the text could be a little later.) Memorisation remains central today: millions of Muslims, called hafiz, know the whole Quran by heart. At a glance Text Tradition's view Scholarly estimate of composition Written down / fixed Rigveda Eternal truth "heard" by seers c. 1500–1000 BCE Oral for well over a millennium Pali Canon The Buddha's teaching From the 5th century BCE onward Written in Sri Lanka, 1st century BCE Hebrew Bible Torah given to Moses; prophets inspired Over centuries in the 1st millennium BCE Final shape after the exile; canon settled by around the 2nd century CE New Testament Inspired by God c. 48–120 CE 27-book list by 367 CE Quran God's word revealed to Muhammad 610–632 CE Standard copy under Uthman, c. 650 CE Guru Granth Sahib The eternal living Guru 15th–17th centuries Compiled by Guru Arjan in 1604; final edition 1704 The Sikh scripture is an unusual case: it was compiled by the Gurus themselves, and alongside the Sikh Gurus' hymns it includes poems by Hindu and Muslim saints such as Kabir and Sheikh Farid. What the comparison shows Seen side by side, these histories share a pattern: memory comes first. Almost every tradition passed its sacred words on by mouth, often for generations, before writing became the main carrier, and several still treat recitation by heart as the purest form of the text. Writing, gathering and fixing a canon came later, often in moments of danger or division, when communities feared the teaching might be lost or distorted. The takeaway The world's scriptures reached us through long human processes: oral recitation, copying, collecting and agreeing on a canon, sometimes over centuries. Traditions explain their texts' origin as revelation or inspiration; scholars describe how those texts took shape in history. Both stories can be told honestly and side by side, and knowing both helps you understand why billions of people treat these words with such care. Try this: pick one scripture you know little about and read its opening passage, then look up the oldest surviving manuscript of it. Holding the words and their journey together changes how both feel. Sources & Further Reading Sources - Dead Sea Scrolls: discovery 1946–47, dating (3rd century BCE–1st century CE), and what they show about textual stability and variety; Israel Antiquities Authority and the standard scholarly literature. - Rigveda dating and oral transmission (e.g., Jamison & Brereton, The Rigveda, 2014); oldest manuscripts c. 11th century CE. - Pali Canon: oral transmission and writing down in Sri Lanka, 1st century BCE; range of scholarly views on its relation to the historical Buddha. - Hebrew Bible composition and canon: mainstream biblical scholarship (e.g., John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible). - Dating of Paul's letters and Mark's Gospel; Athanasius's Festal Letter of 367; Hippo (393) and Carthage (397). - Quran: Islamic tradition of compilation under Abu Bakr and Uthman; University of Birmingham radiocarbon results (July 2015). - Guru Granth Sahib: compiled 1604 by Guru Arjan; final edition 1704; affirmed as Guru in 1708. Go deeper - 📘 A History of the Bible — John Barton (how the Bible came to be, by a leading Oxford scholar) - 📘 The Study Quran — Seyyed Hossein Nasr (ed.) (translation with commentary drawn from Islamic tradition) - 🌐 The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library (high-resolution images of the scrolls themselves) - 🌐 Companion piece in this library: The World's Religions, One Page Each Step 6. Indigenous and Folk Religions: The Oldest Faiths on Earth ----------------------------------------------------------------- Why: Indigenous and folk religions, the oldest on Earth. Survey books about world religions usually march through Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, then add a last chapter with a vague title like "other traditions." Yet that last chapter covers the oldest religious life on the planet, practised in thousands of forms on every inhabited continent. Pew Research estimated that around 400 million people, about 6 percent of humanity, follow folk or traditional religions, and many more blend those practices with a world religion. Many of these traditions don't even have a word for "religion." What outsiders call religion is, for them, simply how you live with your land, your ancestors and the other beings around you. A note on approach: there is no single "Indigenous religion." There are thousands, each belonging to a particular people, and some knowledge is deliberately kept within those communities. This piece describes widely shared patterns and a few well-documented examples, in respectful outline. For anything deeper, the best sources are the communities themselves. What "Indigenous" and "folk" mean here Indigenous religions belong to particular peoples and their ancestral lands: the many traditions of Native American, First Nations, Aboriginal Australian, Sámi, Māori, Amazonian and other peoples. Ethnic or national traditions belong to a whole culture, such as Shinto in Japan, centred on kami, sacred powers present in nature, places and ancestors, honoured at shrines. Folk religion is the everyday religious life of ordinary people, often alongside an official faith. The largest example is Chinese folk religion: ancestor veneration, local gods, festivals and household shrines, which Pew found accounts for most of the world's folk religionists. Patterns that recur (with many exceptions) Place is sacred. Mountains, rivers, springs, rocks and groves are often not just symbols of the sacred; they are where the sacred lives. Moving a people off its land can cut it off from its religion. Ancestors remain present. The dead are often understood as still part of the community, to be honoured, consulted and fed. This idea is found from West Africa to East Asia to the Andes. The world is full of persons. The 19th-century anthropologist E. B. Tylor called this "animism" and treated it as a primitive mistake. Today many scholars reject that judgement. The religious-studies scholar Graham Harvey describes it instead as the view that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that living well means keeping respectful relationships with all of them. Knowledge travels by mouth and by ceremony. Teaching passes through story, song, dance and initiation rather than a single written scripture. That makes it no less precise: some oral traditions preserve huge bodies of detailed knowledge across generations. Reciprocity. Many ceremonies are about balance: you give back to the land, the spirits or the ancestors in return for what you take. For many traditions, the question is not "what do you believe?" but "how are you keeping your relationships?" Three examples Yoruba religion (West Africa and the Americas). Centred in southwestern Nigeria, Benin and Togo, it recognises a supreme creator, Olódùmarè, and many òrìṣà (orishas), divine powers linked to forces such as rivers, thunder and iron. Its Ifá divination system rests on a vast oral body of verses, which UNESCO recognised as part of humanity's intangible heritage in 2005. Carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans, it became the root of traditions such as Santería (Lucumí) in Cuba and Candomblé in Brazil, which are practised today across the Caribbean, Brazil and beyond. Aboriginal Australian traditions. Across roughly 250 language groups, the shared idea usually rendered in English as "the Dreaming" (Warlpiri Jukurrpa, among many local names) speaks of ancestral beings who shaped the land and the law, and whose presence continues in it. The English word comes from 1890s anthropologists, and many find it misleading: it can suggest something unreal or long past, when people describe it as a living reality, sometimes called the "everywhen." Songlines, sung routes across Country, carry knowledge of land, law and story. Andean traditions. In the highlands of Peru and Bolivia, offerings to Pachamama, often translated "Mother Earth," and to the spirits of the mountains continue alongside Catholic practice, a living example of how traditions blend rather than simply replace one another. The honest history: suppression and survival Many Indigenous religions survived deliberate attempts to stamp them out. A few examples among many: Where What happened Canada The "potlatch ban" in the Indian Act (1884–1951) made the potlatch ceremony of Pacific Northwest peoples a crime punishable by prison. It continued underground. United States Many Native ceremonies were restricted or banned. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 acknowledged that they had been "intruded upon, interfered with, and in a few instances banned." The Americas and Africa Under colonial rule and the slave trade, African and Indigenous practices were often outlawed, and survived by blending with Christian saints and festivals. In 2007 the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which includes the right to practise spiritual traditions and to the return of ceremonial objects and ancestral remains held by museums. Two live debates Blending: survival or dilution? Some practitioners see mixing with Christianity or Islam as a clever strategy that kept traditions alive; others work to restore older forms. Sharing or taking? Interest from outsiders can support revival, but it can also mean sacred practices sold as wellness products, or ceremonies performed without permission. Many communities ask that some things be learned only from them, and some not at all. The takeaway Indigenous and folk religions are the oldest and most varied religious life on Earth, followed in some form by hundreds of millions of people. Though they differ enormously, many share a sense that land is sacred, ancestors remain present, the world is full of non-human persons, and knowledge lives in story and ceremony. Many survived bans and persecution, and today they are reviving, debating how to stay true to themselves while the wider world takes an interest. Try this: find out whose ancestral land you live on and whether that people's traditions are still practised today. Many Indigenous nations and cultural centres publish their own introductions for visitors, written in their own voice. Sources & Further Reading Sources - Pew Research Center, "The Global Religious Landscape: Folk Religionists" (2012): about 405 million, ~6% of world population, mostly in China. - E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871); Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (2005), on the "new animism." - Yoruba religion and Ifá (UNESCO proclamation, 2005); its continuation in Santería and Candomblé. - The Dreaming: origin of the English term (Gillen and Spencer, 1890s), translation disputes, and W. E. H. Stanner's "everywhen." - Canada's potlatch ban (1884–1951); the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978). - UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (General Assembly resolution 61/295, 2007). Go deeper - 📘 Animism: Respecting the Living World — Graham Harvey (the modern rethinking of an old word) - 📘 Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer (a Potawatomi botanist on reciprocity with the living world) - 🌐 UN — Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples - 🌐 Companion pieces in this library: The World's Religions, One Page Each and Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It Step 7. Mysticism 101: The Experience Beneath Every Religion ------------------------------------------------------------ Why: Mysticism: the experience beneath every religion. Underneath the doctrines, the institutions, and the centuries of theological argument, nearly every religious tradition harbors a smaller, stranger current: people who claimed to have directly touched whatever the tradition points toward — not believed in it, not reasoned about it, but experienced it. That current is mysticism, and its reports are eerily consistent across traditions that never spoke to each other. Mysticism is often confused with superstition or vague "spirituality." Properly understood, it means something more specific: the pursuit and report of direct, unmediated experience of ultimate reality — however a given tradition names that reality — rather than belief arrived at through doctrine, argument, or authority. A mystic doesn't say "I believe there's a God." A mystic says, in whatever their tradition's language allows, "I encountered something, directly, and it changed me." Meet the mystics, across traditions Every major religion has produced this current, usually treated as a serious, sometimes central strand rather than a fringe: Christian mysticism — figures like Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, and Meister Eckhart described states of direct union with God, often through intense contemplative prayer, sometimes accompanied by what they called "the dark night of the soul" — a period of spiritual desolation preceding profound union. Sufism (Islamic mysticism) — poets and teachers like Rumi and Al-Ghazali sought fana, the dissolution of the individual ego into the divine, often through poetry, music, and the whirling meditative practice of the dervishes. Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) — a tradition of contemplative and symbolic practice aimed at direct apprehension of the divine, working through structured meditation on the nature of God and creation. Buddhist and Hindu contemplatives — describe states like samadhi or moksha: profound absorption or liberation reached through deep meditation, often depicted as dissolving the sense of a separate self entirely. Taoist sages — describe direct, wordless attunement to the Tao, the ineffable underlying way of reality, reached through stillness and non-striving rather than doctrine. The startling convergence: mystics describe the same thing Here's what should catch your attention. Scholars who have studied mystical reports across unconnected traditions and eras, from William James to Walter Stace, describe a consistent core of features showing up again and again, regardless of the mystic's religion, culture, or century: Unity — a sense that the ordinary boundary between self and everything else dissolves, replaced by a feeling of oneness with all things. Ineffability — the near-universal claim that the experience cannot be adequately captured in words; language is described as falling short, not just difficult. Noetic quality — the experience is reported not as a feeling or a belief but as a direct form of knowing — a conviction of having encountered something real and true, often more certain-feeling than ordinary knowledge. Transience — the state itself is usually brief, though its effects on the person can be lasting and profound. A sense of sacredness — accompanied by deep reverence, awe, and often overwhelming peace or love. A Christian contemplative in medieval Spain and a Buddhist monk in ancient India, who could never have read each other's accounts, describe strikingly similar structural features of their peak experience — even while interpreting what they encountered in the specific language of their own tradition (God, Brahman, the Tao, emptiness). This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence behind the "perennial philosophy" idea discussed in What They All Seem to Agree On: different cultures, using different names, may be reaching toward the same underlying territory of human experience. Not every scholar accepts this. "Constructivists" such as Steven Katz argue that experience is always shaped by the concepts a mystic brings to it, so a Christian and a Buddhist meet genuinely different things, and the similarity lies partly in the scholar's categories. The debate is still open. The mystics agree on what they found more than the theologians agree on what it means. Mysticism inside institutions — often an uneasy fit Interestingly, mystics have frequently sat in tension with their own religious institutions. Direct experience can feel destabilizing to organized authority — if truth is available firsthand to anyone through practice, what special role remains for doctrine and hierarchy? Several celebrated mystics faced real suspicion or censure from religious authorities in their own lifetimes, even as their traditions later canonized them as saints or masters. This tension is itself telling: it suggests mysticism is not simply religion turned up to maximum volume, but a somewhat distinct current running through and sometimes against institutional religion. Is this "real," or just brain chemistry? Modern neuroscience has studied experienced meditators and mystics and found real, measurable brain changes during these states — notably reduced activity in brain regions associated with the sense of a separate self and spatial boundary, which may help explain the reported dissolving of the self/other line. Some researchers see this as explaining away mystical experience (it's "just" neurons); others see it as showing how the brain accesses something genuinely significant, without settling whether the experience reveals objective truth or "merely" a state of the brain. This is a live, unresolved question — and reasonable, well-informed people land on very different sides of it, from those who see these experiences as direct contact with a transcendent reality to those who see them as a profound but purely neurological event. Both camps at least agree the states themselves are real and can be powerfully transformative for the person who has them. Why this matters even if you never have such an experience You don't need a mystical peak experience yourself to take something from this. It suggests that ordinary waking consciousness — the self bounded by skin, in a world of separate objects — may not be the only mode of experience available to a human mind, and that many serious, careful people across every culture and century have reported something beyond it, worth taking seriously as data even amid disagreement about what it means. It also reframes contemplative practice: not just as stress relief or self-improvement, but as a door that others, for millennia, have reported leads somewhere. The takeaway Beneath religious doctrine runs a distinct thread — mysticism — the pursuit of direct, experiential contact with ultimate reality rather than belief arrived at through argument or authority. Mystics across unconnected traditions and centuries report a strikingly consistent core: a sense of unity, an experience beyond words, a feeling of direct knowing, brief duration with lasting effect, and profound awe — even while interpreting what they encountered through their own tradition's language. Whether read as evidence of a shared spiritual reality or as a universal feature of human consciousness explored by every culture, the convergence itself is real and worth taking seriously. Try this: read one short passage from a mystic outside your own tradition — a poem of Rumi's, a line from Teresa of Ávila, a Zen koan — not analytically, but slowly, the way you'd read poetry. Notice what it's reaching for beneath its specific religious vocabulary. Sources & Further Reading Sources - The list combines William James's four "marks" of mystical experience (ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, passivity; The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902) with philosopher Walter Stace's "common core" (unity, a sense of objective reality, sacredness, peace and alleged ineffability, among others; Mysticism and Philosophy, 1960), a framework widely used in the academic study of mysticism. The constructivist objection: Steven T. Katz, "Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism", in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (1978). - Neuroscientific studies of meditators' and mystics' brain activity (notably reduced default-mode-network and parietal-lobe activity linked to self/other boundaries) come from researchers including Andrew Newberg. Go deeper - 📘 Mysticism and Philosophy — Walter Stace (the foundational cross-cultural framework) - 📘 The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James - 📘 Why God Won't Go Away — Andrew Newberg & Eugene d'Aquili (the neuroscience angle) - 🌐 Companion pieces in this library: What They All Seem to Agree On and Meditation, Without the Woo Step 8. Rumi: The Ecstasy of Divine Love and the Longing of the Soul -------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: Rumi; then any mystic in section 21. In the 13th century, amid the devastation of the Mongol invasions across Asia, a Persian Islamic scholar and jurist in Anatolia underwent a radical spiritual transformation that would produce some of the most transcendent poetry in human history. His name was Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (1207–1273), known simply to the world as Rumi. Moving beyond formal religious scholasticism, Rumi articulated a mystical vision centered on radical divine love (Ishq), the annihilation of the ego (Fana), and the soul's aching longing to reunite with its divine source. Eight centuries after his death, Rumi remains one of the most widely read and beloved poets across the globe. Who He Was: The Scholar and the Wandering Dervish Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh (located in modern-day Afghanistan). As Mongol armies swept through Central Asia, Rumi's family fled westward, eventually settling in Konya (in modern-day Turkey), then part of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum. Rumi followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a respected Islamic theologian, jurist (Alim), and preacher. By his late thirties, he led a large Islamic school, surrounded by students, prestige, and religious authority. Everything changed in late 1244 when Rumi met Shams of Tabriz, a wandering, enigmatic Sufi dervish. Shams challenged Rumi's reliance on bookish learning, asking him whether the Prophet Muhammad or the mystic Bayazid Bastami had greater spiritual stature. The intense spiritual friendship between Rumi and Shams shattered Rumi's intellectual detachment: Shams served as a mirror reflecting the unmediated presence of the Divine. When Shams mysteriously disappeared years later (likely murdered by jealous townspeople or disciples), Rumi's grief erupted into a torrent of ecstatic poetry, music, and dance. Rumi realized that Shams was not merely a person, but a lens through which the ultimate Beloved—God—was revealed. The Core Mystical Message Rumi's mysticism, rooted in the Sufi tradition of Islam, revolves around several core spiritual pillars: 1. The Longing of the Soul (The Reed Flute) The opening lines of Rumi's 50,000-line spiritual masterpiece, the Masnavi, contain his central metaphor for the human condition: the Reed Flute (Nay): "Listen to the reed flute, how it complains, telling a tale of separations. 'Ever since I was cut from the reed bed, my wailing has made men and women weep... Everyone who is left far from his source desires again the time of union.'" Rumi explains that the human soul is like a hollow reed cut from its native riverbank. The wailing sound of the flute is the soul's homesickness—a deep, aching longing (Shawq) to return to the Divine Presence from which it emerged. 2. Radical Divine Love (Ishq) For Rumi, love (Ishq) is not an emotional preference or a romantic feeling; it is the fundamental gravitational force of the universe. It is the divine energy that draws all creation back to unity. Reason and intellect can guide us to the edge of the abyss, but only love can leap across: "Reason is helpless in the expression of Love. Love alone can reveal the truth of Love and being a lover." 3. Annihilation of the Ego (Fana) To experience divine union, the false, self-absorbed ego (Nafs) must melt away. Rumi uses the image of a moth drawn to a flame: the moth does not merely observe the light; it enters the flame and becomes consumed by it. In Sufism, this state of ego-dissolution is called Fana (extinction in God), followed by Baq'a (abiding in divine awareness while living in the world). 4. Universalism Beyond Dogma While deeply grounded in Islamic scripture and practice, Rumi looked past rigid sectarian divisions to the universal core of spiritual truth (here in Coleman Barks's popular free rendering): "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about." Key Insights and the Whirling Dervishes Rumi composed two vast poetic works: - The Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi: A collection of over 40,000 ecstatic lyric verses (Ghazals) celebrating the Beloved. - The Masnavi: Known as "the Quran in the Persian tongue," a six-volume masterwork combining parables, folklore, Quranic commentary, and mystical instruction. To channel the spiritual energy of love, Rumi took up Sama—an older Sufi practice of sacred listening to music, which in his circle became whirling to the sound of ney flutes and drums. In the ceremony as it later developed, one hand points upward toward heaven to receive divine grace, while the other points downward to the earth to pass that grace to humanity. After his death, his son Sultan Walad and his successors organized his followers into the Mevlevi Order ("the Whirling Dervishes") and formalized the ceremony. The Lasting Legacy When Rumi died on December 17, 1273, in Konya, his funeral was attended by Muslims, Christians, Jews, Persians, Turks, and Greeks alike, each mourning him as a spiritual father. The night of his death is celebrated annually as Şeb-i Arûs (Shab-e Arus) (the "Wedding Night"—the night the soul unites with its eternal Beloved). Rumi's legacy shaped Persian, Turkish, and South Asian literature for centuries. In the 20th and 21st centuries, translated by scholars and poets, Rumi became a global cultural phenomenon, reminding humanity that across all borders of doctrine and nationality, the heart's true home is love. Takeaways Rumi’s Sufi mysticism teaches that the human soul's deep restlessness is a sacred longing (Shawq) to return to its divine source, illustrated by the reed flute cut from its riverbank. True spiritual awakening requires moving beyond bookish intellect into radical divine love (Ishq) and releasing the false ego (Fana). Through poetry and sacred movement (Sama), Rumi provides a timeless, universal bridge connecting human experience to the transcendent. Action step: Set aside ten minutes today to sit in silence, notice any inner restlessness or longing without judgment, and reframe that feeling as a constructive invitation to connect with what matters most. Sources & Further Reading Sources - Rumi's Masnavi and Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi (critical Persian editions by Reynold A. Nicholson and B. Zarrinkoub). The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi by William C. Chittick. Rumi: Past and Present, East and West by Franklin D. Lewis. Go Deeper - 📘 The Sufi Path of Love — William C. Chittick (the definitive thematic compilation of Rumi's spiritual philosophy) - 📘 Rumi: Past and Present, East and West — Franklin D. Lewis (the most comprehensive biography and literary history of Rumi) - 🌐 The Mevlevi Order — Official Cultural Information - 🌐 Related piece in this library: The World's Religions, One Page Each For Your Vocabulary Sufism (the mystical, inward dimension of Islam) · Ishq (radical, ecstatic divine love) · Fana (the Sufi concept of the annihilation of the false ego in God) · Masnavi (Rumi's 50,000-line spiritual poetic masterpiece) · Shams of Tabriz (the wandering dervish who transformed Rumi from scholar to mystic) · Sama (the sacred Sufi ceremony of music and whirling dance) · Ney (the traditional end-blown reed flute symbolizing the longing soul) · Mevlevi (the Sufi order founded by Rumi's followers) Step 9. Pilgrimage: Why Humans Walk to Holy Places -------------------------------------------------- Why: Pilgrimage. Every year, well over a million Muslims arrive in Mecca and, for the Hajj, the men among them change into two plain, unstitched white cloths. A banker and a farmer, a king and a cleaner become, for a few days, impossible to tell apart. That small act sums up something pilgrimage does in nearly every tradition: it takes you out of your ordinary life, strips away your usual rank, and sends you home changed. Pilgrimage is one of the most widespread religious practices on Earth. It is also one of the most physical. You can't do it in your head. You have to go. The great journeys Pilgrimage Tradition Scale and shape Hajj, Mecca Islam A duty once in a lifetime for every Muslim physically and financially able; about 1.7 million pilgrims in 2026 by official Saudi figures Arbaeen, Karbala Shia Islam Mourning the death of Husayn, the Prophet's grandson, in 680 CE; recent estimates of 10–20 million pilgrims, many walking for days Kumbh Mela, India Hinduism Bathing at sacred rivers, rotating among four sites; for the 2025 Maha Kumbh at Prayagraj, officials claimed more than 660 million visits over 45 days, a figure some observers called implausible Camino de Santiago, Spain Christianity Walking to the shrine of St James; about 499,000 pilgrims received the Compostela certificate in 2024 Shikoku 88 Temples, Japan Buddhism A loop of about 1,200 km honouring the monk Kūkai; 30–60 days on foot Bodh Gaya, India Buddhism Where the Buddha is said to have reached enlightenment Western Wall, Jerusalem Judaism The last remnant of the retaining walls around the ancient Temple Mount Golden Temple, Amritsar Sikhism Its free community kitchen, the langar, feeds anyone who comes (Attendance at mass gatherings is notoriously hard to count. Treat every big number here as an estimate.) Three stages of a journey In 1909 the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep noticed that rites of passage everywhere share three phases: separation from ordinary life, a transition in which you are "betwixt and between," and return, as someone new. Pilgrimage fits the pattern almost perfectly. Separation. You leave home, often in special clothes, sometimes after confession, fasting or settling debts. Transition. On the road you are no longer quite who you were. Comfort is reduced, routines are gone, and strangers become companions. Return. You come home with a story, often a title (like Hajji for someone who has made the Hajj), and a changed relationship to your faith. The anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner, who wrote Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978), gave a name to the feeling many pilgrims report in that middle stage: communitas, an intense sense of equality and shared humanity among people who would normally be divided by class, nation or status. The destination is holy, but much of the transformation happens on the way there. Why it matters to the people who go Ask pilgrims and you'll hear many reasons, often several at once: Obedience to a religious duty, as with the Hajj. Devotion: to be close to a saint, a teacher, or a place where the sacred broke into the world. Petition and healing: to pray for a sick child, a pregnancy, a recovery. Shrines such as Lourdes in France are famous for this. Penance and gratitude: to make up for wrongs, or to say thank you. Transition: many people walk the Camino after a death, a divorce, retirement or illness, with or without religious belief. That last group points to something important: pilgrimage has spread beyond religion. People travel to war graves and memorials, to the homes of writers and musicians, to sites of tragedy such as Auschwitz, and describe the journey in almost religious terms. The impulse to go to a place, in person, in order to be changed seems to run deeper than any one creed. The honest complications Crowds can kill. Huge numbers in confined spaces can turn deadly. During the 2015 Hajj, a crush at Mina killed 769 people according to Saudi authorities; counts compiled by the Associated Press from other countries' reports put the toll at more than 2,400. A crush at the 2025 Kumbh Mela killed at least 30, with independent reports suggesting more. Organisers now invest heavily in crowd science, but the risk is real. Access isn't equal. The Hajj is limited by national quotas and can be very expensive, so for many Muslims it is a lifetime's savings, or out of reach. Tourism can crowd out pilgrimage. The Camino's popularity has brought both revival and complaints about crowding, commercialisation and rising prices in small villages along the route. Sacred places can be contested. Some sites are holy to more than one tradition, which can make them centres of both devotion and conflict. The takeaway Pilgrimage, the journey to a holy place, appears in almost every tradition, from the Hajj and the Kumbh Mela to the Camino and the 88 temples of Shikoku. It follows the pattern of a rite of passage: leave, be transformed on the way, return changed. Pilgrims often feel communitas, a sense of equality with strangers, and many modern people make secular pilgrimages for the same reason. Crowds, cost and commercialism are real problems, but the human pull to go somewhere in order to become someone is very old and very strong. Try this: choose a place within a day's walk that matters to you: a grave, a church, a tree you loved as a child, a memorial. Go on foot, without your phone in your hand, and notice how arriving feels different when the journey took effort. Sources & Further Reading Sources - Hajj obligations and 2026 attendance (official Saudi figures, as reported in standard references); 2015 Mina crush toll (Saudi authorities: 769; Associated Press compilation: at least 2,411). - Arbaeen attendance ranges (Iraqi state media and other estimates; not independently verified). - 2025 Prayagraj Maha Kumbh: official claim of 660 million visits and press skepticism (e.g., The Economist); crowd crush of 29 January 2025. - Camino de Santiago: Pilgrim's Office of Santiago figures (499,239 Compostelas in 2024). - Shikoku pilgrimage: 88 temples, about 1,200 km, associated with Kūkai. - Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (1909); Victor & Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978). Go deeper - 📘 Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture — Victor & Edith Turner (the classic anthropology of pilgrimage) - 📘 The Art of Pilgrimage — Phil Cousineau (a reflective guide for anyone, religious or not) - 🌐 Pilgrim's Office of Santiago de Compostela (official statistics and guidance for the Camino) - 🌐 Companion piece in this library: Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It Step 10. How Religion Began: From the First Burials to the Axial Age -------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: How religion began. Graves dug 100,000 years ago, a lion-headed figure carved from mammoth ivory, stone pillars raised by hunter-gatherers, and a century and a half of arguments about why almost every human society has had gods, spirits or ancestors to answer to. Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each, Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It and Indigenous and Folk Religions: The Oldest Faiths on Earth. Companion pieces: How the Sacred Texts Were Written and Atheism, Agnosticism & Humanism, Fairly. About 75,000 years ago, in a cave in the Zagros Mountains of what is now Iraqi Kurdistan, someone laid a dead Neanderthal behind a tall slab of rock that had fallen from the cave roof. Over generations, others were placed in the same small space, about a metre and a half long. When archaeologists published the newest of these bodies in October 2026, they counted at least five people in the cluster, and wrote that the repeated use of one marked spot for the dead supports the idea of "complex, potentially meaningful" mortuary behaviour among Neanderthals. Potentially meaningful. Those two words are the honest heart of this subject. We can dig up what early people did with their dead, their pigments and their stones. We cannot dig up what they believed. Every account of how religion began is a bridge built from a little hard evidence and a great deal of inference, and the people who build those bridges disagree, often sharply. There is also a second kind of answer. For billions of believers, religion did not "begin" as a human invention at all. It began when God spoke, or when the gods were always there and humans learned to see them, or when the first ancestors laid down the law of the land. That answer deserves a hearing too, and it gets one here, in its own terms, beside the scholarship and not beneath it. This long read covers what counts as religion, what the archaeology of the deep past does and does not show, the great theories of why humans are religious, the newer science of the religious mind, the shift from forager spirits to the gods of kings and cities, the famous idea of an "Axial Age", and how believers themselves tell the story. A note on approach: this piece describes scholarly theories and religious accounts without deciding between them. Where evidence is contested, it says so and gives the main positions. It does not rank traditions, defend them or debunk them. The scientific theories here try to explain why humans believe; none of them can settle whether what they believe is true, and most of the scientists involved say so. In this long read What counts as religion? The first graves (about 100,000–34,000 years ago) Painted caves and the shaman hypothesis (about 51,000–12,000 years ago) Göbekli Tepe: what it may and may not show (about 9500–8000 BCE) The founders' theories: Tylor, Frazer, Marx, Durkheim, Freud and James The cognitive science of religion: minds built for gods? Costly signals and big gods: the argument over cooperation From the spirits of the forest to the gods of the city The Axial Age and its critics (800–200 BCE) In their own words: revelation, and how believers read the science What we know, what we don't Part 1 — What counts as religion? Before you can ask how religion began, you have to say what it is. That turns out to be one of the hardest questions in the field. A word with a history The English word comes from the Latin religio. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on the concept puts it, religio originally meant something like "scrupulousness" or "felt obligation", the conscientious care you owed because of a taboo, a promise or a curse, whether or not any god was involved. Only much later did "religion" come to mean a kind of thing in the world, a category with members called Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and so on. Many languages had no equivalent word. Classical Chinese, Sanskrit and the languages of many Indigenous peoples had rich vocabularies for duty, ritual, law, teaching and the way of the ancestors, but no single term that drew a line around "religion" and set it apart from the rest of life. As Indigenous and Folk Religions in this library notes, for many communities what outsiders call religion is simply how you live with your land, your ancestors and the beings around you. Three famous definitions Scholars have tried for 150 years to pin the thing down. Three attempts frame the debate. Belief in spiritual beings. In 1871 the English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor proposed, in Primitive Culture, what he called "a minimum definition of Religion, the belief in Spiritual Beings." It is simple and works for most traditions. But it struggles with Theravada Buddhism, which does not centre on a creator god, and with forms of Confucianism focused on ritual and ethics rather than on beings. A community around the sacred. In 1912 the French sociologist Émile Durkheim defined religion by what it does: "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden — beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them" (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. J. W. Swain, 1915). No spirits required. The weakness is the opposite of Tylor's: by this test, a nation with its flags, anthems and war memorials might count as a religion too. A system of meaning. In the 1960s the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz described religion as a system of symbols tied to a conception of "a general order of existence", a picture of what reality fundamentally is, which makes people's moods and motivations feel uniquely realistic. This captures how religion shapes a whole way of seeing, but critics say it makes religion sound like a set of ideas in the head rather than something people do with their bodies, their food and their calendars. Approach Example Captures well Struggles with Substantive (what religion is about) Tylor: belief in spiritual beings Most theistic and animist traditions Non-theistic Buddhism, ritual-centred traditions Functional (what religion does) Durkheim: a moral community around the sacred Religion's social power Where religion ends and nationalism or sport begins Symbolic (what religion means) Geertz: a picture of the order of existence Religion as a worldview Practice, bodies, institutions Family resemblance Smart's seven dimensions Variety without a single essence Deciding how many features are enough Families, not essences Many scholars now avoid a one-line definition. Borrowing from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea of "family resemblance", they treat religion as a cluster of overlapping features, none of which every religion must have. The British scholar Ninian Smart listed seven dimensions: ritual; narrative and myth; experience and emotion; doctrine and philosophy; ethics and law; social and institutional life; and material culture (buildings, art, sacred places). A tradition can be strong in some and thin in others and still clearly belong to the family. Is "religion" a Western invention? A more radical group of scholars argues that the very category is a product of modern European history. Jonathan Z. Smith wrote in 1982 that "there is no data for religion": the category is created by scholars' acts of comparison. Talal Asad (Genealogies of Religion, 1993) argued that the modern concept carries Christian, and specifically Protestant, assumptions, above all the idea that religion is mainly a matter of private belief. Brent Nongbri (Before Religion, 2013) traced how the word changed meaning. Their point is not that nothing is going on in temples, shrines and festivals, but that slicing human life into "religion" and "not religion" can distort cultures that never sliced it that way. The deeper we go into the past, the less sure we can be that the people we are studying would have recognised our word "religion" at all. That matters for everything that follows. When an archaeologist asks whether a Neanderthal burial is "religious", the question smuggles in a category built in early modern Europe. This piece uses the word anyway, in a broad family-resemblance sense: practices and beliefs that relate people to sacred, more-than-human or unseen realities, such as gods, spirits, ancestors or a cosmic order. But keep the caution in mind. Part 2 — The first graves (about 100,000–34,000 years ago) Burial is the oldest place where archaeologists look for something like religion, because it is one of the few behaviours that leave traces. A body deliberately placed in a dug pit, with care, perhaps with objects, suggests that the dead mattered to the living. Whether it suggests belief in an afterlife is another matter. The Neanderthal debate The first claimed Neanderthal burial was found in 1908 at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in southwest France. For a century sceptics argued that the body might simply have ended up in a natural hollow. In 2014 a team that had spent twelve years re-excavating the site reported in PNAS that the pit was dug by people and the body was covered quickly, evidence they said "support[s] the hypothesis of an intentional burial." Shanidar Cave in Iraq produced the most famous case. In 1960 Ralph Solecki's team excavated a cluster of Neanderthal skeletons, one of which, Shanidar 4, became known as the "flower burial" because soil samples contained clumps of pollen. The image of Neanderthals laying flowers on their dead travelled around the world. It did not survive scrutiny. Later work suggested the pollen could have been carried in by burrowing animals or bees, and the 2026 paper from the new Cambridge-led excavations states plainly that the heavily criticised flower-burial theory "has not stood up to further scrutiny." What has survived is something subtler. New excavations since 2015 found more individuals right beside the 1960 ones, including Shanidar Z, a woman in her mid-forties or older who lived more than 70,000 years ago and was laid in a shallow, hand-dug depression. The cluster, behind a prominent fallen boulder, was used again and again within what may have been a few generations. The researchers think that pattern is the strongest sign yet of deliberate, perhaps meaningful, treatment of the dead by Neanderthals. Other archaeologists remain unpersuaded that Neanderthal "burials" show anything symbolic. Early Homo sapiens Our own species has its own early graves. At Qafzeh, a cave in what is now Israel, early Homo sapiens buried their dead around 100,000 years ago. Seventy-one pieces of ochre, a red mineral pigment, were found associated with the burials, and a boy of about 12 or 13 was laid in a grave cut into the bedrock with fallow-deer antlers beside his chest. In 2025 a team reported further burials with ochre at Tinshemet Cave, also in Israel, dated to about 100,000 years ago, and argued that both Homo sapiens and Neanderthal-like groups in the region shared a set of behaviours that included "intentional human burial and the use of ochre in burial contexts." In Africa, the oldest known human burial is a child of about two and a half to three years old from Panga ya Saidi cave in coastal Kenya, dated to 78,300 years ago, plus or minus 4,100. The study, published in Nature in 2021, showed the body was placed in a deliberately dug pit, tightly flexed, and decomposed in place under grave earth. Site Who Approximate age What was found How secure Rising Star cave, South Africa Homo naledi 335,000–236,000 years Bodies in deep chambers; claimed burials Strongly disputed Qafzeh, Israel Homo sapiens about 100,000 years Burials, ochre, antlers Widely accepted as burials Tinshemet, Israel Homo (species not settled) about 100,000 years Articulated burials with ochre New (2025) Panga ya Saidi, Kenya Homo sapiens child 78,300 ± 4,100 years Dug grave, flexed body Oldest accepted burial in Africa Shanidar, Iraq Neanderthals about 75,000–70,000 years Cluster of at least five individuals behind a boulder Burial accepted by excavators; meaning debated La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France Neanderthal about 50,000 years Dug pit, rapid covering Argued intentional (2014) Sungir, Russia Homo sapiens about 34,000 years Three burials with more than 13,000 ivory beads Elaborate grave goods The Homo naledi controversy The boldest claim concerns a different species. Homo naledi, a small-brained hominin found in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa and dated to between 335,000 and 236,000 years ago, left over 1,500 bone specimens deep inside nearly inaccessible chambers. Lee Berger and colleagues argued in eLife (2023, revised 2025) that the evidence is most compatible with "cultural burial", which would mean that meaning-making around death predates large brains. Many specialists reject this. A 2024 paper in the Journal of Human Evolution by María Martinón-Torres and colleagues was titled, bluntly, "No scientific evidence that Homo naledi buried their dead and produced rock art." This debate is live and unresolved. What a grave can tell you Even where burial is secure, it does not by itself reveal belief. People bury their dead to protect bodies from scavengers, to deal with smell, to keep a loved one close, or to mark a place. Grief needs no theology. The archaeologist's honest claim is narrower: by roughly 100,000 years ago some humans were treating the dead with deliberate care, sometimes with pigment and objects, and by about 34,000 years ago, at Sungir in Russia, three people were buried with more than 13,000 ivory beads, which by one estimate would have taken some 10,000 hours to make. That is consistent with ideas about what happens after death, and with social status, and with love. The trowel cannot choose between them. A grave proves that the dead mattered. It does not tell you whether the mourners thought they were going somewhere. Part 3 — Painted caves and the shaman hypothesis (about 51,000–12,000 years ago) The second great body of evidence is image-making: carved figures and painted caves. The oldest pictures For most of the 20th century, the great painted caves of France and Spain seemed to be the beginning of human art. That picture has changed. In 2021 researchers dated a painting of a Sulawesi warty pig in Leang Tedongnge cave, Indonesia, to at least 45,500 years ago. In 2024 a new laser-based dating method pushed things back further: a scene at Leang Karampuang on the same island, showing human-like figures interacting with a pig, was painted at least 51,200 years ago, which the team called the earliest known example of representational art and visual storytelling. In Europe, the Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel in southern Germany, a figure 31 centimetres tall carved from mammoth ivory with a human-like body and a cave lion's head, dates to between about 35,000 and 41,000 years ago. Chauvet Cave in France holds animal paintings tens of thousands of years old; Lascaux's famous bulls and horses are usually dated to around 17,000–22,000 years ago. A creature that is part human and part animal is not an image of anything anyone has seen. That is one reason the Lion-man is so often cited as evidence of imagination reaching beyond the visible world, and perhaps of beliefs about beings that cross the line between species. Perhaps. It could also be a costume, a story character or a clan emblem. Art as the Mirror of Consciousness, in this library's art section, takes up this art as a window on the human mind. Three theories of the caves Hunting magic. The French priest and prehistorian Henri Breuil, who sketched Lascaux soon after its discovery in 1940, championed the idea that cave paintings were sympathetic magic: painting the animal helped capture it. A problem soon emerged: the animals on the walls were not the animals on the menu. At Lascaux, reindeer were the artists' main source of food, yet only a single reindeer appears among hundreds of images. Structure. From the 1960s André Leroi-Gourhan mapped where different animals appeared in caves and argued for a deliberate organisation of the painted space, built on a masculine/feminine duality seen in pairings such as bison and horse. It drew attention to the caves as organised wholes, but its specific scheme has proved hard to confirm. Shamanism. The most influential modern theory came from the South African archaeologist David Lewis-Williams, whose doctoral research was on the symbolic meanings of southern San rock paintings in southern Africa. Read alongside San testimony and ethnography, much of that art, he argued, depicts what healers saw and did in trance. With Thomas Dowson, in a 1988 paper in Current Anthropology titled "The Signs of All Times", he argued that the human nervous system produces similar visual patterns in altered states of consciousness everywhere: first geometric "entoptic" shapes (dots, grids, zigzags), then those shapes turned into meaningful objects, and finally full immersion in a vivid other world. Ice Age art, they proposed, mixes all three stages, and the cave wall itself may have been seen as a membrane between this world and the spirit world. Working with the French prehistorian Jean Clottes, he applied it to the painted caves of France and Spain, and set out the full argument in The Mind in the Cave (2002). The critics The shamanism theory has fierce opponents. Patricia Helvenston and Paul Bahn, in a series of papers including one in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2003), tested the "three stages of trance" model against the neuropsychology it relies on and argued that it does not hold up. Others object to stretching an analogy from the 19th- and 20th-century San across tens of thousands of years to Ice Age Europe, and to the theory's ability to explain almost any image, which makes it hard to test. Theory Main champion The idea The main objection Hunting magic Henri Breuil Painting the animal helps catch it The most-painted animals were often not the most-eaten Structuralism André Leroi-Gourhan Caves organised as paired symbolic systems The pairings are hard to confirm Shamanism David Lewis-Williams, Jean Clottes Images record trance visions; the wall as a veil to the spirit world Contested neuropsychology; analogy stretched too far; hard to falsify Many purposes Many current specialists Different caves and images had different uses Less satisfying, perhaps more accurate Most specialists today would say the caves probably did not have one meaning across 30,000 years and a whole continent. Some images may have been sacred, some instructional, some decorative, some all three. What the art does establish is that by 50,000 years ago humans were making images of things that matter to them, and sometimes of things no eye has seen. Part 4 — Göbekli Tepe: what it may and may not show (about 9500–8000 BCE) In 1995 a German archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt began excavating a hill in southeastern Turkey called Göbekli Tepe, "Potbelly Hill". What he found rearranged textbooks. The site Beginning around 9500 BCE, before pottery, before metal and before fully domesticated crops, people here carved and raised great T-shaped limestone pillars inside round and oval enclosures about 20 metres across. The tallest pillars stand up to 5.5 metres high. Many are carved with arms, hands and belts, so that the pillars seem to be stylised human or superhuman figures, and with reliefs of wild animals: foxes, boars, snakes, vultures, scorpions. The site was used until about 8000 BCE and was added to UNESCO's World Heritage List in 2018. Related sites with T-pillars, including Karahan Tepe, have since been found across the region. Schmidt's interpretation was dramatic. He saw the enclosures as the world's first temples, a sanctuary where scattered hunter-gatherer bands gathered for ritual and feasting. His preliminary report of 2000 carried the title "Zuerst kam der Tempel, dann die Stadt": first came the temple, then the city. If religion drew people together to build monuments, he suggested, the need to feed the builders may have helped drive the invention of farming. Religion would be not a result of civilisation but one of its causes. What changed Since Schmidt's death in 2014, work led by the German Archaeological Institute, with Lee Clare and Turkish colleagues, has complicated the picture. People lived there. Excavations have found smaller rectangular buildings around the enclosures that look like houses, rainwater channels feeding cisterns cut into the bedrock, and huge numbers of everyday tools. They processed cereals on a large scale. A 2019 study of more than 7,000 grinding stones and related tools found that most were used for processing cereals, confirmed by plant microfossils. The builders were not "pure" hunter-gatherers living only off wild game. The enclosures were not deliberately buried all at once, as Schmidt thought. Later work suggests landslides repeatedly damaged them, followed by repairs and rebuilding. Human remains were handled in special ways. Fragments of three human skulls carved with deep grooves, reported in 2017, suggest a form of "skull cult", though no graves have been found in the enclosures. Göbekli Tepe shows that people without farming or writing could organise the labour to raise monuments of stone. It does not show what they believed about them. How many hands? The site's meaning depends partly on a practical question: how many people did it take to build? Schmidt argued that quarrying, moving and raising the pillars, cut from bedrock pits about 100 metres away with flint tools, was beyond the capability of a few people, and, using experiments with the stone statues of Rapa Nui as a guide, estimated that moving the pillars alone must have involved hundreds. That supported his picture of a regional gathering place where many bands came together. Later researchers working at the site have suggested instead that the structures exposed so far could have been built by 12 to 24 people in under four months, within the capacity of a single extended family or village. The difference matters. Hundreds of builders suggests a pilgrimage centre for a whole region; a dozen or two suggests a community building something special in its own backyard. The argument also feeds a bigger one. Prehistorians agree that settled life and farming arose together in southwest Asia, but disagree about which came first. A monumental complex on a rocky hilltop, built before clear evidence of crop cultivation, has made Göbekli Tepe a centrepiece of that debate. What it may and may not show Claim Status Hunter-gatherers (in a broad sense) built monumental stone architecture about 11,000 years ago Well supported The carved pillars depict humans or human-like beings, and animals had symbolic importance Widely accepted The site was a sanctuary visited only by nomads, with no residents Now doubted: evidence of houses, water systems and daily work It was "the first temple" Possible but unprovable; "special buildings" is the cautious term many prefer Religion caused the agricultural revolution A hypothesis; the evidence fits several stories The deepest lesson of Göbekli Tepe may be the one drawn in The Pecking Order, in this library's sociology section: large-scale cooperation did not need farms or kings. Whether that cooperation was organised around gods, ancestors, feasts, clan identity or all of these, the stones cannot say. The archaeologist Edward Banning asked in 2011 whether the enclosures might have been elaborate houses rather than temples at all, and noted that in many traditional societies the line between a sacred building and a dwelling barely exists. That warning echoes Part 1: the people who carved these pillars may never have drawn our line between religion and everything else. Part 5 — The founders' theories: Tylor, Frazer, Marx, Durkheim, Freud and James The archaeology is new. The big theories are older. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a handful of thinkers proposed answers to the question "why religion?" that still frame the debate. Each saw something real. Each has been heavily criticised. Here they are, as their defenders would put them, followed by their critics. An 18th-century forerunner: David Hume Before any of them, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, in The Natural History of Religion (1757), pointed to fear, hope and a tendency of the mind: "There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves ... We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds." — David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, Section 3 Hume argued that, anxious about health, harvest and death and ignorant of their real causes, early people imagined invisible powers with minds like their own. Remember that sentence about faces in the moon. Two centuries later it became a research programme (Part 6). Tylor: the soul and animism (1871) Tylor thought religion began with reasoning about experience. Early humans saw the difference between a living body and a corpse, and saw the dead and the absent in dreams. The natural inference was that each person has a soul that can leave the body. Extended to animals, plants and places, this produced animism, which Tylor considered the root of all religion, from which polytheism and monotheism later developed. His great strength was taking early peoples seriously as thinkers, not as fools. His weakness, by modern lights, was the ladder: the assumption that "primitive" societies represented an early stage on a road that led to Victorian England. Indigenous and Folk Religions describes how scholars such as Graham Harvey have since reclaimed the word "animism" without the ladder. Frazer: magic, religion, science (1890) James George Frazer's The Golden Bough gathered a vast catalogue of myths and rites and proposed three stages of thought. In magic, people try to control nature through supposed laws (like produces like); when magic fails, they turn to religion, appealing to powerful beings; finally science replaces both. "The movement of the higher thought," he wrote, "has on the whole been from magic through religion to science." Frazer was enormously influential on literature and popular culture. Anthropologists later criticised his "armchair" method, which pulled customs out of context from all over the world, and his three-stage scheme, since magic, religion and science coexist in most societies, including modern ones. Marx: the sigh of the oppressed (1844) Karl Marx is often quoted as dismissing religion in five words. The full passage, from the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (written 1843–44), is more complicated: "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." — Karl Marx (1844) For Marx, "man makes religion, religion does not make man." Religion is a human product that both expresses real misery and soothes it, and in doing so can reconcile people to unjust conditions instead of changing them. Opium, in the 1840s, was a common painkiller as well as a drug. Marx's real target was the social world that "requires illusions". Critics answer that religion has as often fuelled rebellion as quieted it (from medieval peasant revolts to the American civil rights movement), and that a theory explaining religion purely by economic conditions cannot explain why it flourishes among the comfortable too. Durkheim: society worshipping itself (1912) Durkheim studied reports of Aboriginal Australian totemism, which he took to be the simplest religion known. His key observation was that what makes something sacred is not its nature but how a community treats it: set apart, protected, forbidden. Why? Because the sacred stands for the group. In the great seasonal gatherings, when dispersed clans came together to sing and dance, people felt a surge of energy he called collective effervescence, a power greater than themselves. They attributed it to the totem. But the power was real, he argued: it was society itself. "The god of the clan, the totemic principle, can therefore be nothing else than the clan itself, personified and represented to the imagination under the visible form of the animal or vegetable which serves as totem." Durkheim's insight that ritual creates and renews social bonds is one of the most fertile ideas in social science, and modern research on synchrony and group ritual (see Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It) builds on it. The criticisms: his Australian data were secondhand and patchy; Aboriginal religion was not "elementary" but as complex as any; and reducing God to society seems to assume the conclusion. Believers can also turn the argument around: if communal worship produces a real experience of something greater, why must that something be only the group? Freud: the longing for a father (1913, 1927) Sigmund Freud offered two theories. In Totem and Taboo (1913) he proposed a speculative prehistory: a primal horde ruled by a jealous father, killed by his sons, whose guilt became the first taboos and the totem feast. He concluded "that the beginnings of religion, ethics, society, and art meet in the Oedipus complex." Almost no anthropologist accepts this story, and Freud's own sources were thin. His second theory, in The Future of an Illusion (1927), is more lasting. Humans face a terrifying nature, death and the frustrations of civilised life. Religion answers with a protective father in heaven, a life after death and a just order. Its beliefs are "fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind." Freud called them illusions, and was careful to define the word: a belief is an illusion when wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation, regardless of its relation to reality. That leaves open, by his own definition, whether the belief is true. Critics point out that the argument cuts both ways: people may also wish there were no God, and wishes do not make a belief false. Defenders reply that Freud explained why religion feels so compelling, which is all he claimed to do. James: experience first (1902) The American psychologist William James took a different route. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) he defined religion, for his purposes, as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." He studied conversions, mystical states and saintly lives, judged them by their fruits in people's lives, and refused to reduce them to illness or to social function. Mysticism 101 in this library follows his line. His critics say he neglected the communal, ritual side that Durkheim stressed; his admirers say he took seriously what believers actually report. Thinker Year Religion arises from Lasting insight Main criticism Hume 1757 Fear, hope and projecting minds onto nature The mind's tendency to see agents Speculative, no evidence base Tylor 1871 Reasoning about dreams and death: the soul Early peoples as rational thinkers The evolutionary ladder Frazer 1890 Failed magic Comparative scope Armchair method; stages don't hold Marx 1844 Social suffering and injustice Religion and power are entangled Religion also inspires revolt; flourishes among the comfortable Durkheim 1912 The group's experience of itself Ritual makes and renews community Thin data; reductive Freud 1913, 1927 Wishes, fear, the father The emotional pull of belief Unfalsifiable; speculative prehistory James 1902 Individual experience of the divine Experience as primary data Neglects community and ritual The anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, whose own fieldwork began in 1926 among the Azande of the upper Nile, delivered a famous critique of this generation in Theories of Primitive Religion (1965): most of them speculated about the inner lives of peoples they had never met, often by imagining how they themselves would have reasoned in an early human's place. The field that came next tried to replace guessing with experiments. Part 6 — The cognitive science of religion: minds built for gods? From the 1990s, a group of anthropologists and psychologists, working independently at first, began asking a new question. Not "what is religion for?" but "what is it about human minds that makes religious ideas so easy to think, remember and pass on?" The field became known as the cognitive science of religion. Seeing agents everywhere The anthropologist Stewart Guthrie, in Faces in the Clouds (1993), revived Hume's insight with an evolutionary twist. Imagine hearing a rustle in the grass. If you assume it is a predator and it is only the wind, you lose a moment. If you assume it is the wind and it is a predator, you may lose your life. Natural selection should therefore favour minds that over-detect agents, that guess "someone is there" at the slightest hint. Guthrie argued that religion is, at root, systematic anthropomorphism: seeing human-like intention in the world. The psychologist Justin Barrett named the proposed mechanism a hyperactive agency detection device, or HADD, in a 2000 paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, alongside a broader "theory of mind" that leads us to attribute beliefs, desires and purposes. Developmental psychologists added evidence that young children readily explain natural things by purpose and intention. Reviewing that research in 2004, Deborah Kelemen asked whether children are "intuitive theists", disposed to see nature as designed, and suggested that by around five years of age the description may have explanatory value. Ideas that are easy to remember The French-American anthropologist Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained (2001), focused on the shape of religious concepts. Successful supernatural ideas, he argued, are minimally counterintuitive: they fit almost all our ordinary expectations about a category but break one or two in a striking way. A spirit is like a person in every respect (it sees, wants, remembers, gets angry), except that it has no body. A sacred tree hears prayers. Such ideas are memorable because of the violation and usable because of everything else. Boyer's claim was that religion is not one thing with one explanation but a collection of by-products of mental systems that evolved for other purposes: detecting agents, tracking social obligations, avoiding contamination, dealing with dead bodies. The anthropologist Scott Atran, in In Gods We Trust (2002), developed a similar picture and stressed what a list of mental quirks leaves out: religious belief is bound up with emotion, ritual and deep commitment to a group, in a way that other striking fictions are not. The cognitive science of religion asks why gods are easy to believe in. It cannot tell you whether any of them exist. By-product or adaptation? This produced the field's central divide. By-product view: religion itself was not selected for. It is a side effect, like a spandrel in architecture, of mental tools that evolved for other jobs. Adaptation view: religion, or parts of it, spread because it gave groups or individuals real advantages, above all by promoting cooperation and trust. Cultural evolution view: a synthesis increasingly popular since the 2010s. The raw materials may be by-products of cognition, but particular religious beliefs and practices were then selected by cultural, not genetic, evolution, because the groups holding them out-competed or out-reproduced others. The cracks Like much of psychology, the field has been tested by replication and large samples. In five studies with over 67,000 participants across the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States, a team led by David Maij and Michiel van Elk found in 2017 that measures of mentalizing skill did not predict belief in supernatural agents, except for a curvilinear effect in the US. What did predict belief was having seen credible religious behaviour while growing up. Will Gervais and Joseph Henrich posed the "Zeus problem" (2010): Zeus has every feature that makes a god cognitively attractive, and was once worshipped by millions, yet almost nobody believes in him now. Content alone cannot explain which gods people believe in. Context, above all who you learn from, matters more. None of this means the cognitive approach has failed. Its proponents point out that it explains why certain kinds of supernatural ideas recur across unrelated cultures, while cultural learning explains which particular gods a given person comes to believe in. The two levels fit together. That shift led to the idea of credibility-enhancing displays. Henrich argued (2009) that humans are wary of copying beliefs from people who do not act on them. A preacher who lives modestly, fasts and gives generously is more persuasive than one who does not. Children raised among people whose actions are costly displays of faith are more likely to believe themselves. This takes us from the individual mind to the group, and to the most argued-over theory of all. Part 7 — Costly signals and big gods: the argument over cooperation Humans cooperate with strangers on a scale no other primate does. How did that become possible, and did religion help? This question has produced the most ambitious, and most combative, research in the field. Costly signalling Why would religions demand things that are expensive: fasting, painful initiations, dietary restrictions, distinctive dress, long hours of worship? Evolutionary anthropologists, notably Richard Sosis, developed the costly signalling theory of religion. Hard-to-fake displays of commitment signal to others that you are a reliable member of the group, which makes trust and cooperation easier. Sosis tested it on an unusual population: 19th-century American communes, all of which had to solve the problem of getting people to share labour. In a study published in 2003 with Eric Bressler, using data on 83 communes, they asked whether communes that imposed costlier requirements survived longer. The results, they wrote, "support aspects of the costly signaling theory." In Sosis's broader analysis of about 200 communes, as summarised in later reviews, about 39 percent of religious communes were still functioning twenty years after founding, against about 6 percent of secular ones, and the number of costly demands predicted longevity only in the religious communes. The data are historical, and communes are a special case, but the pattern is striking. Big gods The social psychologist Ara Norenzayan, in Big Gods (2013), and a team including Joseph Henrich and Edward Slingerland (in a major 2016 paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences) proposed a bigger story. Forager spirits, they noted, are often not very interested in human morality. But many later religions centre on powerful, all-knowing, moralising gods who watch and punish. Such "big gods", the argument runs, helped groups expand beyond the size at which everyone can watch everyone: "watched people are nice people." Groups with these beliefs cooperated better, grew and spread, and their gods spread with them. There is experimental support for part of this. In 2016 Benjamin Purzycki and colleagues ran economic games with 591 people in eight communities, from Tanna in Vanuatu to the Hadza of Tanzania and the Tyva Republic in Siberia. The more participants rated their moralistic god as punitive and knowledgeable, the more coins they allocated to distant co-religionist strangers. The Seshat fight The historical test proved explosive. In 2019 a large team using Seshat, a databank coding hundreds of past societies, published a paper in Nature that coded 414 societies from 30 regions over 10,000 years. Its headline: moralising gods followed, rather than preceded, large increases in social complexity, appearing only after "megasocieties" of around a million people had formed. Big gods did not build big societies. If anything, rituals that standardised religion across large populations came first. Then came the counter-attack. Bret Beheim and colleagues, including Norenzayan, Henrich and other big-gods researchers, argued in Nature that the result depended on how missing data were treated: in large parts of the dataset, "unknown" had been converted into "absent", which biased the timing. In July 2021 the authors retracted the 2019 paper, accepting that they should have coded those portions differently. Three of the paper's authors did not agree with the retraction. The original team then published a corrected and extended reanalysis (Religion, Brain & Behavior, 2023), which they said confirmed their headline finding: the largest increases in social complexity precede big gods. A separate Seshat analysis in Science Advances (2022) found that agricultural productivity and military technology best explained the rise of complex societies. Study Finding Status Watts et al., Proc. R. Soc. B (2015), 96 Austronesian cultures Broad supernatural punishment preceded political complexity; moralising high gods followed it Published Purzycki et al., Nature (2016), 8 communities Belief in punitive, knowing gods linked to fairness to distant co-religionists Published Whitehouse et al., Nature (2019), Seshat Moralising gods followed megasocieties Retracted 2021 Beheim et al., Nature (2021) The 2019 result depended on missing-data coding Published critique Whitehouse et al., Religion, Brain & Behavior (2023) Corrected reanalysis: big gods still follow big societies Published; debate continues Historians joined in too, questioning how any database can code something as slippery as "moralising gods" across Egypt, China and the Andes. Where does this leave the question? Many researchers now hold a middle position that the Austronesian study pointed to: belief in some kind of supernatural punishment, by ancestors, spirits or impersonal forces like karma, may be very old and may have helped cooperation, while the specific belief in a single all-seeing moral god may have spread later, with empires. This is one of the field's most open questions. In 2019 a big-data study said big gods came after big societies. In 2021 it was retracted. In 2023 its authors said the conclusion still stands. Science, in other words, working as it should and not yet finished. Part 8 — From the spirits of the forest to the gods of the city Whatever the mechanisms, the historical shape of religion changed dramatically as humans moved from foraging to farming to states. Religion among foragers Hunter-gatherer societies observed in the last two centuries are not fossils of the past; they have their own long histories. But they are the best window we have on how religion works in small, mobile groups. A 2016 study by Hervey Peoples, Pavel Duda and Frank Marlowe in Human Nature coded seven traits across a global sample of hunter-gatherer societies and reconstructed their likely history on a family tree of cultures. Their results suggested: Animism, the sense that animals, plants and places have spirit or personhood, was present in the most recent common ancestor of present-day hunter-gatherers. Belief in an afterlife came next. Then shamanism, ritual specialists who enter altered states to heal or travel among spirits, and ancestor worship. Ancestors or high gods who are active in human affairs, rewarding and punishing, were absent in early humans, consistent with the egalitarian character of forager life. Belief in a high god, a single creator, stood apart: it appeared in some forager societies regardless of their other religious traits. That last finding is intriguing, because it echoes an old dissent from Tylor's ladder. In 1898 the Scottish writer Andrew Lang argued that some of the simplest societies known believed in a Supreme Being, and the Catholic priest and ethnologist Wilhelm Schmidt developed this into a theory of Urmonotheismus, an original monotheism, in his multi-volume Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (1912–1955). Most scholars rejected Schmidt's broader claim that monotheism was humanity's first religion. But the observation that high gods appear among some foragers has held up. The first farmers and their dead With settled life came new religious forms, many centred on the dead. At Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia, a large settlement occupied from around 7100 BCE, people buried their dead beneath the floors of their houses, under platforms and hearths. In the Levant, between about 8000 and 6000 BCE, people at Jericho and other sites removed skulls from the dead, covered them with plaster modelled into faces and sometimes set shells in the eye sockets. Ancestors, it seems, stayed at home. The idea of a single prehistoric "Mother Goddess" also comes from this era, mainly from the excavations of James Mellaart at Çatalhöyük in the 1960s. Later excavations under Ian Hodder found little support for a Mother Goddess cult, and Hodder points out that the site gives little indication of either matriarchy or patriarchy. Female figurines are real and common; what they meant is not known. Temples, priests and kings The next leap came with cities and writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE, covered in depth in the next long read, The Vanished Gods. In Sumer, each city belonged to a god: Enlil at Nippur, Nanna the moon god at Ur, Enki at Eridu. The temple was literally the god's house, with a household of priests, kitchens and lands. Kings ruled as the god's stewards. The Sumerian King List opens: "After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridug." In Egypt, the king was himself a divine figure, the living Horus. For the first time there were full-time religious specialists, written prayers, fixed calendars of festivals, and temple economies that controlled land and labour. Way of life Typical religious forms Who mediates Gods' interest in morality Mobile foragers Animism, spirits of animals and places, shamans, afterlife beliefs Shamans, elders; anyone in some cases Often limited or indirect Early farmers Ancestors kept close (house burials, plastered skulls), feasting, monuments Households, lineages, ritual leaders Ancestors may punish neglect Early states City gods in temples, sacrifice, divination, king as god's agent or a god Full-time priests and kings Gods guard oaths, justice, the social order Axial-era and later traditions Universal moral teachings, scriptures, salvation or liberation Prophets, sages, monks, scholars, congregations Central The first named author in history may belong to this world: Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, high priestess of the moon god at Ur around 2300 BCE, to whom a cycle of temple hymns is attributed (scholars debate how literally). Already, religion had professionals, texts and a canon of places to praise. And the very idea of kingship was cast in religious terms: it was something that had "descended from heaven". The table is a tendency, not a law. Some forager peoples had moral high gods; some states had capricious gods. But the broad pattern helps explain the next and most famous claim about religious history. Part 9 — The Axial Age and its critics (800–200 BCE) In 1949 the German philosopher Karl Jaspers published Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The Origin and Goal of History). In it he proposed that the period from roughly 800 to 200 BCE was an "axis" of world history, an Achsenzeit, when, in several places at once, human thought turned in a new direction. Jaspers's list Jaspers pointed to an astonishing cluster: China: Confucius and Laozi, and the "hundred schools" of philosophy, including Mozi and Zhuangzi. India: the Upanishads, the Buddha, and a full range of philosophies from devotion to scepticism and materialism (and, others would add, Mahavira and the Jains). Iran: Zarathustra, teaching the world as a struggle between good and evil. Israel: the prophets, from Elijah through Isaiah and Jeremiah to the anonymous prophet scholars call Second Isaiah. Greece: Homer, the philosophers Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato, the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. What they shared, Jaspers argued, was a new reflectiveness: people began to question inherited myths, to imagine a transcendent reality beyond the visible world, to ask about the individual's moral life and to think in universal terms about all humanity. The great traditions most people still live by, he suggested, have their roots here. The Good Life Across Traditions in this library meets four of these teachers. Why it might have happened Explanations range widely. The sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt, building on Max Weber, studied the social and economic conditions of the "axial civilisations". Robert Bellah, in Religion in Human Evolution (2011), saw the Axial Age as the moment when "theoretic" culture, abstract and critical thinking, joined older ritual and mythic culture. In 2015 Nicolas Baumard, Pascal Boyer and colleagues argued in Current Biology that rising prosperity explained the timing: statistical modelling of "energy capture", a proxy for living standards, suggested that economic development, not political complexity or population size, predicted when ascetic, moralising traditions appeared in the Yellow and Yangtze valleys, the eastern Mediterranean and the Ganges valley. The Axial Age may be one of history's great discoveries, or one of its great optical illusions. Serious scholars hold both views. The critics The concept is influential, and heavily contested. The dates don't line up. Most scholars now place Zarathustra around 1000 BCE, give or take a century or more, with some still arguing for anywhere between 1500 and 500 BCE. On the majority view, he lived well before 800 BCE. Jesus and Muhammad, arguably as transformative as anyone on Jaspers's list, fall well after 200 BCE. Akhenaten's experiment with a single sun god in Egypt came around 1350 BCE. The edges of the "age" keep moving. The places don't fit together. The church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch called the thesis "a baggy monster" that bundles together four very different civilisations, only two of which had much contact during the period. The Old Testament scholar Iain Provan devoted a book, Convenient Myths (2013), to arguing that the idea flattens what actually happened. The supposed novelties appeared earlier. In 2018 a team using the Seshat databank (Daniel Mullins, Daniel Hoyer and colleagues, in the American Sociological Review) systematically tested the claim. They found that critical traits offered as evidence of an "axial" transformation appeared across Afro-Eurasia "hundreds and in some cases thousands of years prior to the proposed Axial Age." Their investigation, they wrote, "undercuts the notion of a specific 'age' of axiality." It can carry a bias. Some critics argue that the concept quietly ranks "axial" traditions above others, casting Indigenous, Egyptian, Mesopotamian or Mesoamerican religions as "pre-axial" or merely ritualistic. Defenders reply that Jaspers himself presented the axis as shared by several civilisations precisely to avoid a Christian-centred history. Position Who holds it Core claim Strong Axial Age Jaspers; Karen Armstrong in popular form A real, near-simultaneous breakthrough in several civilisations Moderate Bellah and Joas (The Axial Age and Its Consequences, 2012) Significant shifts did happen; the causes and boundaries are debated Economic explanation Baumard, Boyer and colleagues (2015) Rising affluence explains when ascetic, moral religions emerged Sceptical MacCulloch, Provan, Mullins and colleagues (2018) No distinct age; traits are older, scattered and differently timed A fair summary is the one Bellah and Joas offered: the idea that the middle centuries of the first millennium BCE marked a significant transition "has become widely, but not universally, accepted." What almost everyone agrees on is narrower: in several literate civilisations of that period, teachers emerged whose words were written down and became the foundation texts of long-lasting traditions. Whether that was one global event or several local ones that look alike from a distance is still argued. One more caution, which brings us back to Part 1. The Axial Age story, like Frazer's ladder, can make it seem that religion "progressed" from ritual to ethics, from many gods to one, from myth to philosophy. Every tradition in this series would tell its own history differently, and many would reject the very idea of progress in religion. Part 10 — In their own words: revelation, and how believers read the science Everything so far has been the outsider's view: religion as a human phenomenon with causes to be found. For most of the world's religious people, the most important thing about their faith's origin is not what it reveals about human minds but what it reveals about God, the gods or the nature of reality. Those accounts are not evidence in the archaeologist's sense. They are the meaning the traditions themselves give to their beginnings, and they deserve to be stated in their own terms. Revelation The Abrahamic traditions trace religion to God's initiative. In Jewish and Christian scripture, God calls Abraham, speaks to Moses from a burning bush and gives the covenant at Sinai (Exodus 19–20). Revelation is often quiet: when the prophet Elijah waits on the mountain, the Lord is not in the wind, the earthquake or the fire, "and after the fire a still small voice" (1 Kings 19:12, King James Version). In Islam, the Quran is God's speech, revealed to the Prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel from around 610 CE. Muslim tradition holds that the first words revealed, in the cave of Hira near Mecca, were the opening of Sura 96: "Recite thou, in the name of thy Lord who created; created man from clots of blood. Recite thou! For thy Lord is the most Beneficent, who hath taught the use of the pen; hath taught Man that which he knoweth not." — Quran 96:1–5 (trans. J. M. Rodwell, 1861) Hindu tradition regards the Vedas as śruti, "that which is heard": eternal truth perceived by ancient seers rather than composed by them. Buddhists trace the Dharma to the Buddha's awakening, a discovery of how things are rather than a message from a god. Many Indigenous traditions locate the origin of law and ceremony in the actions of ancestral beings who shaped the land, as in the Aboriginal Australian Dreaming, a reality described by many as continuing, not past. Religion as natural to humans: the believer's version Some of the most striking religious accounts make the same observation as the cognitive scientists, and draw the opposite conclusion. Many traditions teach that humans are made to seek God, so of course religion is universal. The Quran speaks of an original human nature (fitra) shaped for faith: "Set thou thy face then, as a true convert, towards the Faith which God hath made, and for which He hath made man. No change is there in the creation of God" (Quran 30:30, Rodwell). Another verse (7:172) describes all of Adam's descendants, before birth, being asked "Am I not your Lord?" and answering "Yes, we witness it." In the New Testament, Paul tells the Athenians that he found an altar inscribed "TO THE UNKNOWN GOD", and that God made all nations so "that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us" (Acts 17:23, 27, KJV). He also writes that God's "invisible things ... are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made" (Romans 1:20). The Hebrew Bible's Ecclesiastes says God "hath set the world in their heart" (3:11, KJV), a word many modern translations render as "eternity". The Rigveda's famous Creation Hymn (10.129), by contrast, ends not with certainty but with a question: whether even the one who surveys creation from the highest heaven knows how it began, or perhaps does not. Doubt and wonder are themselves part of religious traditions. How believers respond to the science of religion Believers respond to the theories in Parts 5 to 7 in several ways. "The explanation does not explain away." This is the most common philosophical response. Showing that a capacity has natural causes does not show that its objects are unreal. Humans have evolved capacities for mathematics and for perceiving colour; nobody concludes that numbers or colours are illusions. If God exists and wished to be known, a mind inclined to detect agency and seek meaning is just what one might expect. Justin Barrett, who named the "hyperactive agency detection device", is himself a practising Christian and has argued exactly this. Christian theology, he has written, teaches that people were made to be in relationship with God, so why wouldn't God design us to find belief in the divine natural? "A sense of the divine." The Reformer John Calvin taught that humans have a sensus divinitatis, an implanted awareness of God. Some modern philosophers of religion, notably Alvin Plantinga, have argued that belief formed by such a faculty could be rational without arguments, if the faculty was designed by God. Sceptics reply that the same reasoning would license every tradition's beliefs, including those that contradict each other. "Religion was there first." Some believers read the evidence of very early burial and art as confirming that humans have always been religious, and see this as consistent with their scriptures, rather than as a story of invention. "The science is welcome, but limited." Many believers take the scholarship in their stride as an account of how religion works in human societies, while holding that why there is something to seek is a different question. How the Sacred Texts Were Written in this library makes the same distinction for scripture. Sceptics, for their part, argue that once you can explain why people would believe in gods whether or not gods exist, belief loses its evidential support. That argument, and the replies to it, are explored in Atheism, Agnosticism & Humanism, Fairly. The scientist asks why humans everywhere seek gods. The believer asks what it is that humans everywhere are seeking. The same evidence sits beneath both questions. Part 11 — What we know, what we don't Key dates Dates before writing are approximate, many are minimum ages, and several are disputed; the parts above give the arguments. Date Event 335,000–236,000 years ago Homo naledi in the Rising Star caves; burial claims disputed about 100,000 years ago Burials with ochre at Qafzeh and Tinshemet (Israel) about 78,000 years ago Child buried at Panga ya Saidi, Kenya about 75,000–70,000 years ago Neanderthal burial cluster at Shanidar, Iraq at least 51,200 years ago Narrative cave painting at Leang Karampuang, Sulawesi about 41,000–35,000 years ago The Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, Germany about 34,000 years ago Richly furnished graves at Sungir, Russia about 22,000–17,000 years ago Lascaux cave paintings, France about 9500–8000 BCE Göbekli Tepe, Turkey about 8000–6000 BCE Plastered skulls at Jericho and other Levantine sites about 7100–5600 BCE Çatalhöyük, Anatolia; burials under house floors 4th–3rd millennium BCE Temples, priests and writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt about 2300 BCE Enheduanna, priestess of the moon god at Ur, named author of temple hymns (authorship debated) about 1000 BCE (disputed) Zarathustra's Gathas, by most current estimates 800–200 BCE Jaspers's "Axial Age" 1757 Hume, The Natural History of Religion 1871 Tylor, Primitive Culture 1912 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life 1949 Jaspers names the Axial Age 1995 Excavations begin at Göbekli Tepe 2019–2023 The Seshat "big gods" paper, its retraction (2021) and reanalysis Who's who Person Field Known for David Hume (1711–1776) Philosophy Religion from fear, hope and projecting minds onto nature Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) Anthropology Animism; "belief in Spiritual Beings" James George Frazer (1854–1941) Anthropology The Golden Bough; magic, religion, science Karl Marx (1818–1883) Philosophy, economics Religion as "the sigh of the oppressed creature" Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) Sociology The sacred, collective effervescence Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Psychoanalysis Religion as wish-fulfilment William James (1842–1910) Psychology Religious experience Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) Philosophy The Axial Age Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954) Ethnology Original monotheism (Urmonotheismus) David Lewis-Williams (b. 1934) Archaeology Shamanism and rock art Klaus Schmidt (1953–2014) Archaeology Göbekli Tepe, "first came the temple" Stewart Guthrie Anthropology Faces in the Clouds; anthropomorphism Pascal Boyer Anthropology Minimally counterintuitive concepts Justin Barrett Psychology Hyperactive agency detection Scott Atran Anthropology In Gods We Trust Richard Sosis Anthropology Costly signalling and communes Ara Norenzayan Psychology Big Gods Harvey Whitehouse Anthropology Seshat analyses of moralising gods and ritual How to read a claim about religion's origins New discoveries about early religion make headlines every year. A few questions help sort them. What exactly was found? A pit, a body, a pigment, a carving? The physical evidence is usually far less dramatic than the headline. Who dated it, and how? Dates in this field are often minimums, and methods change: the Sulawesi paintings got older when the dating technique improved. Is "religious" doing hidden work? "Burial", "shrine", "temple" and "shaman" are interpretations, not observations. Who disagrees? For almost every bold claim in this piece, from Homo naledi burials to Göbekli Tepe's temples to the Seshat big gods, there is a published reply. Read both. Five open questions Did Neanderthals and Homo naledi have religious ideas? The burial evidence for Neanderthals is stronger than it was twenty years ago; what it meant to them is not known. The naledi claims remain disputed. Was religion an adaptation, a by-product or a cultural invention that spread because it worked? The cultural-evolution synthesis is popular, but it is hard to test against the deep past. Did belief in punishing gods help build large societies, or follow them? After the Seshat retraction and reanalysis, both sides are still publishing. Was there an Axial Age? Or several unrelated transformations that only look connected from a distance? Can a natural history of religion say anything about religious truth? Most scientists in the field say no; philosophers on both sides still argue that it says something. The more evidence we gather, the further back the story goes, and the more the line between "religious" and "human" blurs. The takeaway Religion has no single starting date. By about 100,000 years ago some humans were burying their dead with care and pigment; by 50,000 years ago they were painting scenes and carving beings that no eye had seen; by 11,000 years ago foragers were raising carved stone pillars at Göbekli Tepe. None of this tells us exactly what they believed. The great 19th- and 20th-century theories each caught something true, about reasoning (Tylor), society (Durkheim), suffering (Marx), wishes (Freud) and experience (James), and each overreached. The cognitive science of religion suggests that minds which readily detect agents and remember striking ideas find gods easy to think, while cultural evolution suggests that costly rituals and, later, moralising gods spread with the groups that held them, though when and why is still fiercely argued. The "Axial Age" is an illuminating pattern to some scholars and an illusion to others. Believers, meanwhile, tell the story as revelation and as a human longing placed there on purpose, and the science, by itself, cannot settle which story is true. Try this: next time you catch yourself seeing a face in a cloud, a car's "expression", or feeling that a run of bad luck is "out to get you", notice it as the mental habit Hume described in 1757 and the cognitive scientists study today. Then ask the question this piece cannot answer for you: is that habit only a quirk of a primate brain, or could it also be, as many traditions say, a capacity for something real? Sources & Further Reading Sources - Kevin Schilbrack, "The Concept of Religion", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 28 March 2022): religio, Tylor, Durkheim, Geertz, family resemblance, Smart's dimensions, J. Z. Smith, Asad, Nongbri and the critical turn. - E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 1 (1871), Project Gutenberg #70458; É. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. J. W. Swain (1915), Gutenberg #41360; W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Gutenberg #621; J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (abridged 1922), Gutenberg #3623; S. Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. A. A. Brill (1918), Gutenberg #41214; D. Hume, The Natural History of Religion (1757), Section 3, Hume Texts Online; K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction (1844), Marxists Internet Archive. Freud's The Future of an Illusion (1927) is summarised from the Wikipedia article and the translation it quotes. - E. Pomeroy et al., "Evidence for funerary behaviour and lethal trauma in a new Neanderthal individual from Shanidar Cave", Scientific Reports 16 (October 2026), and the Shanidar Cave article (lead). - W. Rendu et al., "Evidence supporting an intentional Neandertal burial at La Chapelle-aux-Saints", PNAS 111 (2014): 81–86. - M. Martinón-Torres et al., "Earliest known human burial in Africa", Nature 593 (2021): 95–100. - Y. Zaidner et al., Tinshemet Cave, Nature Human Behaviour 9 (2025): 886–901. - L. R. Berger et al., "Evidence for deliberate burial of the dead by Homo naledi", eLife 12 (2023/2025); M. Martinón-Torres et al., "No scientific evidence that Homo naledi buried their dead and produced rock art", Journal of Human Evolution 195 (2024). - A. Brumm et al., "Oldest cave art found in Sulawesi", Science Advances 7 (2021); A. A. Oktaviana et al., "Narrative cave art in Indonesia by 51,200 years ago", Nature 631 (2024): 814–818. Lion-man, Lascaux (including Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan), Sungir and Qafzeh details from the corresponding Wikipedia articles (leads). - J. D. Lewis-Williams and T. A. Dowson, "The Signs of All Times", Current Anthropology 29 (1988): 201–245; P. A. Helvenston and P. G. Bahn, "Testing the 'Three Stages of Trance' Model", Cambridge Archaeological Journal 13 (2003): 213–224. - L. Dietrich et al., "Cereal processing at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe", PLOS ONE 14 (2019); J. Gresky, J. Haelm and L. Clare, "Modified human crania from Göbekli Tepe", Science Advances 3 (2017); K. Schmidt, "Zuerst kam der Tempel, dann die Stadt", Istanbuler Mitteilungen 50 (2000); E. B. Banning, "So Fair a House", Current Anthropology 52 (2011). Site chronology and later research via the Göbekli Tepe article (lead, citing Clare 2020). - J. L. Barrett, "Exploring the natural foundations of religion", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (2000): 29–34; D. Kelemen, "Are children 'intuitive theists'?", Psychological Science 15 (2004): 295–301; D. L. R. Maij et al., "Mentalizing skills do not differentiate believers from non-believers, but credibility enhancing displays do", PLOS ONE 12 (2017); W. M. Gervais and J. Henrich, "The Zeus Problem", Journal of Cognition and Culture 10 (2010); J. Henrich, "The evolution of costly displays, cooperation and religion", Evolution and Human Behavior 30 (2009). - R. Sosis and E. Bressler, "Cooperation and Commune Longevity", Cross-Cultural Research 37 (2003): 211–239; the 39%/6% figures from R. Sosis, "Religion and Intragroup Cooperation", Cross-Cultural Research 34 (2000): 70–87, as summarised by Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (2012), ch. 11, and in the Wikipedia article "Evolutionary psychology of religion". - A. Norenzayan et al., "The cultural evolution of prosocial religions", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39 (2016); B. G. Purzycki et al., "Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality", Nature 530 (2016); J. Watts et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B 282 (2015); H. Whitehouse et al., Nature 568 (2019), and Retraction Note, Nature 595 (7 July 2021); B. Beheim et al., Nature 595 (2021); H. Whitehouse et al., "Testing the Big Gods hypothesis with global historical data: a review and 'retake'", Religion, Brain & Behavior 13:2 (2023): 124–166; P. Turchin et al., Science Advances 8 (2022). - H. C. Peoples, P. Duda and F. W. Marlowe, "Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion", Human Nature 27 (2016): 261–282. Çatalhöyük, plastered skulls and Urmonotheismus: corresponding Wikipedia articles (leads). - Sumerian King List, Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (University of Oxford), 2.1.1. - D. Mullins et al., "A Systematic Assessment of 'Axial Age' Proposals Using Global Comparative Historical Evidence", American Sociological Review 83 (2018): 596–626; N. Baumard et al., "Increased affluence explains the emergence of ascetic wisdoms and moralizing religions", Current Biology 25 (2015): 10–15; Axial Age article (lead) for Jaspers's list, MacCulloch's and Bellah and Joas's words; Zoroaster dating per the Zoroaster article citing Malandra (Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2005) and Kellens (2011). - Scripture: King James Version (Project Gutenberg); the Quran, trans. J. M. Rodwell (1861), Project Gutenberg #2800. Justin Barrett's views as quoted (from the New York Times) in his Wikipedia biography; sensus divinitatis, Muhammad's first revelation and the life dates in the Who's who table from the corresponding Wikipedia articles (leads). E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford, 1965). Golden Bough first edition 1890 per its Wikipedia article. Go deeper - 📘 Religion Explained — Pascal Boyer (the founding popular book of the cognitive science of religion: witty, provocative and clear on why some supernatural ideas stick) - 📘 Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict — Ara Norenzayan (the big-gods thesis at its strongest, by its main author; read it alongside the Seshat debate above) - 📘 Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age — Robert N. Bellah (a vast, humane synthesis by a sociologist who took both science and religion seriously) - 📘 The Mind in the Cave — David Lewis-Williams (the shamanism theory of cave art, argued in full) - 📘 Born Believers: The Science of Children's Religious Belief — Justin L. Barrett (the developmental evidence, by a cognitive scientist who is also a Christian) - 📘 The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James (still the best book on religious experience; free on Project Gutenberg) - 🌐 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — The Concept of Religion (the definitional debate, thoroughly and fairly) - 🌐 Companion pieces in this library: The World's Religions, One Page Each, Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It, Indigenous and Folk Religions, Mysticism 101, Atheism, Agnosticism & Humanism, Fairly, The Pecking Order, and the next long read, The Vanished Gods Step 11. The Vanished Gods: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, the Norse and Mesoamerica --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: The vanished gods: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, the Norse, Mesoamerica. Six great religious worlds that shaped billions of lives over thousands of years, what their followers actually did and hoped for, how we know (and why some of our sources were written by their enemies), how each one ended, and the people bringing their gods back today. Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each and How Religion Began. Companion pieces: How the Sacred Texts Were Written, Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It, Indigenous and Folk Religions: The Oldest Faiths on Earth and A Brief History of Mexico. On 24 August 394 CE, on the island of Philae in the Nile, a man named Esmet-Akhom carved a figure of the god Mandulis and a short text beside it on the wall of the temple of Isis. It is the last known inscription written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. The script had been used for something like three and a half thousand years. By the time Esmet-Akhom picked up his chisel, the Roman Empire had made Christianity its official religion, the great temples of Egypt were closing, and very few people alive could read what he wrote. Philae's Isis kept her worshippers for more than a century after that. But eventually she, like Ra and Osiris, Marduk and Ishtar, Zeus and Athena, Jupiter and Vesta, Odin and Thor, Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, lost the communities that fed, housed and praised them. We call these "dead religions", or "mythology", a word that quietly turns other people's faith into stories. For their followers they were not stories. They were the order of the world, the reason the river rose and the sun returned, the source of law and kingship, and the hope of what came after death. Millions of people lived and died within them, often for far longer than any religion now practised has existed. This long read visits six of those worlds: ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, the Norse and the Mesoamerican civilisations of the Aztecs (Mexica) and Maya. For each it asks the same questions. Who were the gods? What did people do, in temples and at home? What did they expect after death? How do we know, and how reliable are our sources? How did it end? And what remains, including the modern communities who honour these gods again. A note on approach: this piece describes these religions as far as possible as their followers understood them, without ranking them against each other or against living faiths. Some practices, such as human sacrifice, are described plainly, along with the scholarly debates over how far hostile sources exaggerated them. Modern revivals are described in their own terms and in the terms of historians, who usually see them as reconstructions; both views are given. Where evidence is thin or contested, the piece says so. In this long read Egypt: the gods who kept the world in order (about 3000 BCE–6th century CE) Mesopotamia: houses of the gods between the rivers (about 3500 BCE–1st century CE) Greece: sacrifice, oracles and mysteries (Late Bronze Age–6th century CE) Rome: a contract with the gods (about 8th century BCE–5th century CE) The Norse: gods we know mostly through Christians (about 8th–11th centuries CE) Mesoamerica I: the Mexica (Aztecs) (14th–16th centuries CE) Mesoamerica II: the Maya, the sources and what survived (to the 16th century CE, and beyond) How gods vanish, and how they come back Part 1 — Egypt: the gods who kept the world in order (about 3000 BCE–6th century CE) The gods and the order of things Egyptian religion had hundreds of gods, and they changed over three thousand years, merged with each other and took on new roles. A few stand out. Ra, the sun god, sailed across the sky by day and through the underworld by night. Osiris, murdered by his brother Seth and restored to life by his wife Isis, became king of the dead. Their son Horus, the falcon god, avenged him and inherited the throne of the living, which is why every pharaoh was in a sense the living Horus. Amun of Thebes rose to become king of the gods, often fused with Ra as Amun-Ra. Anubis, jackal-headed, guarded embalming and the cemetery. Thoth, the ibis-headed god of writing and wisdom, recorded the judgement of the dead. At the centre of it all stood an idea rather than a god: Ma'at, the right order of the cosmos, truth, justice and balance, opposed to isfet, chaos. Ma'at was also a goddess, shown with an ostrich feather on her head. The king's highest duty, through the priests who acted for him, was to sustain the gods with rituals and offerings so that Ma'at would hold and chaos would be kept back. The state poured vast resources into this. The pyramids, the temples of Karnak and Luxor, and the tombs of the Valley of the Kings were not luxuries. They were the machinery of keeping the world working. Temples: the gods' houses An Egyptian temple was not a place for congregations. It was the house of a god, whose image lived in the sanctuary, where priests, acting as intermediaries on the king's behalf, sustained the god with daily rituals and offerings. Ordinary people did not go into the inner rooms. They encountered the gods at the temple gate, in the outer courts, and above all at festivals, when the god's image was carried out in a portable boat-shrine (a barque) on the shoulders of priests. The procession could also serve as an oracle: people put questions to the god, and the movement of the barque gave the answer. The afterlife and the weighing of the heart Egypt is famous for its concern with death, but its texts are really about life continuing. Among the oldest religious texts in the world are the Pyramid Texts, carved inside the pyramid of King Unas, the last king of the Fifth Dynasty, around 2350 BCE: spells to help the dead king rise to join the gods. Over centuries such spells spread from kings to nobles and then to anyone who could pay a scribe. The collection we call the Book of the Dead, which Egyptians knew as spells for "coming forth by day", was in use from about 1550 BCE to about 50 BCE. Its most famous scene appears in the Papyrus of Hunefer, from about 1275 BCE. The dead man's heart is weighed on a scale against the feather of Ma'at. Anubis checks the balance, Thoth writes down the result, and a monster called Ammit, part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus, waits to devour any heart heavy with wrongdoing. Before the weighing, the dead person declares innocence of a long list of wrongs, the so-called "negative confession" of chapter 125. In E. A. Wallis Budge's translation the lines include: "I have not let any man hunger. I have made no one to weep. I have not committed murder ... I have not taken milk from the mouths of children." — Book of the Dead, chapter 125 (trans. Budge) It is one of the oldest moral codes we have, and it is spoken by someone hoping to be found righteous. Religion at home The temples belonged to the state, but ordinary Egyptians had a rich religious life of their own. At Deir el-Medina, the village of the craftsmen who cut and painted the royal tombs, archaeologists have found household niches and altars, and around 5,000 ostraca, written fragments on pottery and stone, that illuminate everyday life, religion included. Families marked births and naming with rites, looked for meaning in dreams and put questions to the gods through oracles. Historians describe a growth of "personal piety" in the Middle and New Kingdoms, in which individuals addressed gods directly as personal protectors. In the Late Period, from the 26th Dynasty (7th century BCE) onwards, the cult of sacred animals boomed. Worshippers paid priests to mummify an animal of the species sacred to a god, such as a cat or a bird, as an offering. Millions of these animal mummies were buried at temples. One great break: Akhenaten Around the mid-14th century BCE, the pharaoh Akhenaten did something without parallel in Egyptian history. He elevated one god, the Aten, the disc of the sun, above all others, and built a new capital for the god at Akhetaten (Amarna). Scholars still argue whether this was true monotheism, a royal cult of the sun with the king as its interpreter, or something else. It did not outlast him long: the Atenist religion was effectively finished by about 1319 BCE, and Egypt returned to its many gods. How it ended Egyptian religion survived conquest by Persians, Alexander the Great, the Greek Ptolemies and the Romans, foreign rulers who often took the role of pharaoh and built or decorated temples to Egyptian gods. What it did not survive was the Christianisation of the Roman Empire. Imperial laws of the late 4th century banned sacrifice and closed temples. Esmet-Akhom's inscription of 394 marked the end of hieroglyphic writing. Philae lasted longer, partly for political reasons: the Roman state had agreed by treaty, in 452, that peoples from south of the frontier, who still worshipped Isis, could visit her temple. The historian Procopius says the temple was closed by the general Narses on the orders of the emperor Justinian, around 537. Modern scholars such as Jitse Dijkstra argue that the organised cult had already faded by then, and that the "closure" was more symbolic than real. Either way, by the 6th century the last community of Egyptian temple religion was gone. Legacy and revival The Coptic language, the last stage of Egyptian, has no native speakers today, but it remains in daily use as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic churches. In the 20th century, people began to worship the Egyptian gods again, under the broad name Kemetism, from Kemet, an ancient Egyptian name for Egypt. Kemetic Orthodoxy was founded in 1988 by Tamara Siuda and is based at a temple in Joliet, Illinois; its practice centres on living by Ma'at, belief in Netjer (the divine), veneration of the ancestors (akhu) and worship at personal shrines, and members recognise Siuda by the ancient title of Nisut. The Ausar Auset Society, founded in Brooklyn in 1973 by Ra Un Nefer Amen, draws Egyptian religion into an African-centred spiritual system. The Fellowship of Isis, founded in Ireland, honours Isis and other goddesses. Historians note that no unbroken line of practice links these groups to ancient Egypt; the groups themselves present their work as restoring a tradition rather than inheriting one intact. Egypt at a glance Key gods Ra, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Amun, Anubis, Thoth, Ma'at Central idea Ma'at: cosmic order sustained by ritual Religious specialists Priests acting for the king; the king as living Horus Afterlife Judgement of the heart; life continuing with Osiris Main sources Pyramid Texts, Book of the Dead, temple inscriptions, tombs, village records End Temples closed late 4th century; last hieroglyphs 394 CE; Philae closed c. 537 Revival Kemetism (Kemetic Orthodoxy, 1988), Ausar Auset Society (1973), Fellowship of Isis Part 2 — Mesopotamia: houses of the gods between the rivers (about 3500 BCE–1st century CE) Gods of cities Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates in what is now Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkey, is where writing was invented and where the oldest cities grew. Its religion was shared, with variations, by Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians over more than three thousand years. Each city belonged to a god. Enlil, lord of wind and authority, lived at Nippur. Enki (in Akkadian, Ea), god of fresh water, wisdom and craft, lived at Eridu. Nanna (Sin), the moon god, lived at Ur. Utu (Shamash), the sun, was god of justice. Inanna (Ishtar), goddess of love, sex and war, was worshipped at Uruk and everywhere. As Babylon rose, its god Marduk became king of the gods; in Assyria, the national god was Ashur, who shared his name with his city. How Religion Began in this series describes how this pattern, a god for each city and a king as the god's steward, marked a new stage in religious history. The temple household A Mesopotamian temple was the literal house of the god, and it was run like a great household, with priests to care for the god's statue. The temple owned land, herds and workshops, and employed farmers, weavers, brewers, musicians and scribes. A cult statue was not seen as a mere image: through rituals known as "mouth-washing" and "mouth-opening" (in Akkadian mīs pî and pīt pî), the made object became a living presence of the god. The most famous religious figure from Mesopotamia is a priestess. Enheduanna, who flourished around 2300 BCE, was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, the king who united Mesopotamia, and served as high priestess (entu) of the moon god Nanna at Ur. Hymns to Inanna and to temples across the land are attributed to her, which would make her the earliest known named author in history. Scholars debate how much of that attribution is literal, since the copies we have were made centuries later; some, like William Hallo and Åke Sjöberg, have accepted it, while others, including Miguel Civil and Jeremy Black, are more sceptical. Omens, demons and personal gods Mesopotamians lived in a world full of signs. Diviners read the future in the entrails of sacrificed animals (extispicy), in oil dropped on water, in the flight of birds, in dreams and in the movements of the stars and planets, laying some of the foundations of astronomy. The world was also full of demons. Lamashtu, a terrifying female demon, preyed on unborn and newborn babies and on pregnant women. Another demon, Pazuzu, served as a protector of the household, and his image was used against her. Alongside the great gods, individuals honoured a personal god. In the third millennium BCE some rulers regarded particular gods as their personal protectors; by the second millennium, ordinary people too had a close relationship with a personal god, maintained through prayer. A bleak afterlife The Mesopotamian underworld, sometimes called Irkalla, was not a place of reward or punishment. Almost everyone went there, and it was grim. The poem known as the Descent of Ishtar describes it as "the house of darkness ... the place where dust is their nourishment and their food mud" (trans. Mackenzie). The dead depended on the living to bring them food and water offerings; neglected ghosts could become restless and dangerous. That bleakness gives the region's greatest literary work its power. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the king, shattered by the death of his friend Enkidu, searches for immortality. In the Old Babylonian version, a tavern-keeper (called Sabitum in an early translation, Siduri in later ones) tells him: "The life that thou seekest, thou wilt not find. When the gods created mankind, Death they imposed on mankind." — Gilgamesh, Old Babylonian version (trans. Jastrow and Clay, 1920) Her advice is to fill his belly, make merry, wear clean clothes, and let his wife rejoice in his embrace: to love the life he has. Festival: Akitu The great New Year festival, the Akitu, renewed the bond between the gods, the king and the land. In Babylon, priests of Marduk's temple, the Esagila, prayed for the god's forgiveness and protection of his city, and creation stories were told while the people sang and danced. In one remarkable ritual the high priest stripped the king of his royal insignia and struck him on the cheek; if the blow brought tears, it was a good omen, a sign that Marduk was pleased. The king's power came from the god and could be humbled before him. How we know Unlike the Norse or the Aztecs, Mesopotamians speak to us mostly in their own words, because they wrote on clay, which survives fire. The library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, from the 7th century BCE, held more than 30,000 tablets and fragments. Archaeologists, including Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam, began recovering them from 1849. In 1872 George Smith, an assistant in the British Museum's Assyriology department, deciphered one of them and found a story of a great flood. Like Noah, its hero Utnapishtim was forewarned, built a boat to preserve living things, and afterwards sent out birds to look for dry land. When he presented it on 3 December 1872, with Prime Minister William Gladstone in the audience, it caused a sensation because of its parallels with the story of Noah. How it ended There was no single end. Mesopotamian religion faded slowly under Persian, Greek and Parthian rule, as Aramaic replaced Akkadian and old temples lost their patrons. The last datable cuneiform tablet is an astronomical almanac from Uruk from 79/80 CE. Some old Mesopotamian traditions lingered much longer: the city of Harran, in what is now southern Turkey, remained a centre of a pagan religion, with deep roots in the old Semitic gods and strong Greek philosophical elements, into the early Islamic period. Its followers, known as Sabians, included the 9th-century astronomer and mathematician Thabit ibn Qurra. Legacy and revival Mesopotamian stories left traces in the Hebrew Bible, most famously in the parallels between the Babylonian flood stories and Genesis, which scholars generally explain through shared regional traditions rather than simple copying. Base-60 counting, which originated with the Sumerians in the third millennium BCE, survives in a modified form in the way we measure time and angles: sixty minutes, sixty seconds. Today, Assyrian Christians, many of whom see themselves as descendants of the ancient Assyrians, celebrate Akitu (also called Kha b-Nisan) on 1 April as a cultural and national new year. It was revived as a celebration in the 1960s and held publicly from the 1990s. It is a festival of identity, not of the old gods; most celebrants are Christians. Small modern groups also attempt to reconstruct Mesopotamian polytheism, but they are very few. Mesopotamia at a glance Key gods An, Enlil, Enki/Ea, Inanna/Ishtar, Nanna/Sin, Utu/Shamash, Marduk, Ashur Central idea Humans serve the gods, who own the cities Religious specialists Temple priests and priestesses, diviners, exorcists; king as god's steward Afterlife A dim underworld for almost everyone Main sources Cuneiform tablets (myths, hymns, omen lists, rituals), temple archaeology End Gradual decline; last datable cuneiform tablet 79/80 CE; Harran's pagans into the Islamic era Revival Assyrian Akitu (cultural, 1 April); tiny reconstructionist groups Part 3 — Greece: sacrifice, oracles and mysteries (Late Bronze Age–6th century CE) Old gods, new gods Greek religion did not have a founder, a creed or a single holy book. It was a web of local cults, shared myths and common rituals, spread across hundreds of independent cities. Some of its gods were very old. Clay tablets in the Linear B script from the Mycenaean palaces of the Late Bronze Age already name Poseidon (po-se-da-o), Zeus and Dionysus (di-wo-nu-so). Others, such as Apollo and Aphrodite, do not appear in those records, suggesting they joined or rose to prominence later. By the time of Homer and Hesiod (around the 8th–7th centuries BCE), the familiar family of Olympian gods was in place: Zeus, king of gods and guardian of oaths and hospitality; Hera, his wife, goddess of marriage; Athena, wisdom and war; Apollo, prophecy, music and healing; Artemis, the hunt and wild things; Demeter, grain; Poseidon, the sea; Hermes, messenger and guide of souls; Dionysus, wine, ecstasy and theatre; Hestia, the hearth. Sacrifice: sharing a meal with the gods The core ritual was animal sacrifice, with hymn and prayer, at an altar that stood outside the temple, never inside it. Most of the flesh was eaten by the worshippers, and the parts burned for the gods went up as smoke; libations of wine were poured as well. Hesiod's Theogony explains this unequal division with a myth: at a place called Mecone, the trickster Prometheus fooled Zeus into choosing the bones hidden under glistening fat, leaving the meat for humans, "and because of this the tribes of men upon earth burn white bones to the deathless gods upon fragrant altars." — Hesiod, Theogony (trans. Evelyn-White) There were no revealed scriptures and no creed. Authority came from tradition, and Greeks generally considered what one did far more important than what one believed. Priests were mostly drawn from the local elite, and religion was bound up with civic life. Oracles People consulted the gods directly through oracles. The most famous was at Delphi, where the Pythia, a priestess of Apollo, gave answers to cities and individuals asking whether to go to war, found a colony or marry. Many ancient authors mention her, from Herodotus to Plato, but details of how she actually operated are scarce. One of our best inside witnesses is the philosopher and biographer Plutarch, who served as a priest at Delphi around the late 1st and early 2nd centuries CE. Death and the mysteries For most Greeks the afterlife looked much like Mesopotamia's: a shadowy existence in the house of Hades. In the Odyssey, when Odysseus visits the dead and praises the great hero Achilles, Achilles replies: "I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead." — Homer, Odyssey, Book 11 (trans. Samuel Butler) But Greek religion also offered something more hopeful to those who sought it. The mysteries, initiations that revealed secret rites, promised a better fate. The most famous, at Eleusis near Athens, honoured Demeter and her daughter Persephone, "the two goddesses". Initiates were sworn to secrecy, and kept it so well that we still do not know exactly what happened inside the great hall of initiation, the Telesterion. The Roman statesman Cicero, himself an initiate, wrote that from the mysteries we learn not only to live with joy but to "die with a better hope" (On the Laws 2.36). Some Greeks followed Orphic and Dionysian teachings. Some initiates were buried with small inscribed gold tablets, dating from about 450 BCE to 250 CE, which scholars call Totenpässe, "passports for the dead": instructions for the soul's journey in the underworld. Religion at home and in the street Most Greek religion happened far from great temples. Each household had its hearth, sacred to Hestia. Square stone pillars topped with a carved head, most often of Hermes, called herms, stood in public places, and travellers added stones to sacred heaps at crossroads and boundaries. People made vows and left offerings at local shrines, asked healing gods like Asclepius for cures, and sometimes, less respectably, paid for curse tablets: thin sheets of lead inscribed with spells to bind a rival in love, law or sport, often buried in graves or thrown into wells. How it ended Greek religion survived Roman conquest and merged with Roman religion. It ended with the Christianisation of the empire. Under Emperor Theodosius I, laws in the early 390s banned sacrifice and pagan worship. According to the historian Eunapius, the Eleusinian Mysteries came to an end around 392, and the Goths of Alaric sacked Eleusis in 396. The ancient Olympic Games, held in honour of Zeus, are traditionally said to have been held for the last time in 393. Philosophical paganism lasted longer: the Neoplatonic school in Athens continued to teach until 529, when the emperor Justinian closed it. Legacy and revival Greek myths never stopped being told; they shaped European art, literature and psychology. But the worship of the Greek gods also returned. Hellenism (sometimes called Hellenic polytheism or Hellenismos) is practised by groups in Greece and elsewhere. The Supreme Council of Ethnikoi Hellenes (YSEE), founded in 1997, estimated its own following at around 2,000. In 2017 Greece recognised Hellenism as a "known religion", a legal status that allows, for example, its own places of worship and weddings. Many Hellenists see their faith as the native religion of Greece, suppressed but never entirely extinguished. Most historians see it as a modern reconstruction drawing on ancient texts and archaeology. The two views are not wholly opposed: Hellenists themselves often describe their work as restoration. Greece at a glance Key gods Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Demeter, Poseidon, Hermes, Dionysus, Hestia Central idea Right practice more than right belief; sacrifice and festival within the city Religious specialists Part-time priests and priestesses; seers; oracles such as the Pythia Afterlife Shadowy Hades for most; better hopes for initiates in mysteries Main sources Homer, Hesiod, tragedies, inscriptions, temples, vase paintings, gold tablets End Laws of the 390s; Eleusis c. 392; Athens school closed 529 Revival Hellenism; recognised as a "known religion" in Greece (2017) Part 4 — Rome: a contract with the gods (about 8th century BCE–5th century CE) "I give so that you may give" Roman religion had a reputation, even in antiquity, for being practical. It was based on the principle of do ut des, "I give so that you may give". The Romans offered the gods sacrifice, prayer and correct ritual; the gods in return protected the city, its harvests and its armies. What mattered was not inner belief or doctrine but doing the right thing, in the right way, at the right time. Keeping the "peace of the gods" (pax deorum) was a central responsibility of the state, and later of the emperors. The great gods of the state were the triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, worshipped on the Capitoline Hill, along with Mars, god of war and father of Romulus, and many others. As Rome expanded it absorbed Greek gods, identifying Jupiter with Zeus and Venus with Aphrodite, and welcomed foreign gods into the city: Cybele from Asia Minor, Isis from Egypt, Mithras with eastern origins. Priests and Vestals Rome had priesthoods, but they were usually held by members of the elite alongside political careers; priests married, raised families and led active public lives. Julius Caesar became pontifex maximus, the chief priest, before he was elected consul, and in the imperial era the emperor held the title. Augurs read the will of the gods in signs such as the flight of birds. The most famous Roman priestesses were the six Vestal Virgins, who tended the sacred fire of Vesta, goddess of the hearth, in her round temple in the Forum. The fire symbolised Rome's survival; if it went out, disaster threatened. Vestals vowed to serve for at least thirty years and to remain chaste throughout. The religion of the household For ordinary Romans, the centre of religion was the home. Every household had its Lares, guardian spirits, and its domestic Penates, often honoured at a small shrine called a lararium. The family made offerings at meals and important family events: grain, honey cakes, wine, incense. Lares also protected neighbourhoods: crossroad shrines were a focus of local life, and their cult officials included freedmen and enslaved people who were otherwise excluded from public office. Rome's religious marketplace also included mystery cults offering personal salvation. The cult of Mithras, whose initiates met in underground temples built to resemble caves, drew especially on soldiers, merchants, customs officials and minor bureaucrats. Persecution, toleration and reversal Romans tolerated most gods, but expected loyalty to the gods of the state. Christians, who refused to sacrifice to them, were viewed with suspicion. Under Emperor Decius in 250, every inhabitant of the empire was required to sacrifice and obtain a certificate proving it. The "Great Persecution" under Diocletian began in 303. In 311 Galerius issued an edict of toleration, and in February 313 Constantine and Licinius agreed the policy known as the Edict of Milan, granting freedom of worship to Christians and all others. Then the direction reversed. In the Edict of Thessalonica of 27 February 380, Theodosius I declared Nicene Christianity the religion that all subjects should follow. Laws of 391 and 392 banned pagan sacrifice and temple visits; historians debate how strictly they were enforced, and many temples continued in use for decades. The last pagan holders of the consulship, the highest honorary office, served in 391. The Altar of Victory: the last great argument The most moving document of the end is a debate. In 382 Emperor Gratian removed the Altar of Victory from the Senate house in Rome, where senators had burned incense before it for centuries, and confiscated the revenues of the Vestals. In 384 the senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus appealed to the young emperor Valentinian II to restore them. His argument is a plea for religious pluralism: the gods had protected Rome for a thousand years, and the truth is too great to be reached by one path alone. His opponent, Ambrose, bishop of Milan, quoted him and replied, in a letter to the emperor: "By one road, says he, one cannot attain to so great a secret. What you know not, that we know by the voice of God." — Ambrose of Milan, Letter 18.8, quoting and answering Symmachus Ambrose won. The altar was not restored, despite later appeals. How it ended, and what lingered Official Roman religion was largely dismantled by the early 5th century, though rural practices and household rites persisted. Unofficial worship of the Lares, for example, seems to have continued into the early 5th century. Legacy and revival Roman religion lives on in the names of the planets, in religious vocabulary (religio itself, see How Religion Began), and in a small modern revival. Roman polytheist groups, including the international Nova Roma organisation, celebrate festivals such as the Natale di Roma, the birthday of Rome, with ceremonies that in recent years have been held at the Circus Maximus. Like other revivals, these are modern reconstructions; their followers would add that they honour gods who never died. Rome at a glance Key gods Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Mars, Vesta, Janus, Lares and Penates; many adopted gods Central idea Do ut des: correct ritual maintains the pax deorum Religious specialists Elite priestly colleges, pontifex maximus, augurs, six Vestal Virgins Afterlife Varied and uncertain; families honoured their dead Main sources Latin literature, inscriptions, calendars, temples, household shrines (e.g. Pompeii) End Edict of Thessalonica 380; anti-pagan laws 391–392; Altar of Victory debate 384 Revival Roman polytheist reconstruction (e.g. Nova Roma) Part 5 — The Norse: gods we know mostly through Christians (about 8th–11th centuries CE) The gods The Norse gods belonged to two families, the Æsir and the Vanir, who in myth fought a war and then made peace. Odin, god of wisdom, poetry, magic and the battle-dead, whose reconstructed ancient name may mean "lord of frenzy", was widely revered across the Germanic world. Thor, with his hammer, defended gods and humans against giants and was the most popular god among farmers and sailors. Freyr and his sister Freyja, from the Vanir, governed fertility, wealth and love; Freyja was also linked to magic. Frigg was Odin's wife; Loki, the trickster, was both helper and betrayer, and in the end an enemy of the gods. Norse myth imagined a world that would end: at Ragnarök a great battle would see many gods perish, the world would burn and sink beneath the water, and then rise again, cleansed and fertile, to be repopulated by two human survivors. The source problem No religion in this piece is harder to know honestly. The Norse peoples wrote little about their religion before they became Christian. Runic inscriptions are short. Almost everything we know about the myths comes from texts written down in Christian Iceland in the 13th century, two centuries or more after conversion. The Prose Edda was written around 1220 by Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic chieftain, poet and historian. It is our richest source for Norse myth, but Snorri was a Christian, writing partly as a handbook for poets. His prologue explains the gods as human kings of the ancient past who came to be worshipped, a common Christian way of treating pagan gods. The Poetic Edda survives mainly in a single manuscript, the Codex Regius, written in the 1270s. It was rediscovered in 1643 by Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson, sent to Denmark in 1662, and returned to Iceland only on 21 April 1971, a national event. Outsiders' accounts are vivid but biased. In the 11th century the German cleric Adam of Bremen described a great temple at Uppsala in Sweden, with statues of Thor at the centre flanked by Wodan (Odin) and Fricco (probably Freyr), and a festival every nine years at which nine males of every kind of creature, including humans, were sacrificed and hung in a sacred grove. He relied on an informant (who he said was 72 years old) and wrote as a missionary churchman. Archaeologists have not found a temple of the size he described, and many scholars treat his account with caution. In 921 the Arab traveller Ahmad ibn Fadlan left Baghdad on an embassy to the Volga Bulgars. Much of his account describes the Rus, Scandinavian traders on the Volga, including in great detail the funeral of one of their chieftains: a ship burial involving human sacrifice. It is one of the most detailed eyewitness accounts we have, though written by an outsider who found the Rus disgusting and said so. Almost everything we know about the Norse gods was written down by Christians, foreigners, or the descendants of converts. That does not make it false. It does mean every page needs a second look. Ritual and the household The core ritual was blót, sacrifice, usually of animals, followed by a communal feast. It was led not by a professional priesthood but by chieftains and heads of households; in Iceland, the chieftain-priests were called goðar (singular goði). Some rites were private. The poet Sigvatr Þórðarson, travelling in Sweden in the early 11th century, was turned away from a farm because the household was holding an álfablót, a sacrifice to the elves, and a housewife told him to leave. Magic was part of religious life. Seiðr, a form of sorcery and divination, was associated in myth with Freyja and Odin; the sagas describe women seers (völur) practising it. Archaeology adds what the texts leave out: burials with ships, weapons, horses and household goods. The Oseberg ship in Norway, buried in or after 834 with two women and rich goods, is the most spectacular. The afterlife Different texts describe several destinations. Warriors chosen by Odin's valkyries feasted in Valhalla, the hall of the slain, preparing for Ragnarök. Hel, ruled by a being of the same name, received others. Other traditions spoke of the dead living on in burial mounds or in mountains. The variety suggests there was no single official doctrine, which fits a religion without scriptures or a central priesthood. How it ended Christianisation came over two centuries, sometimes peacefully through trade and marriage, sometimes by force. Olaf Tryggvason, king of Norway from 995 to 1000, pressed conversion within his kingdom forcibly, and put pressure on Iceland too. Iceland's conversion is one of the most remarkable stories in religious history. Around the year 1000 (some sources say 999), with the country divided between Christians and pagans and on the edge of civil war, the dispute went to the Althing, the island's assembly. Both sides agreed to let the lawspeaker, Thorgeir Thorkelsson, a pagan goði, decide. According to the sagas he lay under a fur cloak for a day and a night, then announced that all Icelanders should be baptised and accept Christianity, under one law, to keep the peace. There were concessions: for a time, people could still expose unwanted infants, eat horse meat, and sacrifice in private. A popular story that Thorgeir then threw his idols into the waterfall Goðafoss is a much later legend, from the 19th century. Legacy and revival The old Germanic gods live on in the English days of the week: Wednesday is Woden's (Odin's) day, Thursday is the day of Thunor (Thor), and Friday is named for the Anglo-Saxon goddess Frīg, counterpart of Frigg. They also live on in modern fantasy and film. They also have living worshippers. In 1972, on the first day of summer, a group met at the Hótel Borg in Reykjavík and founded the Ásatrúarfélagið, the Æsir Faith Fellowship, led for its first two decades by the poet and farmer Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson. Iceland recognised it as an official religious organisation in 1973. It has grown remarkably: according to Statistics Iceland it had 280 members in 1998, 1,402 in 2010, 4,640 in 2020, and 6,158 at the start of 2026, about 1.56 percent of the population. Members typically see their faith as Iceland's ancient heritage, reawakened. Most historians would describe it as a modern religion inspired by medieval texts. Many members would accept both descriptions. Elsewhere, Norse-inspired religion is called Heathenry, Ásatrú or Odinism, and is a diverse international movement. It is divided by a sharp argument over who may belong. Universalist or inclusive groups, such as The Troth (founded in 1987), welcome anyone who wishes to honour the gods. Folkish groups hold that the religion belongs to people of northern European descent, and often combine it with far-right and white-supremacist views. A larger proportion of Heathens take the universalist view, and a 2015 survey of Heathens found more subscribing to universalist ideas than folkish ones. Some Heathen groups explicitly denounce any link between their religion and racial identity. The Norse at a glance Key gods Odin, Thor, Freyr, Freyja, Frigg; Æsir and Vanir; Loki Central idea Reciprocity with the gods through blót; a world heading for Ragnarök Religious specialists Chieftains and householders (goðar), seeresses (völur) Afterlife Several: Valhalla, Hel, life in the burial mound Main sources Eddas (13th century, Christian Iceland), sagas, runestones, archaeology, Adam of Bremen, Ibn Fadlan End Gradual conversion 10th–12th centuries; Iceland's Althing decision c. 1000 Revival Ásatrúarfélagið (Iceland, 1972); international Heathenry Part 6 — Mesoamerica I: the Mexica (Aztecs) (14th–16th centuries CE) Mesoamerica, the region stretching from central Mexico through Guatemala and Belize to parts of Honduras and El Salvador, developed its religions entirely independently of Europe, Asia and Africa. Its civilisations, from the Maya and Zapotecs to Teotihuacan and the Mexica (Aztecs), shared a family of ideas: a 260-day sacred calendar, gods of rain, maize and sun, temple pyramids, and the central place of blood in relations between gods and humans. A Brief History of Mexico in this library's nations series tells the political story. The Mexica (Aztec) gods The Mexica, who founded Tenochtitlan in the 14th century, worshipped a large and shifting pantheon. Their own patron was Huitzilopochtli, god of the sun and war, who according to one origin story was born on Coatepec, "Serpent Hill", to defend his mother Coatlicue against his sister Coyolxauhqui and her four hundred brothers. Tlaloc was the ancient god of rain and fertility. Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, was a god of wind and knowledge; Tezcatlipoca, "Lord of the Smoking Mirror", associated with the jaguar, was a trickster and the patron god of the ruling class. At the heart of Tenochtitlan stood the Templo Mayor, a pyramid with twin shrines on top: on the left (facing it) the shrine of Tlaloc, on the right that of Huitzilopochtli, embodying the two pillars of Mexica life, water for crops and war for tribute. The first temple there was built, by tradition, in 1325, and it was enlarged in seven major building phases. On 21 February 1978 electricity workers digging in central Mexico City hit a huge carved stone disc showing the dismembered Coyolxauhqui, which led to the excavation of the temple. Archaeologists have since recovered more than 7,000 objects, mostly offerings. Calendars and time Mesoamerican religion was organised around time. Two calendars ran side by side: a 260-day ritual count (the tonalpohualli in Nahuatl; the tzolk'in among the Maya), made of 20 day-signs combined with numbers 1 to 13, and a 365-day solar year. The two cycles return to the same starting combination every 18,980 days, which is exactly 52 years of 365 days. At the end of each 52-year cycle the Mexica performed the New Fire ceremony, the "binding of the years": every fire was put out, a new fire was kindled on the chest of a sacrificed captive, and it was carried all over the city. Sacrifice, honestly The Mexica practised human sacrifice, most famously by removing the heart of a victim on the temple summit. Many victims were war captives. Children were offered to Tlaloc, without whose sacrifices, it was believed, the rain would not come; archaeologists have found the remains of at least 42 children sacrificed to him at the Templo Mayor. Some victims were impersonators: during the month of Toxcatl, a young man who had lived for a year dressed as Tezcatlipoca and treated as his living incarnation was sacrificed. Blood held a central place in Mesoamerican cultures. The Florentine Codex records a creation myth in which Quetzalcoatl gave blood from his own body to bring humanity to life, and other Nahua myths tell of gods offering their blood for humankind. What sacrifice meant is debated; many scholars argue that, in Mexica understanding, it helped the gods sustain the cosmos, and offerings to Tlaloc were believed necessary for the rain to come. Limited self-sacrifice was common too: people offered maguey thorns stained with their own blood, drawn from the tongue, ear lobes or genitals. How many people died is one of the most argued questions in the field, because many of the highest figures come from Spanish conquerors and chroniclers who had every reason to make Mexica religion look monstrous, and from Mexica sources that may have inflated numbers to project power. For the rededication of the Templo Mayor in 1487, one chronicle tradition gives 80,400 victims; the historian Ross Hassig has given a range of 10,000 to 80,400 for that event, while many scholars doubt the upper figure. Scholarly estimates for the empire as a whole range from about 1,000 to around 20,000 a year; an older estimate of 250,000 a year is widely rejected. Archaeology has settled one thing. From 2015, archaeologists working near the Templo Mayor excavated part of the Huei Tzompantli, the great rack where skulls of the sacrificed were displayed, described by the Spanish conquistador Andrés de Tapia. They found more than 670 skulls, including those of women and children, which showed that the victims were not only adult male warriors. Most were men, but not all. The scale of sacrifice was real, even if the most extreme numbers are not. Archaeology has confirmed that Aztec sacrifice was real. The arguments now are about how many, who, and what it meant to the people who performed it. The afterlife Where you went after death depended mainly on how you died, not how you lived. Most of the dead journeyed for four years through the nine levels of Mictlan, the underworld, helped by a dog, before reaching rest. Warriors who died in battle or on the sacrificial stone accompanied the sun through the eastern sky. Women who died in childbirth, honoured like warriors, accompanied the sun in the west. Those who died by drowning or other water-related deaths went to Tlalocan, the realm of Tlaloc. Part 7 — Mesoamerica II: the Maya, the sources and what survived (to the 16th century CE, and beyond) The Maya The Maya, whose cities flourished in the Classic period (roughly 200–900 CE) and continued afterwards in the north and in the highlands, shared many of these ideas. Kings presented themselves as sacred lords who performed bloodletting to communicate with gods and ancestors. The Maya used the 260-day and 365-day calendars together, and in addition a "Long Count" to record dates over many centuries. Their best-known sacred narrative, the Popol Vuh of the K'iche' Maya of Guatemala, contains the Maya creation myth, a chronicle of the K'iche' people, and the adventures of the Hero Twins, Hunahpú and Xbalanqué, who defeated the lords of the underworld, Xibalba. It was written down in the K'iche' language in Latin letters around 1550, and survives in a copy made by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez around 1701 in Chichicastenango. How we know, and the problem of the sources Mesoamerican peoples wrote their own books, painted on bark paper or deerskin. Most were destroyed. On 12 July 1562, at Maní in Yucatán, the Franciscan friar Diego de Landa held an auto de fe in which he burned Maya books and thousands of religious images; by his own account, they contained nothing "in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil", and the Maya "regretted to an amazing degree" their loss. Only four pre-conquest Maya books are known to survive, including the Dresden Codex. The richest source for Mexica religion is the Florentine Codex, compiled between about 1545 and 1590 by the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún and his Nahua collaborators, including students trained at the college of Tlatelolco and elderly informants who remembered life before the conquest. Its twelve books, around 2,500 pages with more than 2,000 illustrations, in Nahuatl and Spanish, are now in the Laurentian Library in Florence and on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. It is an extraordinary record. But Sahagún's goal was to help evangelise the Nahua; he described the work as an account of "divine, or rather idolatrous, human, and natural things". His Indigenous collaborators, writing a generation after the conquest, also had their own perspectives and pressures. Every page is valuable, and every page is a negotiation. Much of what we know about Mesoamerican religion was written down by the friars who were trying to end it, with the help of the Indigenous scholars who were trying to remember it. Then there are stories we now doubt. The famous account that Moctezuma believed Hernán Cortés to be the returning god Quetzalcoatl appears only in documents shaped by post-conquest Spanish influence, and many ethno-historians now think it was largely a later invention. How it ended, and what did not The Spanish conquest, the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521, and the epidemics that killed millions brought public Mexica religion to an end. Temples were razed and churches built in their place; Mexico City's Metropolitan Cathedral stands on top of the former Aztec sacred precinct, near the excavated Templo Mayor. But Mesoamerican religion did not simply vanish. It blended, persisted and adapted. In Guatemala, traditional daykeepers in the highlands still treat the 20 named days of the 260-day count as living, divine presences, and the Calendar Round remains in use among many highland communities. Across the Maya region, diviners and curers remain active in private religious life. In Mexico, the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe, said to have appeared in December 1531 to Juan Diego, an Indigenous convert, on the hill of Tepeyac, became the central symbol of Mexican Catholicism. The site's associations with earlier devotion and the history of the apparition account are debated, a subject this library covers in its Spanish-language piece La Virgen de Guadalupe: historia, fe y debate. The Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos), recognised by UNESCO in 2008 as part of the intangible heritage of humanity, is often described as an Aztec survival. Its origins are debated: some scholars trace it to Mexica festivals for the dead, others to the Catholic feasts of All Saints and All Souls brought from Spain, and many to a blend of both. El Día de Muertos: lo que realmente es, in this library's Spanish section, sets out the arguments. Modern revival In the 20th century, a movement called Mexicayotl ("Mexican-ness") arose in Mexico City in the 1950s, around figures such as Rodolfo Nieva López, seeking to restore the religion, language and identity of the Mexica. A related tradition, the Concheros dance, which emerged shortly after the conquest, is performed today in places such as Mexico City's Zócalo; its rituals include calling down the spirits of the ancestors. For some practitioners this is a recovery of what was taken; for others it is a cultural and spiritual expression rather than a religion in the full sense. Many Indigenous communities, meanwhile, never stopped honouring mountains, rain and ancestors alongside Christian saints, and would not describe what they do as a revival at all. Mesoamerica at a glance Key gods Huitzilopochtli, Tlaloc, Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca (Mexica); the maize god, Itzamna, Chaac the rain god (Maya) Central idea Gods and humans bound by offerings, above all of blood Religious specialists Priests, kings as sacred lords, daykeepers Afterlife Determined by manner of death: Mictlan, the company of the sun, Tlalocan Main sources Surviving codices, archaeology, Florentine Codex, Popol Vuh, Spanish chronicles End Conquest 1521 and missionary campaigns; book burnings (e.g. Maní, 1562) Continuity and revival Maya daykeepers; folk Catholicism; Mexicayotl (1950s); Concheros Part 8 — How gods vanish, and how they come back How they ended Looking across the six worlds, a pattern emerges. These religions were not usually defeated by argument. They lost the institutions that held them up. Tradition Main cause of end Roughly when Fate of daily practice Egypt Christianisation of the Roman Empire; imperial laws Late 4th–6th century CE Faded slowly; Coptic Christianity took over the land Mesopotamia Long decline under foreign empires, loss of writing and temples 4th century BCE–1st century CE (and later at Harran) Absorbed into later cultures; some lore persisted Greece Christianisation; laws of the 390s 4th–6th century CE Rural customs and saints' cults absorbed old forms Rome Christianisation; laws of 380–392 Late 4th–5th century CE Household rites lingered into the 5th century Norse Royal conversion; trade and politics; Iceland's 1000 decision 10th–12th centuries CE Folk customs survived for centuries Mexica and Maya Conquest, epidemics, missionary campaigns 16th century CE Blended with Catholicism; Maya calendar kept Three lessons stand out. First, religions die when the people who feed them die or stop. State temples needed kings, money, land and trained priests. When Roman emperors cut temple funding, or Spanish conquerors destroyed Tenochtitlan's priesthood, the public religion collapsed quickly. Household and local religion, which needed only families and a sense of place, lasted much longer. Second, many of our sources come from the winners. Christian Icelanders wrote down the Norse myths; Christian bishops recorded the arguments of the last Roman pagans; Spanish friars recorded Mexica religion in order to replace it. Historians do not throw these sources away. They read them carefully, alongside archaeology and the religion's own surviving words, asking who wrote, for whom and why. Third, few things vanish completely. The Egyptian language survives in Coptic liturgy, Mesopotamian counting in our clocks, Greek myths in our art, Roman gods in our calendars, Norse gods in the days of the week, and the Mesoamerican calendar in Guatemalan villages. These religions did not die because their followers stopped believing. Mostly, the followers kept believing until the temples were shut, the priests were gone and the children were raised in a new faith. The revivals: continuity, reconstruction, or both? Every one of these traditions now has modern followers, in numbers ranging from a few dozen to thousands. The debate about them has two sides worth stating fairly. The historian's view. Historians usually describe these movements as reconstructions or new religious movements. Ancient practice was interrupted, often for many centuries. What we know comes from texts and archaeology that are fragmentary, and modern followers necessarily fill gaps with their own creativity and with the values of their own times. Modern Heathens, for example, generally do not practise animal sacrifice on the scale described in old sources; modern Hellenists rarely consult an oracle that once guided whole cities. The practitioner's view. Many followers reply that every religion changes, and that Christianity or Judaism today would also be unrecognisable to their first followers. The gods, they say, did not die when their temples closed; people simply stopped listening. Reconstruction, done with scholarly care, is a way of hearing them again. Some also see their faith as a recovery of ancestral or national heritage taken by force, which is especially strong in Iceland, Greece and among some Mexican and Indigenous groups. Both views can be true at once. A religion can be newly organised and deeply old in its gods, stories and sense of the sacred. What matters to most practitioners is not whether they are continuous with the past but whether their worship is meaningful and honest about its sources. The best-known groups usually are. What the vanished gods teach For anyone thinking about religion today, the vanished gods offer three questions. What does it feel like to be inside a religion that seems obviously true to everyone around you? For an Egyptian in 1300 BCE or a Roman in 100 CE, the gods were as real and as normal as the sun. That helps explain why religion is so rarely a matter of private argument and so often a matter of community and practice. What survives when an empire falls? Again and again, it is the household and the local: the hearth, the shrine at the crossroads, the offering at the grave. Who gets to tell a religion's story? The answer is rarely its last followers, which is a reason to read every account of a "dead" religion with humility. Key dates Date Event c. 2350 BCE Pyramid Texts carved in the pyramid of Unas, Egypt c. 2300 BCE Enheduanna, high priestess at Ur c. 1550 BCE–50 BCE Book of the Dead in use Late Bronze Age Linear B tablets name Zeus, Poseidon and Dionysus c. 1319 BCE End of Akhenaten's Aten religion c. 1275 BCE Papyrus of Hunefer, weighing of the heart 7th century BCE Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh 79/80 CE Last datable cuneiform tablet, Uruk 250 CE Decius orders empire-wide sacrifice 313 CE Edict of Milan 380 CE Edict of Thessalonica 384 CE Symmachus and Ambrose debate the Altar of Victory c. 392 CE End of the Eleusinian Mysteries 24 August 394 CE Last known hieroglyphic inscription, Philae 529 CE Neoplatonic school in Athens closed c. 537 CE Temple of Isis at Philae closed (Procopius) 921 CE Ibn Fadlan's embassy; account of a Rus funeral c. 1000 CE Iceland's Althing accepts Christianity 1325 CE Traditional founding of Tenochtitlan's first temple 1487 CE Rededication of the Templo Mayor 1521 CE Fall of Tenochtitlan 1562 CE Diego de Landa burns Maya books at Maní c. 1220 / 1270s CE Prose Edda written; Codex Regius copied 1872 CE George Smith reads the Babylonian flood story 1972–1973 Ásatrúarfélagið founded and recognised in Iceland 1978 Coyolxauhqui stone found in Mexico City 1988 Kemetic Orthodoxy founded 2017 Greece recognises Hellenism as a "known religion" The takeaway The religions of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, the Norse and Mesoamerica were not quaint myths but complete ways of life, each lasting centuries or millennia, each with its own gods, rituals, ethics and hopes. Egypt sought to keep the world in balance through Ma'at; Mesopotamia served gods who owned its cities; Greece and Rome bound gods and citizens through sacrifice and civic ritual; the Norse traded gifts with gods who would one day die; Mesoamerica fed gods who had given their own blood for the world. We know them through their own texts where they survive, through archaeology, and often through the writings of those who replaced them, which must be read carefully. They ended mostly when their institutions were removed, by Christian emperors, Christian kings, and Spanish conquerors, while household and local practice lingered long after. Today each has modern followers, whom historians usually call reconstructionists and who often call themselves restorers; both can be partly right. Try this: look at a calendar. Find the Roman god in this month's name, the Norse god in today's name if it is Wednesday through Friday, the Mesopotamian base-60 in the minutes on your clock. Then ask yourself which of the ideas you take for granted might, two thousand years from now, be called someone's "mythology". Sources & Further Reading Sources - Egypt: Wikipedia articles "Ancient Egyptian religion", "Pyramid Texts", "Book of the Dead", "Deir el-Medina", "Atenism", "Philae", "Graffito of Esmet-Akhom", "Kemetism" and "Kemetic Orthodoxy" (leads, with their cited scholarship, including Dijkstra on Philae); The Book of the Dead, trans. E. A. Wallis Budge, Project Gutenberg #7145, chapter 125. - Mesopotamia: Wikipedia articles "Ancient Mesopotamian religion", "Enheduanna", "Lamashtu", "Pazuzu", "Akitu", "Library of Ashurbanipal", "George Smith (Assyriologist)", "Cuneiform" and "Sabians" (leads); The Epic of Gilgamesh, Old Babylonian version, trans. M. Jastrow and A. T. Clay (1920), Project Gutenberg #11000; D. A. Mackenzie, Myths of Babylonia and Assyria (1915), Project Gutenberg #16653, for the Descent of Ishtar; Sumerian King List, Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (University of Oxford). - Greece: Hesiod, Theogony, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White, Project Gutenberg #348; Homer, Odyssey, trans. S. Butler, Project Gutenberg #1727; Cicero, On the Laws 2.36; Wikipedia articles "Ancient Greek religion", "Mycenaean religion", "Pythia", "Eleusinian Mysteries", "Totenpass", "Hestia", "Herma", "Curse tablet", "Ancient Olympic Games", "Neoplatonic Academy", "Hellenism (modern religion)" and "Supreme Council of Ethnikoi Hellenes" (leads). - Rome: Ambrose, Letter 18, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 10 (New Advent); Wikipedia articles "Religion in ancient Rome", "Vestal Virgin", "Lares", "Lararium", "Mithraism", "Decian persecution", "Diocletianic persecution", "Edict of Milan", "Edict of Thessalonica", "Altar of Victory", "Symmachus", "Gratian", "Persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire" and "Roman polytheistic reconstructionism" (leads). - Norse: Wikipedia articles "Old Norse religion", "Prose Edda", "Snorri Sturluson", "Codex Regius", "Temple at Uppsala", "Ahmad ibn Fadlan", "Oseberg ship", "Blót", "Seiðr", "Valhalla", "Hel (location)", "Olaf Tryggvason", "Christianisation of Iceland", "Thorgeir Thorkelsson", "Ásatrúarfélagið", "Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson", "Heathenry (new religious movement)" and "The Troth" (leads); Statistics Iceland, table MAN10001, "Populations by religious and life stance organizations" (membership figures 1998–2026). - Mesoamerica: BBC News, "Aztec tower of human skulls uncovered in Mexico City" (2 July 2017); Wikipedia articles "Aztec religion", "Templo Mayor", "Huey tzompantli", "Human sacrifice in Aztec culture", "Mictlan", "Tonalpohualli", "New Fire Ceremony", "Tlaloc", "Quetzalcoatl", "Maya religion", "Maya calendar", "Maya codices", "Popol Vuh", "Diego de Landa", "Florentine Codex", "Bernardino de Sahagún", "Our Lady of Guadalupe", "Day of the Dead", "Mexicayotl" and "Concheros" (leads, with their cited scholarship, including Hassig on sacrifice numbers). The 52-year cycle was computed (the least common multiple of 260 and 365 is 18,980 days). - Cross-references in this library: A History of Mexico (Histories of Nations), El Día de Muertos: lo que realmente es and La Virgen de Guadalupe: historia, fe y debate (Spanish section). Go deeper - 📘 The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt — Richard H. Wilkinson (a clear, illustrated guide to who was who and how they were worshipped) - 📘 Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia — Jeremy Black and Anthony Green (an accessible illustrated dictionary of Mesopotamian religion) - 📘 Greek Religion — Walter Burkert (the classic scholarly survey; demanding but unsurpassed) - 📘 Religions of Rome — Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price (the standard modern history, in two volumes, with a sourcebook) - 📘 Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings — Neil Price (an archaeologist's history of the Viking world that gives belief, ritual and magic their full weight) - 📘 The Aztecs — Richard F. Townsend (a well-illustrated introduction to Mexica society and religion), and Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate — Elizabeth Hill Boone (on the painted divinatory books and their calendars) - 📘 Popol Vuh — trans. Dennis Tedlock (a widely read English translation of the K'iche' Maya sacred narrative) - 🌐 Companion pieces in this library: How Religion Began, How the Sacred Texts Were Written, Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It, Indigenous and Folk Religions and A History of Mexico Step 12. Hinduism: The World's Oldest Living Family of Traditions ----------------------------------------------------------------- Why: Hinduism. Hymns memorised for three thousand years, a philosophy of the self that still unsettles readers, gods beyond counting and one reality behind them, a social order argued over for as long, and 1.2 billion people who live it in their own ways. Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each and How the Sacred Texts Were Written. Companion pieces: Adi Shankara: The Non-Dual Reality of Advaita Vedanta, Kabir: The Weaver of the Heart, Pilgrimage: Why Humans Walk to Holy Places, If I Was Born in India, and the Religions long reads on Buddhism and on Jainism and Sikhism. In 1966 the Supreme Court of India faced an awkward question. A group of followers of the Swaminarayan movement in Gujarat argued that they were not Hindus, so a law opening Hindu temples to all castes did not apply to their temples. To rule, the judges first had to say what a Hindu is. They found it hard, perhaps impossible, to define the religion at all: it has no single founder, no single book that all accept as final, no one creed, no central authority. Even so, they ruled that the Swaminarayan followers were Hindus after all. Sixty years later, the same puzzle survives in a survey. When the Pew Research Center interviewed almost 30,000 Indian adults between November 2019 and March 2020, it asked Hindus which god they felt closest to. Shiva came first (44 percent), then Hanuman (35 percent) and Ganesha (32 percent). Yet 84 percent of Hindus named more than one god or said they had many, and the most common view, held by 61 percent, was that there is one God with many manifestations. Many gods and one God, many paths and one goal: that tension is not a confusion inside Hinduism. For many Hindus it is the point. This long read follows the tradition from the cities of the Indus to the hymns of the Vedas, the forest teachings of the Upanishads, the epics and the Gita, the great devotional movements, the six schools of philosophy, the long argument over caste, the daily life of worship, the medieval and colonial centuries, the global spread of yoga, and the politics of Hindu identity in India today. A note on approach: this piece describes Hindu traditions as their followers understand them and sets beside that what historians, archaeologists and geneticists have found. Where these differ, both are given, and neither is treated as the last word on the other. Where scholars disagree (on dates, on caste, on the Indus, on modern politics) the main positions are stated, as fairly as possible. Nothing here ranks Hinduism against any other religion. Quotations from scripture come from public-domain translations: Ralph Griffith's Rig Veda (1896), Max Müller's Upanishads (1879, 1884), Georg Bühler's Laws of Manu (1886) and Edwin Arnold's Song Celestial (1885). In this long read One religion or many? The name and the argument Before the Vedas: the Indus cities (c. 2600–1900 BCE) The Vedas: fire, hymn and sacrifice (c. 1500–500 BCE) The Upanishads: brahman, atman, karma, rebirth and release The epics and the Bhagavad Gita The Puranas, the gods and the rise of devotion The great traditions: Vaishnava, Shaiva, Shakta, Smarta The six schools of philosophy, Vedanta and Yoga Caste: scripture, history and the census Caste reformers, Ambedkar and the argument today Living it: the day, the year and a lifetime The medieval centuries (c. 600–1750) The colonial encounter and the reformers (1750–1948) The diaspora and the global life of yoga Hindu nationalism and its critics Hinduism today and its open questions Part 1 — One religion or many? The name and the argument The word "Hindu" was not originally a religious word, and it was not originally an Indian one. It comes from Sindhu, the Sanskrit name of the Indus river. Persian speakers, who pronounced an initial s as h, turned it into Hindu, and the inscriptions of the Achaemenid king Darius I list Hi(n)dush as a province of his empire: the land beyond the Indus. For centuries "Hindu" meant roughly "Indian", a geographical label used by outsiders. When did it become a religious label? Scholars disagree, and the disagreement matters. One view holds that "Hinduism" as a single religion is largely a modern construction. The historian D. N. Jha wrote that no Indians described themselves as Hindus before the fourteenth century, and that the British "reimported" the word as a reified system called Hinduism. On this account, colonial officials, census-takers and Orientalist scholars, used to religions with one book and one church, grouped hundreds of distinct cults, sects and local practices under a single heading, and Indians then came to see themselves through it. Another view, argued by David Lorenzen in a well-known 1999 essay, "Who Invented Hinduism?", holds that a shared Hindu identity is centuries older than British rule. Texts from the late medieval period already set Hindu against Turk (meaning Muslim). The poet Vidyapati, writing around 1380, describes Hindus and Turks living side by side. Kabir, Tulsidas and the Marathi saint Eknath contrasted Hindu dharma with Turaka dharma. People who worshipped Shiva and people who worshipped Vishnu, on this view, knew they belonged to a common world of gods, texts, pilgrimage places and rites, even when they argued fiercely with each other. "Hinduism" may be a modern word, but the family it names is not modern. The argument is about how tightly its members were ever bound together. Many Hindus prefer an older name for what they practise: Sanatana Dharma, often translated "the eternal way" or "the eternal order". Dharma itself is a word with no exact English equivalent. It means the order that holds the world together, and also the duty, ethics and right conduct by which a person upholds that order. To call a tradition a dharma is to say that it is less a set of beliefs than a way of living in accord with how things are. What holds the family together? If there is no single creed, what makes something Hindu? Scholars and Hindu thinkers have offered several answers, none accepted by all: Proposed common thread Its strength Its weakness Acceptance of the Vedas as authoritative The classical test used by Hindu philosophers themselves Many devotees never read the Vedas; some Hindu movements reject parts of them Belief in karma and rebirth Very widely held (Pew: 77% of Indian Hindus believe in karma) Also held by Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs; not held by every Hindu Worship of a shared set of gods Shiva, Vishnu, the Goddess and their forms are recognised nearly everywhere Local village deities often matter more in daily life A shared sacred geography Rivers, mountains and pilgrimage towns known across India Diaspora Hindus have built new sacred places abroad Birth into a Hindu family How most Hindus actually become Hindu Says who is Hindu, not what Hinduism is Indian law, for its own purposes, takes a very wide view. The Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 applies to Hindus "in any of its forms or developments", including Lingayats and members of reform movements such as the Arya Samaj, and also to Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs. Many Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs object to being grouped in this way, a debate the Jainism and Sikhism long read takes up. The most useful picture may be the one the 1966 court reached for: not a single religion with one essence, but a family of traditions that share ancestors, a vocabulary and many habits, and that recognise one another, sometimes affectionately and sometimes in argument, as kin. Part 2 — Before the Vedas: the Indus cities (c. 2600–1900 BCE) Long before any Vedic hymn, the plains of the Indus and its neighbouring rivers held one of the world's first urban civilisations. At its height, roughly 2600 to 1900 BCE, the Indus or Harappan civilisation spread across hundreds of sites in what are now Pakistan and northwest India. Its largest cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, may each have held tens of thousands of people. These were carefully planned places, with streets laid out in grids, brick drains and standard weights. At Mohenjo-daro a large brick tank with steps leading down into it, the so-called Great Bath, has fascinated visitors since it was excavated. What is known and what isn't The honest summary is that we know a great deal about how these people lived and almost nothing certain about what they believed, because their script has never been deciphered. Many short inscriptions survive, mostly on small stone seals, but no bilingual text like Egypt's Rosetta Stone has been found. What the evidence shows What remains conjecture Planned cities, drains, standard weights, long-distance trade with Mesopotamia What the Indus people called themselves or what language they spoke Thousands of seals, many showing animals, some showing human or composite figures Whether the seals are religious, commercial or both Many female figurines Whether they represent a mother goddess, as was long assumed The Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro Whether it was used for ritual purification, as many suspect A seal showing a horned, seated figure among animals Whether this is an early form of Shiva as "lord of animals" Decline of the cities after about 1900 BCE Exactly why: climate change, shifting rivers and the loss of trade are all proposed The horned seated figure is the most famous case. Soon after the seal was found at Mohenjo-daro in 1928–29, the archaeologist John Marshall suggested it showed a "proto-Shiva", a three-faced lord of animals sitting in a yogic posture. The idea is attractive and widely repeated, but it is a reading of an image without words. Other scholars have read the same figure as a goddess, a buffalo-man or a different deity entirely, and most now treat every identification as speculation. It is fair to say that some later Hindu practices, such as ritual bathing, may have deep roots in the region. It is not established that they come from the Indus cities. The migration debate What happened between the Indus cities and the Vedic hymns is one of the most charged questions in South Asian history. For over a century, most linguists have argued that the language of the Vedas, an early form of Sanskrit, belongs to the Indo-European family, and that its speakers, or at least their language, came into the subcontinent from the northwest during the second millennium BCE. The old idea of a violent "Aryan invasion" that destroyed the Indus cities has been abandoned: the cities declined for other reasons, and the evidence points to gradual migration and mixing rather than conquest. Many Indian writers reject even the migration model. They argue for an indigenous origin: that Vedic culture developed within India, perhaps among the descendants of the Indus people themselves, and that the migration theory was a colonial idea used to cast Indian civilisation as borrowed. Ancient DNA has added a new kind of evidence. In 2019 two large studies, one in Science sequencing 523 ancient individuals and one in Cell reporting the first genome from an Indus-period individual at Rakhigarhi in Haryana, found that the Indus-period people sampled descended mainly from ancient groups related to early Iranian hunter-gatherers and to South Asian hunter-gatherers, with little or no ancestry from the steppe herders of Central Asia. That steppe ancestry appears in northern South Asia after about 2000 BCE, and the Science authors linked it to the spread of Indo-Iranian languages. The genetic studies agree on one point that both sides of the old argument can accept: the people of the Indus cities were ancestors of today's South Asians, and the steppe component arrived later and mixed in. Proponents of indigenous origin point out that genes are not languages and that one genome from Rakhigarhi is a small sample. Most geneticists and linguists, for their part, read the evidence as supporting a migration of steppe-related people in the second millennium BCE. The debate continues, though the space for the strongest versions of either side has narrowed. Part 3 — The Vedas: fire, hymn and sacrifice (c. 1500–500 BCE) The Rig Veda is the oldest text in Vedic Sanskrit, among the oldest in any Indo-European language, and verses from it are still recited at Hindu weddings and rites today. It holds 1,028 hymns in about 10,600 verses, arranged in ten books. Most scholars, working from its language, date the bulk of the hymns to roughly 1500 to 1000 BCE, though the dating is debated, and place their composition in the northwest of the subcontinent. Books 2 to 7, each linked to a family of poet-seers, are the oldest; books 1 and 10 are the youngest. Hindu tradition does not regard the Vedas as human compositions. They are shruti, "what is heard": eternal truth perceived by the ancient seers, the rishis. Everything later, including the epics, the law books and the Puranas, is smriti, "what is remembered", authoritative but secondary. Four Vedas, four layers There are four Vedas. Each grew in layers over many centuries. Veda What it holds Who used it Rig Veda Hymns of praise to the gods The priest who recited invocations Sama Veda Mostly Rig Vedic verses set to melodies The priest who chanted Yajur Veda Prose formulas for performing the sacrifice The priest who carried out the ritual actions Atharva Veda Hymns and spells for healing, protection, love and daily life Household and later priestly use Around each collection of hymns (samhita) grew prose texts explaining the rites (the Brahmanas), "forest" texts with more speculative interpretations (the Aranyakas), and finally the philosophical Upanishads, the subject of the next part. A religion of fire At the centre of Vedic religion was the yajna, the sacrifice: offerings of clarified butter, grain, milk and the juice of the mysterious soma plant, poured into a sacred fire while priests chanted. The fire god Agni carried the offerings to the gods. Indra, the storm god who slays the serpent Vritra and releases the waters, is the most frequently mentioned god, with about 250 hymns of his own. Varuna guards the cosmic order, rita. An entire book of the Rig Veda, the ninth, is devoted to Soma, both the plant and the god. The hymns are not only praise. They contain some of the earliest recorded philosophical questioning anywhere. One famous verse insists that the many gods are names for something single: "To what is One, sages give many a title: they call it Agni, Yama, Matarisvan." — Rig Veda 1.164.46 (Griffith) And the creation hymn of the tenth book, the Nasadiya Sukta, ends not with an answer but with a doubt: "Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation? The Gods are later than this world's production." — Rig Veda 10.129.6 (Griffith) Its last line wonders whether even the highest being, who oversees the world "in highest heaven", knows how it began: "he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not." Memory as scripture For more than two thousand years the Vedas were carried almost entirely by memory. Brahmin families developed recitation methods of extraordinary precision, chanting the text word by word, in overlapping pairs and in complex patterned sequences, so that any error would show. The oldest surviving written manuscripts date only to around 1040 CE. In 2007 UNESCO added thirty Rig Veda manuscripts held in Pune to its Memory of the World register. (The library's How the Sacred Texts Were Written tells this story in more detail.) The Vedic world was also a social world. Its priests, the Brahmins, held the knowledge of the rites. One late hymn, which will matter a great deal in Part 9, describes society as the body of a cosmic person, Purusha, offered in the primordial sacrifice. Part 4 — The Upanishads: brahman, atman, karma, rebirth and release Somewhere in the first millennium BCE, the questions of Indian religion turned inward. The Upanishads, whose name is often explained as "sitting down near" a teacher, are dialogues, stories and riddles in which teachers, kings, wives and students ask what lies behind the ritual and behind the world itself. More than two hundred texts carry the name, and a traditional list gives 108, but about a dozen are regarded as the principal ones. The oldest, the Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya, are dated by the scholar Patrick Olivelle to around the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, give or take a century, before the time of the Buddha. Five words that changed Indian thought Term Usual translation What it means in the Upanishads Brahman The absolute, ultimate reality The single ground of everything that exists, beyond all names and forms Atman The self The innermost self of a person, beneath body, senses and mind Karma Action Every action has consequences that shape a person's future, including future lives Samsara Wandering, the round of rebirth The cycle of birth, death and rebirth driven by karma Moksha Liberation, release Freedom from the cycle, through knowledge of one's true self "Thou art that" The most famous teaching comes in the Chandogya Upanishad. The young Shvetaketu returns home after twelve years of study, proud of his learning. His father, Uddalaka, asks whether he has learned the one thing by which everything else is known. He has not. So his father teaches him with objects from the kitchen. He asks his son to put salt in a cup of water overnight and bring it back in the morning. The salt has dissolved; Shvetaketu cannot find it. His father has him taste the water from the top, the middle and the bottom. It is salty everywhere. In the same way, the father says, the true reality cannot be seen in the body, "but there indeed it is". Then comes the refrain repeated through the chapter: "It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art it." — Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7 and 6.13 (Müller) In Sanskrit, the last words are tat tvam asi, "you are that". How to read them became the central question of later Hindu philosophy. Does it mean the self is identical with ultimate reality, as Adi Shankara taught (the library's piece on him gives his answer)? Or that the self is a part, a mode or a servant of a God who is always greater, as Ramanuja and Madhva later argued? Part 8 returns to this argument. Karma and what follows death The early Upanishads tie what happens after death to what a person does and desires in life. The Chandogya puts it in terms of will: "Now man is a creature of will. According to what his will is in this world, so will he be when he has departed this life." — Chandogya Upanishad 3.14.1 (Müller) Karma here is not a cosmic punishment system run by a judge. It is closer to a law of moral cause and effect: desire shapes action, and action shapes what a person becomes, in this life and the next. The Katha Upanishad frames the question as a story. A boy named Nachiketas is sent, in his father's anger, to Death himself. Death, impressed by the boy, offers him three wishes, and the third is to know what happens to a person after dying. Death tries to buy him off with wealth and long life; the boy refuses. So Death teaches him: "The knowing (Self) is not born, it dies not; it sprang from nothing, nothing sprang from it." — Katha Upanishad 1.2.18 (Müller) The same text offers one of the most enduring images of the inner life: the self as the master of a chariot, the body as the chariot, the intellect as the charioteer, the mind as the reins and the senses as horses (1.3.3–4). The person whose mind holds the reins steady "reaches indeed that place; from whence he is not born again." A world of renouncers The Upanishads belong to a time of great religious ferment along the Ganges. Wandering ascetics, the shramanas, left home to seek release through austerity and meditation. From this world came the Buddha and Mahavira, the great teacher of the Jains (see the Buddhism and the Jainism and Sikhism long reads). Karma, rebirth and liberation became the shared problem of all of these movements, which answered it in different ways. Hindu thought absorbed the renouncer's ideal, and later codified it as the last of four stages of life (Part 11). The Upanishads did not abolish the old rituals. They asked what the rituals were for, and answered: for knowing the self. Part 5 — The epics and the Bhagavad Gita If the Upanishads are the philosophy of Hinduism, the two great epics are its memory, its theatre and its moral education. Hundreds of millions of people who will never read a Vedic hymn know their stories from childhood. The Mahabharata The Mahabharata is among the longest poems ever composed: its longest versions run to more than 100,000 verses in eighteen books. Tradition ascribes it to the sage Vyasa, who also appears in it as a character. Scholars see it as the work of many hands over centuries, with the bulk compiled between roughly the third century BCE and the third or fourth century CE. Its core story is a war of succession between two sets of cousins, the five Pandava brothers and the hundred Kauravas, culminating in an eighteen-day battle at Kurukshetra that destroys almost everyone. Around that story the epic gathers genealogies, philosophy, law, and dozens of embedded tales. Its central concern is dharma, and especially how hard it is to know: good people do terrible things, the virtuous lose, and the rules conflict. The Ramayana The Ramayana, ascribed to the poet Valmiki, has about 24,000 verses in seven books. The scholar Robert Goldman dates its oral core to roughly 750–500 BCE, with later layers added for centuries afterwards. Prince Rama, heir to the throne of Ayodhya, is exiled to the forest for fourteen years with his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana. Sita is abducted by Ravana, the demon king of Lanka; Rama, helped by the monkey hero Hanuman, rescues her and returns to rule. Rama became the model of the righteous king and Sita of the faithful wife, and both models have been honoured and argued over. The epic has been retold in dozens of languages: in Tamil by Kamban in the 12th century, in Hindi by Tulsidas in the late 16th century (his Ramcharitmanas is one of the most widely recited religious texts in northern India), and across Southeast Asia, in Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia and beyond. Some versions, especially in the south, tell the story from other angles, including sympathy for Ravana or for Sita, whose later abandonment by Rama has troubled readers for centuries. The Gita: a conversation on a battlefield The Bhagavad Gita, "the Song of the Lord", is a short section of the Mahabharata: 700 verses in eighteen chapters, set in the sixth book. As the armies face each other, the warrior Arjuna sees his teachers, cousins and friends on the other side and refuses to fight. His charioteer, Krishna, answers him, and by the end reveals himself as God. Krishna's first argument is about the self. The true self cannot be killed: "Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never; / Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!" — Bhagavad Gita 2.20 (Arnold) His second is about action. Arjuna must do his duty, but without attachment to the result: "Let right deeds be / Thy motive, not the fruit which comes from them." — Bhagavad Gita 2.47 (Arnold) The Gita weaves together three paths, or yogas, that later Hindus would treat as complementary routes to liberation: Path What it means Who has favoured it Karma yoga Selfless action, doing one's duty without craving its fruits Householders, activists; Tilak and Gandhi both drew on it Jnana yoga The path of knowledge: discerning the eternal self from the passing world Philosophers and renunciates in the Advaita tradition Bhakti yoga Loving devotion to God Most practising Hindus, through the devotional movements In its later chapters the Gita turns increasingly to devotion. Krishna promises that God takes visible shape "from age to age" whenever righteousness declines (4.7–8), that the simplest offering made with love is accepted (9.26), and finally asks Arjuna to give up every other duty and take refuge in him alone: "Make Me thy single refuge! I will free / Thy soul from all its sins!" — Bhagavad Gita 18.66 (Arnold) How should a scripture set on a battlefield be read? Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva each wrote commentaries that read it through their own philosophies. In the 20th century the nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak read it as a call to righteous action against British rule. Gandhi, who knew the closing verses of its second chapter by heart and kept them as a companion through his campaigns, read the battle, as many modern Hindus do, as an allegory of the struggle within every person, and drew from it a gospel of non-violent, selfless action. Both readings have large followings. The text supports more than one. Part 6 — The Puranas, the gods and the rise of devotion The gods most Hindus worship today, Vishnu and his avatars, Shiva and his family, and the Goddess in her many forms, take their full shape not in the Vedas but in a vast later literature called the Puranas, "ancient tales". Tradition counts eighteen great Puranas (Mahapuranas) and eighteen lesser ones, together more than 400,000 verses, attributed to Vyasa. Scholars think they were composed by many authors, with first versions from roughly the third to the tenth centuries CE and continual revision after that; manuscripts of the same Purana can differ greatly. Each traditionally covers five topics: the creation of the universe, its dissolution and re-creation, the genealogies of gods and sages, the great cosmic ages, and the histories of royal dynasties. Most centre on Vishnu, Shiva or the Goddess. The gods in brief Vishnu preserves the universe. When order is threatened, he descends in an avatar (literally "descent"). A common list gives ten, from a fish and a tortoise to Rama and Krishna and the future Kalki, though the lists vary. Shiva is the great ascetic and the dancer whose dance creates and destroys worlds, worshipped above all in the form of the linga, an aniconic pillar. His consort is Parvati; their sons are the elephant-headed Ganesha, remover of obstacles, and Skanda, also called Murugan, especially loved in Tamil Nadu. Devi, the Goddess, appears as gentle Parvati and Lakshmi, as learned Sarasvati, and as the warrior Durga and the fierce Kali. In Shakta theology she is not merely a consort but supreme reality itself. The Puranas also tell of a trinity of creator Brahma, preserver Vishnu and destroyer Shiva, the trimurti. It is often presented to outsiders as the heart of Hinduism, but in practice relatively few temples are dedicated to Brahma, and most Hindus treat either Vishnu, Shiva or the Goddess as the highest God, with the others as aspects or companions. Temples and images The Vedic religion had no temples; its fires were built and taken down. The age of the Puranas is also the age of the temple: from the Gupta period onwards, stone temples rose across India, becoming the homes of the gods in their images (murti). For the worshipper, the image is not a mere symbol. After rites of consecration, the deity is believed to be present in it, to be woken, bathed, dressed, fed and put to sleep each day, and above all to be seen. The central act of temple worship is darshan, seeing the god and being seen in return. Bhakti: the religion of love From around the sixth century CE, in the Tamil country, wandering poet-saints began to sing ecstatic hymns to Vishnu and Shiva in the people's own language rather than Sanskrit. The Vaishnava Alvars (traditionally twelve) and the Shaiva Nayanars (traditionally sixty-three) came from many social backgrounds, including the lowest castes, and some were women. Their message was that God is reached through love, bhakti, more than through ritual, learning or birth. The movement spread north over the following centuries and reached its height between the 15th and 17th centuries: Saint Region and time Remembered for Basava Karnataka, 12th century Founding the Lingayat tradition; rejecting caste and Vedic ritual Namdev Maharashtra, c. 1270–1350 Marathi devotional songs to Vithoba; some are in the Sikh scripture Mirabai Rajasthan, 16th century A princess who left royal life for love of Krishna Kabir Varanasi, 15th century Songs mocking ritual and caste, beyond Hindu and Muslim (see the library's piece) Chaitanya Bengal, 1486–1534 Ecstatic chanting of Krishna's names; root of today's Gaudiya Vaishnavism Tulsidas North India, 16th century The Ramcharitmanas, the Ramayana in Hindi The Bhagavata Purana, perhaps the most beloved of the Puranas, gave this devotion its great story: the childhood of Krishna in the cowherd village of Vrindavan, the butter-thief and flute-player loved by the cowherd women, whose longing for him became the model of the soul's longing for God. In bhakti, the question is no longer how to escape the world, but how to love God within it. Was bhakti a social revolution, a protest against caste and priestly power? Its poets often said so, and it opened religious life to women and low-caste people in ways Sanskrit ritual had not. But many historians point out that it mostly left the social order intact, and they debate how far it was a response to the arrival of Islam, as was once commonly said. It is perhaps best seen as a revolution of the heart that changed religion more than it changed society. Part 7 — The great traditions: Vaishnava, Shaiva, Shakta, Smarta Hinduism has no "denominations" in the Western sense, with membership rolls and separate churches. But most Hindus belong, by family or by choice, to one of several broad streams, each with its own theology, scriptures, temples, teachers and festivals. Tradition Supreme God Key texts Characteristic marks and practice Some living lineages Vaishnava Vishnu, especially as Krishna or Rama Gita, Bhagavata Purana, Ramayana, Tamil hymns of the Alvars Vertical lines of clay on the forehead; devotion through singing and service Sri Vaishnava (Ramanuja), Madhva, Gaudiya (Chaitanya, including ISKCON), Swaminarayan, Pushtimarg Shaiva Shiva Shaiva Agamas, Tamil Tirumurai, Shiva Purana Three horizontal lines of ash; worship of the linga Shaiva Siddhanta (Tamil), Kashmir Shaivism, Lingayats, ascetic orders Shakta The Goddess (Devi, Shakti) Devi Mahatmya, Shakta Tantras Worship of Durga, Kali and local goddesses; Navaratri Bengali and Assamese goddess traditions; many village cults Smarta Brahman, approached through any of five or six deities Vedas, Upanishads, Smriti texts Worship of several deities as equal paths to one reality Associated with Shankara's monasteries These are not sealed boxes. A Vaishnava family may visit a Shiva temple on the night of Maha Shivaratri; almost everyone honours Ganesha before beginning anything; a Shakta may keep a picture of Krishna. The Pew survey found that Hindus' favourite deities cut across these lines. Regionally, too, the picture changes: Shiva and Murugan loom large in Tamil Nadu, Durga in Bengal, Ganesha in Maharashtra, Krishna in Gujarat and the Braj country, Jagannath in Odisha. Beneath all of these lies what scholars call village Hinduism: local goddesses who guard against smallpox or drought, deified heroes, serpent shrines, sacred trees and ancestor rites, often with priests who are not Brahmins. For many rural Hindus these local powers are the gods of daily life, and the great Puranic deities are more distant. Most Hindus do not experience their religion as a choice between gods, but as a household of them, with one at the head of the table. Some groups at the edges of the family debate whether they belong inside it. Many Lingayats in Karnataka argue that Basava founded a separate religion. The Swaminarayan followers in the 1966 case argued that they were distinct, and lost. Movements such as the Arya Samaj (Part 13) reject image worship altogether while insisting they are the purest Hindus. The family is large enough to contain its own arguments about who belongs. Part 8 — The six schools of philosophy, Vedanta and Yoga Classical Indian philosophy was organised into darshanas, a word that means "viewpoints" or "ways of seeing". Those schools that accepted the authority of the Vedas were called astika, orthodox; Buddhism, Jainism and the materialist Charvaka school, which did not, were nastika. Six orthodox schools came to be counted, usually in pairs. School Main concern Founding text (traditional) Key idea Nyaya Logic and knowledge Nyaya Sutra of Gautama Valid knowledge comes through perception, inference, comparison and reliable testimony Vaisheshika Physics and categories Vaisheshika Sutra of Kanada The world is made of atoms combined in categories of substance, quality and motion Samkhya Cosmology and the self Samkhya teachings of Kapila; Samkhya Karika Two realities: countless conscious selves (purusha) and active matter (prakriti) Yoga Practice and meditation Yoga Sutras of Patanjali Liberation through stilling the mind and isolating the self from matter Mimamsa Ritual and interpretation Mimamsa Sutra of Jaimini The Vedas are eternal and their ritual commands must be correctly understood and performed Vedanta The meaning of the Upanishads Brahma Sutra of Badarayana The nature of Brahman and its relation to the self and world Yoga before yoga mats The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are 195 short aphorisms. They cannot be dated exactly; most scholars place them in the first centuries CE, and no later than the fifth century. The second sutra defines the subject: yogas chitta vritti nirodhah, yoga is the stilling of the movements of the mind. Patanjali's "eight limbs" run from ethical restraints and observances, through posture, breath control and withdrawal of the senses, to concentration, meditation and absorption (samadhi). Philosophically, classical Yoga rests on Samkhya's dualism. Its goal is not health or flexibility but kaivalya, the isolation of pure consciousness from the restless world of matter. Patanjali devotes only three short sutras to asana, a word that in premodern usage generally meant a seat for meditation. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, the modern focus on bodily postures is "essentially a modern Western phenomenon" (Part 14 follows that story). Vedanta: three answers to one question Vedanta, "the end of the Veda", became the most influential school, and its internal argument is the one that still shapes Hindu theology. All its thinkers commented on the same three foundations: the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutra and the Gita. They disagreed about what those texts say about the relation between the self, the world and God. School Teacher Relation of self to Brahman The world Advaita (non-dual) Shankara (8th century) Identical: the self is Brahman An appearance (maya) of Brahman, not ultimately real Vishishtadvaita (qualified non-dual) Ramanuja (traditionally 11th–12th century) Self and world are real parts or the "body" of God, distinct yet inseparable Real, as God's body Dvaita (dual) Madhva (13th century) Eternally distinct from God, and dependent on God Real and distinct The library's piece on Adi Shankara sets out his rope-and-snake argument. Ramanuja's objection was, in essence, that a God who is pure undifferentiated consciousness cannot be loved, and that the Upanishads also describe Brahman as having infinite good qualities. Madhva went further: worship needs a worshipper and a worshipped, eternally two. For the many devotional traditions that follow Ramanuja, Madhva or Chaitanya, liberation is not dissolving into the absolute but an eternal relationship of love with a personal God. The argument between Shankara and Ramanuja is one of the great debates of world philosophy: is the deepest truth that you are God, or that you belong to God? Modern Hindu thought, especially the version that reached the West through Vivekananda, drew heavily on Advaita, so that many outsiders take non-dualism to be "the" Hindu philosophy. Among practising Hindus, devotional theologies that keep God and the soul distinct are at least as widespread. Part 9 — Caste: scripture, history and the census No subject about Hinduism is argued over more fiercely, inside India and outside it, than caste. It is worth separating several things that are often run together: what the texts say, how caste actually worked in history, what British rule did to it, and how it lives today. Two words, two systems Varna ("colour" or "class") is the textual scheme of four orders: Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors), Vaishyas (traders and farmers) and Shudras (labourers and servants). Jati ("birth") refers to the thousands of endogamous groups, often linked to a traditional occupation and region, into which people are actually born and within which they have traditionally married. There are four varnas and thousands of jatis; the historian A. L. Basham estimated "3,000 or more castes" in modern India. Outside the four varnas altogether were the groups treated as "untouchable", whose work (handling the dead, leather, waste) was considered polluting. Many of them today call themselves Dalits, "the broken" or "the oppressed". What the texts say The first textual statement of the fourfold scheme is in the late Rig Vedic hymn to the cosmic person: "The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rajanya made. / His thighs became the Vaisya, from his feet the Sudra was produced." — Rig Veda 10.90.12 (Griffith) The law books (dharma-shastras), of which the Manusmriti is the most famous, turned this into a system of duties. Manu repeats the image of the four orders coming from the creator's mouth, arms, thighs and feet (1.31), assigns the Brahmins teaching and sacrifice, and says the creator prescribed to the Shudra "one occupation only... to serve meekly even these (other) three castes" (1.91). Elsewhere it lays down harsh penalties tied to caste and restrictions on women. Hindu responses to these texts vary widely. Some traditionalists regard varna as a divinely ordained division of labour. Many modern Hindu thinkers, including Vivekananda and Gandhi, argued that varna was originally a matter of character and aptitude, not birth, and that hereditary caste and untouchability were corruptions. The Gita itself says that Krishna created the four orders according to qualities and actions (4.13), a line read in both directions. Many reformers, and many Dalit thinkers, reject the authority of these passages entirely. How old is caste as we know it? Here historians and geneticists have added evidence of their own. A 2013 genetic study by Priya Moorjani and colleagues found that the two ancestral populations of India mixed widely between about 4,200 and 1,900 years ago, after which mixing even between closely related groups became rare: in the authors' words, the region shifted to one in which mixture "became rare because of a shift to endogamy". In other words, marriage within closed groups, the core of jati, hardened at least 1,900 years ago, long before any European arrived. At the same time, many historians argue that caste was more fluid in practice than the law books suggest: groups rose and fell, kings of humble origin claimed Kshatriya status, and local hierarchies varied enormously. What the British did The most influential modern argument about caste concerns the colonial period. The anthropologist Nicholas Dirks, in Castes of Mind (2001), argued that British rule made caste into the defining category of Indian society. Colonial administrators relied on Brahmin pandits and Sanskrit law books to understand Indian custom, codified those texts into law, and above all counted caste. The decennial census, beginning in the late 19th century, asked every Indian's caste. Herbert Risley, who directed the 1901 census, treated caste as a matter of race and claimed that a caste's social standing could be read from its members' nose shape, theories historians now classify as scientific racism. Because the census recorded and classified caste, groups lobbied officials for more favourable listings. What had been local, negotiated and varied became fixed, written and all-India. Caste was last fully counted in 1931. Critics of Dirks's argument accept much of this but argue that he overstates it: caste hierarchy, endogamy and untouchability were deeply rooted long before the British, as the genetic and textual evidence shows, and the colonial state hardened an existing system rather than inventing one. Position Core claim Main evidence Ancient and scriptural Caste was laid down in the Vedas and law books and has been the frame of Hindu society for millennia Rig Veda 10.90; Manu; Buddhist and Jain texts that criticise caste Colonial construction (strong form) British rule turned a fluid, local system into a rigid, all-India hierarchy Census rankings; codified law; caste associations formed around the census Synthesis (most scholars today) Caste is ancient, but its modern rigidity and political form owe much to colonial classification Genetic endogamy at least 1,900 years old; colonial records The debate is not only academic. If caste is a colonial artefact, then it is not "really" Hinduism; if it is scriptural, then reforming Hinduism means confronting its texts. That was exactly the argument of the man who did more than anyone to change caste in modern India. Part 10 — Caste reformers, Ambedkar and the argument today Protest against caste is as old as caste. The Buddha and Mahavira rejected birth as a measure of worth. Many bhakti saints, from Basava to Kabir and Ravidas, mocked the pride of high-caste priests. Modern reform movements took the argument into politics. In Maharashtra, Jyotirao Phule (1827–1890), from a gardener caste, opened a school for girls in Pune in 1848 with his wife Savitribai, founded the Satyashodhak Samaj ("Society of Truth-Seekers") in 1873, and in the same year published Gulamgiri (Slavery), which compared caste to American slavery. Ambedkar Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born on 14 April 1891 at Mhow, into the Mahar caste, then treated as untouchable, and grew up facing its daily humiliations. He went on to earn doctorates from Columbia University and the London School of Economics. At Columbia in May 1916, at the age of 25, he read a paper on the origins of caste that went straight to its mechanism: "Endogamy is the only characteristic that is peculiar to Caste." — B. R. Ambedkar, Castes in India (1916) "A caste," he wrote, "is an enclosed class." Back in India, he organised. In 1927 he led thousands of untouchables to drink from the public water tank at Mahad, and on 25 December that year his followers publicly burned a copy of the Manusmriti. In 1930 he led a campaign to enter the Kalaram temple at Nashik. His conflict with Gandhi is one of the defining arguments of modern India. Gandhi opposed untouchability passionately, called untouchables Harijan, "people of God", and worked to open temples to them, but he defended varna as a non-hierarchical division of duties and opposed treating untouchables as a separate political community. When the British granted untouchables separate electorates in 1932, Gandhi began a fast unto death in prison. Ambedkar, under enormous pressure, signed the Poona Pact on 24 September 1932, giving up separate electorates in exchange for reserved seats. He never forgave the pressure. Many Dalits today regard Gandhi's approach as paternalism; many Gandhians see the Pact as a compromise that kept the national movement united. In 1936 Ambedkar wrote a speech for a Hindu reform society in Lahore. When the organisers saw the text, which argued that caste could not be abolished without destroying belief in the sanctity of the scriptures that upheld it, they withdrew the invitation. He published it himself as Annihilation of Caste. A year earlier, at Yeola, he had announced that although he was born a Hindu, he would not die one. He chaired the committee that drafted independent India's Constitution, appointed on 29 August 1947. Its Article 17 abolished untouchability and made its practice an offence; other provisions allowed reserved places in legislatures, government jobs and universities for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, a system of affirmative action later extended to "Other Backward Classes". He resigned from the cabinet in September 1951 when his Hindu Code Bill, reforming marriage, divorce and inheritance, stalled (it later passed in parts from 1955). On 14 October 1956, at Nagpur, he converted to Buddhism with his wife and a vast crowd of followers, often estimated at half a million. He died seven weeks later. Ambedkar's question to Hinduism was simple and has never gone away: can a religion be reformed if the texts it treats as sacred are part of the problem? Caste today Caste remains part of Indian life. In Pew's 2019–20 survey, 98 percent of Indians identified with a caste; Indians as a whole described themselves as 25 percent Scheduled Caste, 9 percent Scheduled Tribe, 35 percent Other Backward Class and about 30 percent General Category (including 4 percent Brahmin). Most said there was not a lot of caste discrimination in India, but large majorities said it was very important to stop people of their community marrying outside their caste: 64 percent for women, 62 percent for men. Reservations remain contested: supporters see them as overdue redress for millennia of exclusion; critics argue they entrench caste identity or benefit the better-off within eligible groups. That argument is now headed for new data. India's 2027 census, which began its first phase on 1 April 2026, will count every individual's caste for the first time since 1931, after the government decided to include it on 30 April 2025. Supporters, including the economist Ashwini Deshpande, say that without such data policymakers are "flying blind"; opponents argue that counting caste hardens identities and divisions, a view the BJP itself long held before agreeing to the count. Within Hinduism, attitudes run from orthodox defenders of varna, to reformers who say caste has nothing to do with "true" Hinduism, to Dalit and Ambedkarite thinkers who say the two cannot be separated. All three positions are held by sincere people, and the argument between them is one of the most important religious debates in the world. Part 11 — Living it: the day, the year and a lifetime For most Hindus, Hinduism is not first of all a set of doctrines. It is something done: at home, at the temple, at the river, in the kitchen, at births and weddings and funerals. An ordinary day In many Hindu homes the day begins at a household shrine, which may be a whole room or a single shelf with a few images and pictures. A typical puja (worship) treats the deity as an honoured guest: the image may be bathed or sprinkled with water, offered flowers, incense and food, and honoured with aarti, the waving of a lit lamp in circles before the god, often while a hymn is sung. The food offered is then received back as prasad, the god's blessed leftovers, and shared. In Pew's survey, most Indian Hindus said they perform puja daily, at home or in a temple. Other daily acts are smaller. Many households keep a holy basil (tulsi) plant, sacred to Vishnu, and water it each morning. Many recite a mantra, such as the Gayatri, a verse of the Rig Veda (3.62.10) traditionally chanted at dawn. Food rules vary: 44 percent of Indian Hindus told Pew they are vegetarian, and another 33 percent avoid certain meats; 72 percent said a person who eats beef cannot be a Hindu. A visit to a temple is above all for darshan, seeing the deity. The devotee rings a bell, makes an offering through the priest, receives prasad and a mark on the forehead, and often walks clockwise around the shrine. The year The Hindu calendar is lunar-solar, so festival dates move against the Western calendar. Festivals vary by region, but some are celebrated almost everywhere: Festival Usual season What it celebrates and how Diwali October–November The festival of lights: lamps lit for Lakshmi, goddess of prosperity, and for Rama's return to Ayodhya; new account books; sweets and fireworks Holi March Spring and the love of Krishna and Radha; bonfires, then crowds throwing coloured powder Navaratri / Durga Puja September–October "Nine nights" of the Goddess; dances in Gujarat; vast images of Durga in Bengal Ganesh Chaturthi August–September Ganesha's birthday; clay images worshipped, then immersed in water, especially in Maharashtra Maha Shivaratri February–March The great night of Shiva; fasting and night-long vigils Janmashtami August–September Krishna's birth at midnight Makar Sankranti / Pongal Mid-January The sun's northward turn and the harvest, especially in the south Many Hindus also fast on particular weekdays or lunar days, and women in many regions keep vows (vrata) for the welfare of husbands, children or households. A lifetime Classical texts describe a series of life-cycle rites, the samskaras, from rites before birth through a child's naming and first solid food, to the sacred-thread ceremony (upanayana) that traditionally began a high-caste boy's study of the Veda, to marriage and death. The wedding, with the couple walking around a sacred fire, and the funeral are the two that almost every Hindu family still performs. Cremation is the norm; the eldest son traditionally lights the pyre, and the ashes are given to a river, ideally the Ganges. The classical texts also describe four aims of life (purusharthas): dharma (righteousness), artha (prosperity), kama (pleasure and love) and moksha (liberation). They describe four ideal stages of life (ashramas): student, householder, forest-dweller and renouncer. Few people follow the stages literally, but the idea that each part of life has its own duty, and that worldly success and spiritual release both have a place, runs deep. Rivers and journeys Hindu sacred geography covers the subcontinent: holy rivers and sacred cities, the "four abodes" (char dham), the great shrines of Shiva's light (jyotirlingas), the seats of the Goddess (shakti pithas). Varanasi on the Ganges is the most famous; to die there, many believe, is to be liberated. In Pew's survey, 81 percent of Indian Hindus said the Ganges has the power to purify. The Kumbh Mela, a bathing festival that rotates among four river sites, is the largest religious gathering on earth. For the 2025 Maha Kumbh at Prayagraj (13 January to 26 February), officials claimed more than 660 million visits, a figure some observers called implausible, and a crowd crush on 29 January killed at least 30 people by the official count. The library's piece on pilgrimage tells that story. Hindu practice asks less "what do you believe?" than "what do you do, for whom, and when?" Part 12 — The medieval centuries (c. 600–1750) The thousand years after the Gupta empire saw Hinduism take much of its present form: great temple-building dynasties in the south, the systematising of Vedanta, the spread of bhakti, and a long and complicated encounter with Islam. Date Event c. 6th–9th centuries Tamil Alvars and Nayanars compose their devotional hymns 8th century Shankara teaches Advaita; tradition credits him with founding monasteries at the four corners of India 1026 Mahmud of Ghazni raids the temple of Somnath in Gujarat 1206 The Delhi Sultanate is established 1336 The Vijayanagara empire is founded in the south (falls after the Battle of Talikota, 1565) 1526 Babur founds the Mughal empire 1556–1605 Akbar's reign; his policy of tolerance toward all faiths 1656 Akbar's great-grandson Dara Shukoh translates fifty Upanishads into Persian 1658–1707 Aurangzeb's reign; the jizya tax on non-Muslims reimposed in 1679 Temples, kings and conquest In the south, dynasties such as the Pallavas and Cholas built temples that were also the centres of towns, economies and royal power, and great Shaiva and Vaishnava institutions grew around them. From the 11th century, Turkic and Afghan armies raided and then conquered the north. The Delhi Sultanate was founded in 1206, the Mughals arrived in 1526, and for much of the next five centuries most of northern India was ruled by Muslim dynasties. How to describe this period is today a matter of fierce public dispute. The historian Richard Eaton, in a widely cited 2000 study of temple desecration, argued that the destruction of temples by Indo-Muslim rulers was real but more limited and more political than often claimed: conquerors targeted royal temples that embodied the sovereignty of defeated Hindu kings, much as Hindu kings had sometimes carried off or destroyed the temple images of their own rivals. Critics counter that his count rests only on cases he considered firmly documented and therefore understates the scale, and that the destruction of temples such as Somnath and, under Aurangzeb, the Vishvanath temple in Varanasi in 1669, left deep wounds in Hindu memory. Both points can be true: the destruction was real and remembered, and its causes were often political as well as religious. The same centuries also produced deep exchange. From 1575 Akbar's "House of Worship" at Fatehpur Sikri hosted debates among Sunni, Shia and Sufi Muslims, Hindus of Shaiva and Vaishnava schools, Jains, Parsis, Jews and Jesuits. His great-grandson Dara Shukoh translated fifty Upanishads into Persian in 1656, a translation that, rendered into Latin in 1801–02, introduced them to European philosophers such as Schopenhauer. Bhakti poets drew followers across religious lines; Sufi shrines drew Hindu pilgrims; Kabir sang to both. In the Punjab, Guru Nanak founded a new tradition that drew on both and belonged to neither (see the Jainism and Sikhism long read). Aurangzeb's reign remains the most argued over. Many historians see in it a turn away from Akbar's pluralism: the reimposition of the jizya in 1679, the destruction of prominent temples, and the execution of the Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1675. Others, such as Audrey Truschke, argue that his policies were driven as much by politics and finance as by religion, that he also endowed some temples, and that the share of Hindus among his senior officials actually rose. Survival and renewal In the south, the Vijayanagara empire, founded in 1336, became a great patron of Hindu temples; its ruined capital near Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the west, the Marathas under Shivaji (17th century) built a state that later dominated much of India and is celebrated today as a Hindu revival. Throughout, Brahmin scholarship, temple ritual, pilgrimage and village religion carried on, often under Muslim rulers who governed through Hindu officials and left local religion largely alone. The medieval centuries were neither a simple story of persecution nor one of harmony. They were both, at different times, in different places, under different rulers. Part 13 — The colonial encounter and the reformers (1750–1948) The British East India Company took control of Bengal after 1757 and, over the next century, of most of India. British rule brought Hindus face to face with Christian missionaries, European science and scholarship, and a colonial state that both studied Hinduism and passed judgement on it. The response was a century of reform movements that reshaped how Hindus understood their own religion. Ram Mohan Roy and the Brahmo Samaj Ram Mohan Roy (c. 1772–1833), a Bengali Brahmin scholar, argued that the Upanishads taught the worship of one formless God and that image worship and many customs were later corruptions. He founded a society for reasoned worship in 1814 and the Brahmo Sabha, later Brahmo Samaj, in 1828. He campaigned against sati, the burning of widows on their husbands' funeral pyres, which the Bengal Sati Regulation of 1829 outlawed, and travelled to Britain in 1830 to defend the ban. He died near Bristol in 1833. Dayananda and the Arya Samaj Dayananda Saraswati founded the Arya Samaj in Bombay on 10 April 1875. His was a different reform: back to the Vedas, which he held to be infallible, and away from everything he considered later accretion, including image worship, which is strictly prohibited in the Samaj; in the early 20th century it also campaigned against caste discrimination. The Samaj developed shuddhi ("purification") ceremonies to bring converts to Islam and Christianity back into Hinduism. Its ten principles were settled in Lahore in 1877. Dayananda died in 1883. Ramakrishna and Vivekananda Ramakrishna (died 1886), a priest at a Kali temple near Calcutta, was a mystic who reported experiencing God through Kali, through Krishna, through Advaita meditation and even through Islamic and Christian practice, and concluded that all religions lead to the same goal. His disciple Narendranath Datta, who took the name Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), carried that message to the world. On 11 September 1893 he addressed the opening of the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago: "Sisters and Brothers of America... We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true." — Swami Vivekananda, Chicago, 11 September 1893 Vivekananda presented Hinduism, and Advaita Vedanta in particular, as a rational, universal and tolerant spirituality. He founded the Vedanta Society of New York in 1894 and the Ramakrishna Mission on 1 May 1897, combining monastic life with social service. His birthday is National Youth Day in India. His vision of Hinduism as the "mother of religions" profoundly influenced both Indian nationalism and the Western view of Hinduism. Some scholars argue that it also flattened the tradition's diversity into a single philosophy shaped for Western audiences, a criticism his admirers reject. Gandhi Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (born 2 October 1869 in Porbandar) drew his politics from religion. From the Gita he took the ideal of selfless action; from a devout Vaishnava home and from Jain teaching, the centrality of non-violence (ahimsa); from his friend the Jain teacher Rajchandra, whom he called his refuge in moments of spiritual crisis, a model of the religious life. His nonviolent campaigns against British rule were framed as satyagraha, "holding to truth". His ideal of a just society, Ram Rajya, borrowed the name of Rama's kingdom. He was a devout Hindu who prayed with Muslims and Christians, opposed untouchability while defending varna, and fought the partition of India along religious lines. On 30 January 1948, at an interfaith prayer meeting in New Delhi, he was shot dead by Nathuram Godse, a militant Hindu nationalist from Pune who had been a member of the RSS. (Godse said he had left it; a government commission later found that the RSS "as such" was not responsible for the murder.) Gandhi's Hinduism and Godse's are still two poles of the argument in Part 15. The reformers disagreed about almost everything except one thing: that Hinduism had to answer the modern world, and that it could. Part 14 — The diaspora and the global life of yoga According to the Pew Research Center's 2025 global estimates, 95 percent of the world's Hindus live in India, and 97 percent live in the world's two Hindu-majority countries, India and Nepal. But the remaining few percent have carried Hinduism to every continent, and its ideas and practices have travelled further still. Indenture: the first great migration After Britain abolished slavery, plantation colonies needed labour. From 1834, when a ship carried Indian labourers to Mauritius, until the system ended in 1917, about 1.6 million Indians, most of them Hindus, went abroad as indentured workers: to Mauritius, British Guiana, Trinidad, Suriname, Fiji, Natal in South Africa, Jamaica and elsewhere. They kept their festivals, their Ramayana recitations and their temples under harsh labour contracts. Today Hindus form large communities in all of these places, with forms of Hinduism shaped by the villages of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh from which most came, and by a century of separation from India. The second wave After the Second World War, and especially after the United States and Canada opened immigration in the 1960s, a second wave of mostly professional migrants built temples, cultural centres and student associations across the English-speaking world. Country Hindu population Source and date India 966 million (79.8%) Census 2011 (the 2027 census is under way) England and Wales 1.0 million (1.7%) Census 2021 Canada about 830,000 (2.3%) Census 2021 United States 0.9% of adults Pew Religious Landscape Study, 2023–24 World about 1.2 billion (14.9%) Pew Research Center, 2025 (2020 estimates) In Harrow, in northwest London, more than a quarter of residents (25.8 percent) identified as Hindu in 2021. Diaspora Hinduism has often been more organised than village Hinduism, more focused on temples as community centres, and more concerned with explaining itself to neighbours and to children growing up as a minority. Hinduism as a missionary movement Hinduism has rarely sought converts, but some modern movements do. ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, was founded in New York on 13 July 1966 by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who had arrived the year before. Its saffron-robed chanters of the Hare Krishna mantra, rooted in Chaitanya's Bengali devotion, became a familiar sight in Western cities. Other teachers, from Vivekananda's Vedanta societies to Paramahansa Yogananda and the Transcendental Meditation movement, brought Hindu meditation and philosophy to Western seekers, many of whom never thought of themselves as Hindu. Yoga goes global The yoga practised in gyms from London to Lagos is related to Patanjali's yoga, but it is not the same thing. Patanjali was concerned with stilling the mind; his few lines on asana concern a stable seat for meditation. Historians of modern yoga, such as Mark Singleton, argue that the flowing sequences of postures familiar today developed largely in the 20th century, drawing on medieval hatha yoga texts but also on modern physical culture and gymnastics, and were spread worldwide by Indian teachers and their Western students. On 11 December 2014 the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 69/131 declaring 21 June the International Day of Yoga, a proposal from India endorsed by a record 175 member states. The UN describes yoga as "an ancient physical, mental and spiritual practice that originated in India." Yoga's success abroad raises a question its practitioners answer differently: is it a Hindu practice, a universal one, or both? Some Hindu organisations in the diaspora have argued that yoga is being stripped of its Hindu roots and sold as fitness. Some Christians and Muslims have argued the reverse, that yoga is too Hindu for them to practise. Many practitioners, including many Hindus, see it as a gift from Indian tradition to anyone who wants it. Each view has serious defenders. Part 15 — Hindu nationalism and its critics The most consequential argument about Hinduism today is political: what is the relationship between Hindu identity and the Indian nation? It is told here in dated steps, with the strongest case of each side. The idea In 1923 Vinayak Damodar Savarkar published Essentials of Hindutva. "Hindutva", Hindu-ness, was in his telling not a religion but a national and civilisational identity: a Hindu was someone who regarded India as both fatherland and holy land. On that definition, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists, whose faiths were born in India, were included; Muslims and Christians, whose holy lands lay elsewhere, were not unless they embraced that identity. Savarkar himself rejected caste hierarchy. In September 1925 K. B. Hedgewar founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, "National Volunteer Organisation") in Nagpur. Organised in local branches (shakhas) with daily drills and discussion, it grew into a vast network (it keeps no membership register; estimates run to millions) and the parent of a family of affiliated groups, the Sangh Parivar, including the Vishva Hindu Parishad and, in politics, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and later the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Key dates Date Event 1923 Savarkar's Essentials of Hindutva 1925 RSS founded in Nagpur 30 January 1948 Gandhi assassinated by Nathuram Godse; the RSS is banned for a time 1980 The BJP is founded 6 December 1992 The Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque at Ayodhya on a site many Hindus revere as Rama's birthplace, is demolished by Hindu activists after a rally; communal riots follow, killing an estimated 2,000 people in Bombay alone February–March 2002 After 59 people, many returning Hindu pilgrims, die in a train fire at Godhra, riots in Gujarat kill 1,044 people by official count (790 Muslims, 254 Hindus), with other estimates near 2,000 2014 The BJP under Narendra Modi wins a national majority 9 November 2019 India's Supreme Court, in a five-judge ruling, awards the disputed Ayodhya site to a trust to build a Rama temple and orders five acres elsewhere for a mosque; it also treats the 1992 demolition as unlawful 22 January 2024 Modi leads the consecration of the new Ram temple at Ayodhya 4 June 2024 The BJP wins 240 of 543 seats, losing its single-party majority; its alliance, with 293, forms the government for Modi's third term The case its supporters make Supporters of Hindu nationalism describe it as the cultural self-respect of a civilisation that, in their view, was subjugated for centuries, first by Muslim conquerors and then by the British, and was then governed by a secular elite that treated majority sentiment with suspicion. They argue that India's secularism became "pseudo-secularism", indulging minority religious law and politics while disparaging Hindu tradition; that Hindus should not have to apologise for wanting their holiest sites restored; that a common civil code and an end to religious conversion by inducement would make citizens truly equal; and that Hindutva is inclusive, since anyone who honours India's civilisation can belong. Many point out that the BJP has won repeated national elections, including among large numbers of lower-caste and poorer voters, and that in Pew's survey 64 percent of Hindus said being Hindu is very important to being truly Indian. The case its critics make Critics, among them scholars such as Christophe Jaffrelot, opposition parties, civil-liberties groups, and many Hindus, argue that Hindutva defines the nation by religion, against the secular and pluralist Constitution written by Ambedkar and his colleagues; that it treats India's Muslims (172 million at the 2011 census) and its Christians as second-class or suspect citizens; that its rise has been accompanied by communal violence (Human Rights Watch counted at least 44 people killed by cow-protection vigilantes between May 2015 and December 2018, 36 of them Muslims) and by pressure on journalists, universities and minorities; and that it rewrites history, presenting a single Hindu nation that never existed. Many Hindu critics add a religious objection: that Hindutva turns a tradition of extraordinary inner diversity and spiritual depth into a political identity, and that Gandhi, a Hindu killed by a Hindu nationalist, represents a truer Hinduism. The argument is not between Hindus and non-Hindus. It runs through Hindu families themselves. These are not abstract disputes. Laws restricting religious conversion, the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (which offered faster citizenship to non-Muslim refugees from neighbouring countries), cow-protection laws and history textbooks are all live political battles in 2026. Readers will find supporters and opponents of each, and each will say the other side is the danger to India. Part 16 — Hinduism today and its open questions By the numbers Measure Figure Source Hindus worldwide about 1.2 billion, 14.9% of humanity Pew Research Center, 2025 (2020 estimates) Growth 2010–2020 about 126 million more Hindus Pew, 2025 Share living in India 95% Pew, 2025 Share of India's population 79.8% (966 million) in 2011, down from 84.1% in 1951 Census of India, via Pew Hindus who believe in karma 77% Pew India survey, 2019–20 Hindus who say there is one God with many manifestations 61% Pew India survey, 2019–20 Hindus who say the Ganges purifies 81% Pew India survey, 2019–20 Those figures carry a caution. India has not had a census since 2011, so the 2011 shares remain the latest official count until results from the 2027 census appear; and survey figures describe India's Hindus, not the diaspora. Questions inside the tradition What counts as Hindu? From the 1966 court case to the Lingayat debate and the place of Dalit Buddhists, the boundaries of the family are still being drawn. The answer has legal consequences, for temple law, personal law and minority status. Caste. Whether caste can be reformed from within, as Gandhi hoped, or only abandoned, as Ambedkar concluded, remains the deepest moral question in modern Hinduism. The 2027 census will put new numbers on it. Women and ritual. Hindu goddesses are among the most powerful divine figures in any religion, yet women's access to priesthood, Vedic study and some temples has long been restricted. Women now train as priests in some traditions, and court cases over temple entry have divided believers between those who see tradition as binding and those who see equality as itself a Hindu value. Scripture and history. How should Hindus read the dating of the Vedas, the migration debate, the historicity of Rama and Krishna? For many believers the epics are history; for many scholars they are sacred literature with historical layers. Some Hindus hold both views at once. Religion and nation. Is Hinduism a religion among others in a secular state, or the civilisational identity of India itself? That question, set out in Part 15, will shape India's politics for decades. The sacred and the environment. Rivers revered as goddesses, the Ganges and the Yamuna above all, are heavily polluted. Hindu environmentalists argue that reverence for nature in Hindu tradition must become action; others note that ritual practices, such as immersing images and ashes, are part of the problem. A tradition that has argued with itself for three thousand years is unlikely to stop now. Its arguments are part of what keeps it alive. The takeaway "Hinduism" is a modern name for a very old family of traditions with no single founder, book or creed. Its oldest layer, the Vedic hymns, was carried by memory for over two thousand years; the Upanishads turned ritual inward, asking how the self relates to ultimate reality and giving the world the ideas of karma, rebirth and liberation; the epics, the Gita and the Puranas made those ideas into stories, gods and devotion that a billion people live by. Its philosophers argued for centuries over whether the self is God or belongs to God. Its social order, caste, is rooted in scripture and ancient custom, was hardened by colonial counting, was fought by reformers from the Buddha to Ambedkar, and is still argued over today. Through conquest, colonialism and migration it has adapted again and again, and in 2026 its biggest arguments, about caste, about who belongs, and about religion and the nation, are being had in public by Hindus themselves. Try this: spend ten minutes with one passage, read slowly: the salt-in-water lesson in the Chandogya Upanishad (chapter 6, section 13), or the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita. Then, if you can, visit a Hindu temple near you at the time of the evening aarti. Most welcome respectful visitors; take off your shoes, watch, and ask afterwards what you saw. You will have met the tradition in both of its forms, as an idea and as a practice. Sources & Further Reading Sources - Pew Research Center, Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation (29 June 2021; survey of 29,999 adults, Nov 2019–Mar 2020): deity preferences, karma, Ganges, vegetarianism, caste identification and attitudes, Hindu identity and nationalism. - Pew Research Center, "Religious Composition of India" and "Population growth and religious composition" (21 September 2021): census shares 1951 and 2011. - Pew Research Center, "How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020" (9 June 2025): 1.2 billion Hindus, 14.9%, 95% in India; Pew, 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study (February 2025): U.S. Hindus 0.9%. - Census of India 2011 (religion tables); Statistics Canada, 2021 Census (26 October 2022); Office for National Statistics, Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021. - Shinde et al., "An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers", Cell 179 (2019); Narasimhan et al., "The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia", Science 365 (2019); Moorjani et al., "Genetic evidence for recent population mixture in India", American Journal of Human Genetics 93 (2013). - World History Encyclopedia, "Indus Valley Civilization" (dates, script, debates over religion and decline). - Primary texts: R. T. H. Griffith, The Hymns of the Rigveda (1896); F. Max Müller, The Upanishads, Sacred Books of the East 1 and 15; G. Bühler, The Laws of Manu, SBE 25; Edwin Arnold, The Song Celestial (1885, Project Gutenberg); B. R. Ambedkar, Castes in India (1916, Project Gutenberg); Swami Vivekananda, address of 11 September 1893, Complete Works, vol. 1. - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Advaita Vedanta" and "Yoga" (Patanjali's dating, the eight limbs, modern postural yoga). - David N. Lorenzen, "Who Invented Hinduism?", Comparative Studies in Society and History 41:4 (1999); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind (Princeton, 2001); Richard M. Eaton, "Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States", Journal of Islamic Studies 11:3 (2000). - United Nations, International Day of Yoga (resolution 69/131, 11 December 2014); Al Jazeera, "History's biggest census" (1 April 2026), on India's 2027 census and caste enumeration. - Dates for reformers, the Ayodhya dispute, the 2002 Gujarat riots, the 2024 election and the 2025 Kumbh were cross-checked against standard reference summaries; casualty figures are given as official counts, with other estimates noted. Go deeper - 📘 An Introduction to Hinduism — Gavin Flood (Cambridge University Press; the standard scholarly introduction, clear and balanced on every period in this piece) - 📘 The Upaniṣads — translated by Patrick Olivelle (Oxford World's Classics; the most reliable modern translation, with an introduction on dating and context) - 📘 The Bhagavad Gita — Edwin Arnold's The Song Celestial is free on Project Gutenberg; Eknath Easwaran's and Laurie Patton's modern translations are easier reading - 📘 India: A Sacred Geography — Diana L. Eck (how rivers, mountains and pilgrimage towns bind the tradition together) - 📘 Annihilation of Caste — B. R. Ambedkar (the undelivered 1936 speech; read it alongside Gandhi's replies, which most editions include) - 📘 The Hindus: An Alternative History — Wendy Doniger (a provocative history centred on women, lower castes and dissent; admired by many scholars and strongly criticised by many Hindus, which is itself instructive) - 🌐 Pew Research Center — Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation (the largest recent survey of what Indians of every faith believe and do) - 🌐 Related pieces in this library: Adi Shankara: The Non-Dual Reality of Advaita Vedanta; Kabir: The Weaver of the Heart; Meditation, Without the Woo; Pilgrimage: Why Humans Walk to Holy Places; If I Was Born in India; and the Religions long reads on Buddhism and on Jainism and Sikhism Step 13. Judaism: A People, a Covenant and a Conversation Across 3,000 Years ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: Judaism. A small people with a very large book, a Temple lost twice, a law argued over for two thousand years, a catastrophe in living memory, and about fifteen million people today who still disagree, in good faith and at length, about what it all means. Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each and How the Sacred Texts Were Written. Companion pieces: the Religions long reads on Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam, and the Histories long read on Israel, which tells the story of the modern state. Open a page of the Babylonian Talmud in almost any edition printed in the last five hundred years and you are looking at a conversation laid out in space. In the middle sits a short passage of the Mishnah, a law code edited around 200 CE. Wrapped around it is the Gemara, the record of rabbis arguing about that passage over the following three centuries, in Aramaic, often without reaching a verdict. In the margins sit the comments of Rashi, who lived in 11th-century France, and of the Tosafot, French scholars of the following generations, who argue with him. Around those, in later editions, are cross-references and glosses from the 16th century and after. The layout was fixed by a Christian printer, Daniel Bomberg, in Venice between 1520 and 1523, and almost every edition since has kept his page numbers, so a student in Jerusalem, Brooklyn or Buenos Aires can say "Bava Metzia 59b" and everyone at the table opens to the same page. That page is the best single picture of Judaism there is. It is a tradition in which the questions are kept, the minority opinions are written down next to the majority, and a reader is expected to join in. This long read follows that conversation from its beginnings to 2026: the Hebrew Bible as the tradition reads it and as historians date it; the two Temples and the exile; the rabbis who rebuilt Judaism after Rome destroyed Jerusalem; the medieval worlds of Babylon, Spain, France and Poland; Kabbalah; persecution and refuge; Hasidism and the Enlightenment; the modern movements; the Holocaust; Zionism as a religious and secular question; what a Jewish day, week, year and life look like; what Jews have thought about God, law and ethics; antisemitism as a historical phenomenon; and the numbers and open questions of today. A note on approach: this piece describes Judaism as its own traditions understand it and sets that beside what historians and archaeologists say, keeping the two distinct and treating both with respect. Jews disagree among themselves about almost every question here, and the main positions are described as their holders would describe them. The modern State of Israel's politics and its conflict with the Palestinians belong to the Histories long read on Israel; this piece touches the state only where it bears on Jewish religion and peoplehood. In this long read The story the tradition tells What historians and archaeologists say Kings, the First Temple and exile (c. 1000–539 BCE) The Second Temple and its sects (539 BCE–70 CE) After the fall: the rabbis, the Mishnah and the Talmud (70–c. 600 CE) Medieval worlds: Babylon, Spain, France and the codes (c. 600–1600) Kabbalah: the hidden Torah Persecution, expulsion and refuge (1096–1903) Hasidim, their opponents, and the Enlightenment (1700–1900) The modern movements The Holocaust (1933–1945) Zionism: a religious and a secular question Living it: the day, the week, the year, a life Thinking it: God, law and ethics Antisemitism: what it is and how it has changed Judaism today: numbers and open questions Part 1 — The story the tradition tells Jewish tradition begins its own story with a man told to leave home. "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will show thee. And I will make of thee a great nation" (Genesis 12:1–2, JPS 1917). Abraham obeys, and God makes a covenant, a binding agreement, with him and his descendants, marked in the flesh by circumcision on the eighth day (Genesis 17:10–12). His grandson Jacob wrestles through a night with a mysterious stranger and receives a new name: "Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel; for thou hast striven with God and with men, and hast prevailed" (Genesis 32:29). The people are named after him, the children of Israel, and many Jews have found it fitting that their name means something like "one who struggles with God". Jacob's twelve sons become twelve tribes. Famine takes them to Egypt, where their descendants are enslaved. God calls Moses, reveals the divine name ("I AM THAT I AM", Exodus 3:14), and through plagues and the parting of the sea brings the people out. At Mount Sinai, God offers the covenant to the whole nation: "ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation" (Exodus 19:6). There, the tradition holds, God gave the Torah: the Ten Commandments and the whole body of law and teaching contained in the five books of Moses. After forty years in the wilderness, the people enter the land of Canaan under Joshua. Two Torahs Rabbinic Judaism adds a crucial idea: at Sinai Moses received not one Torah but two. The Written Torah is the five books. The Oral Torah is the body of explanation needed to live them out: what counts as "work" on the Sabbath, how to write a divorce document, what "an eye for an eye" means in practice (the rabbis said: monetary compensation). The Mishnah opens its tractate of ethical teachings with a chain of transmission: "Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly" (Pirkei Avot 1:1), and from them to the rabbis. On this view, the rabbis' debates are not inventions but the unfolding of what Sinai always contained. The Hebrew Bible The Jewish scripture is the Tanakh, an acronym of its three parts: Part Hebrew name Contents T — Teaching Torah Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy N — Prophets Nevi'im The historical books (Joshua to Kings) and the prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Twelve) K — Writings Ketuvim Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles Jews count these as 24 books. Christians call the same Hebrew books, ordered differently, the Old Testament; Catholic and Orthodox Bibles add others. In Jewish life the Torah is supreme: it is handwritten on parchment scrolls by trained scribes, kept in an ark in every synagogue, and read aloud in full in a yearly cycle. In Jewish tradition, Sinai is not only an event in the past. Every generation is meant to stand there again. Part 2 — What historians and archaeologists say Modern scholarship asks a different question: not where did this text come from? but how did it reach the form we have? Its answers are not the tradition's, and it is worth being clear about which claims are evidence and which are debates. Who wrote the Torah? From the 18th century, scholars noticed doublets (two creation stories, two versions of the flood woven together), different names for God, and shifts in style. In 1878 the German scholar Julius Wellhausen gave the classic form of the documentary hypothesis: the Torah combines four once-separate sources, known by letters: Source Classic date (Wellhausen era) Character J (Yahwist) c. 950 BCE Vivid stories; God called YHWH from the start E (Elohist) 9th century BCE Northern; God called Elohim D (Deuteronomist) 7th century BCE Deuteronomy's sermons and law P (Priestly) 5th century BCE Genealogies, ritual law, the seven-day creation That model was almost universally accepted for most of the 20th century. Since the 1970s it has broken apart. Scholars such as John Van Seters, Hans Heinrich Schmid and Rolf Rendtorff argued that "J" is much later, from the exile or after, and that "E" barely exists. Many European scholars now prefer supplementary or fragmentary models, in which the Torah grew by expansion and editing of smaller units. A revised neo-documentary school, especially in North America and Israel, defends continuous sources. Most scholars now agree on one point: the Torah reached its final form in the Persian period, roughly 539–333 BCE, built from older material. What the ground shows Archaeology gives some fixed points. Find Date What it shows Merneptah Stele (Egypt) Reign of Merneptah, 1213–1203 BCE The earliest mention of a people called "Israel", already in Canaan Tel Dan inscription (found 1993) 9th century BCE An Aramaean king's boast that most scholars read as naming the "House of David", a dynasty in Judah Mesha Stele (found 1868) c. 840 BCE The king of Moab describes throwing off the rule of the kingdom of Israel Elephantine papyri (Egypt) 5th century BCE A Jewish military colony with its own temple to YHW, outside Jerusalem, as late as 411 BCE Dead Sea Scrolls (found 1946–56) c. 3rd century BCE–1st century CE The oldest surviving manuscripts of biblical books; a text transmitted with remarkable stability, alongside real variety before it was standardised around 100 CE The live debates The Exodus. Most mainstream scholars do not accept the Exodus account as a historical record: Egyptian sources do not mention it, and the Sinai desert has yielded no trace of a large population wandering for forty years. Many think the story preserves a memory of something smaller, perhaps a group that escaped Egypt and later joined the people of Canaan, and that most Israelites emerged from the population of Canaan itself. David and Solomon. Here the arguments are fiercest. "Minimalists" (such as the so-called Copenhagen School) doubt that much of the Bible's account of the united kingdom is historical. Israel Finkelstein argues for a "low chronology" in which David ruled a modest chiefdom and the great buildings attributed to Solomon came later. Others, such as William Dever and the excavators of Khirbet Qeiyafa, a fortified town dated around 1000 BCE, argue that the evidence fits an early state in Judah. Few scholars now defend the Bible's picture of a vast Solomonic empire, and few deny that David's dynasty existed. How believers relate to all this Jews respond in different ways, and each response has a long intellectual history. Most Orthodox Jews hold that the Torah was given by God to Moses, word for word (one of Maimonides' thirteen principles). Many Orthodox scholars engage archaeology closely and reject the source theories, or hold that historical questions do not touch the Torah's authority. Conservative/Masorti Judaism has generally accepted critical scholarship while holding that the Torah, however it was written, carries divine authority through the covenant and the community's interpretation of it. Reform and Reconstructionist Jews generally accept the scholarly picture and understand the Torah as a human response to the divine, inspired rather than dictated. Scholarship can tell you how a text was assembled. It cannot tell you whether God speaks through it. Jews have argued about the second question for a very long time, and do not need the first one settled to do so. Part 3 — Kings, the First Temple and exile (c. 1000–539 BCE) The Bible describes a united monarchy under Saul, David and Solomon, with Solomon building the First Temple in Jerusalem. After Solomon, the kingdom split in two: Israel in the north, with its capital at Samaria, and Judah in the south, with Jerusalem and the Temple. Historians accept the two kingdoms as real; the north is attested in Assyrian and Moabite records, and from the 9th century BCE onwards the biblical and external sources increasingly agree. The prophets This was the age of the great prophets: Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah. Their message mixed warning and hope. They denounced idolatry, but just as fiercely they denounced the rich who cheated the poor, the courts that took bribes, and the worship of people who oppressed their neighbours. Micah's summary has never been bettered: "It hath been told thee, O man, what is good, and what the LORD doth require of thee: only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God" (Micah 6:8, JPS 1917). Isaiah imagined a time when nations "shall beat their swords into plowshares" (Isaiah 2:4). Two catastrophes The northern kingdom fell to Assyria around 720 BCE; many of its people were deported, and the "ten lost tribes" entered legend. Judah survived as a small kingdom. In the late 7th century, King Josiah carried out a sweeping religious reform after, according to 2 Kings 22, a "book of the law" was found in the Temple; he centralised all worship in Jerusalem. Many scholars connect that book with an early form of Deuteronomy. Then Babylon rose. Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem in 597 BCE and deported the king and many of the elite; in 587 or 586 BCE he destroyed the city and the Temple and deported more. The Bible's poetry of grief comes from here: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion… How shall we sing the LORD's song in a foreign land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning." (Psalm 137:1–5, JPS 1917) Why the exile mattered The exile could have ended the people, as it ended many others. Instead, many historians think, it was the crucible in which Judaism as a religion of a book took shape. Without the Temple, the exiles gathered their traditions, edited and collected their texts, and kept the Sabbath, circumcision and the dietary laws as signs of who they were. A God who could be worshipped in Babylon was not the god of one hill but, as the later chapters of Isaiah insist, the God of all the earth. When Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, he let the exiles return. The Book of Ezra quotes his decree: "All the kingdoms of the earth hath the LORD, the God of heaven, given me; and He hath charged me to build Him a house in Jerusalem" (Ezra 1:2, JPS 1917). Cyrus's own clay cylinder, found in Babylon, credits Marduk, Babylon's god, and speaks of restoring Mesopotamian sanctuaries without mentioning Judeans; most historians read both texts as Cyrus's general policy of restoring local cults, seen by each people in its own terms. Isaiah 45:1 goes further and calls this Persian king God's "anointed". Part 4 — The Second Temple and its sects (539 BCE–70 CE) Many exiles stayed in Babylon, which remained a great centre of Jewish life for well over a thousand years. Those who returned rebuilt the Second Temple, which by the Bible's account was ready for consecration around 516 BCE. Under the leaders Ezra and Nehemiah, the Torah was read publicly and accepted as the law of the community. Greeks, Maccabees and Romans Alexander the Great conquered the region in 332 BCE, and Greek culture flowed in. In Alexandria, the largest Jewish community outside the land translated the Torah into Greek in the 3rd century BCE: the Septuagint, through which most of the ancient world would come to know the Bible. In 168–167 BCE the Seleucid king Antiochus IV tried to suppress Jewish practice in Judea and set up pagan worship in the Temple. A priestly family, the Maccabees, led a revolt; in 164 BCE they recaptured Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple, the event remembered at Hanukkah. Their descendants, the Hasmoneans, ruled an independent kingdom until Rome took control in 63 BCE. Rome's client king Herod the Great rebuilt the Temple on a vast scale; its western retaining wall survives as the Western Wall. The sects Second Temple Judaism was strikingly diverse. The historian Josephus, a Jewish priest who later wrote in Rome, described it as divided into schools of philosophy: "The Jews had for a great while had three sects of philosophy peculiar to themselves; the sect of the Essens, and the sect of the Sadducees, and the third sort of opinions was that of those called Pharisees" (Antiquities 18.1.2, Whiston translation). Group Who they were (per Josephus and other sources) Distinctive views Sadducees Priestly and aristocratic, centred on the Temple Accepted only the written law; held that "souls die with the bodies"; no resurrection Pharisees Popular teachers and interpreters Developed oral traditions; believed in the soul's immortality and future reward and punishment; combined divine providence with human free will Essenes Communal, ascetic groups living apart Strict purity; many scholars link them to the Dead Sea Scrolls community at Qumran, though some now challenge that link The "fourth philosophy" Founded, says Josephus, by Judas the Galilean Agreed with the Pharisees but held that God alone should be their ruler; resisted Rome, and fed the later revolt Two other movements came out of this world. A Jewish preacher from Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, gathered followers in the 1st century; after his death, the movement in his name would, over the following centuries, become a separate religion, Christianity (see the Religions long read on Christianity). And in Alexandria, the philosopher Philo read the Torah through Greek philosophy, the first great attempt to join Athens and Jerusalem. The Pharisaic teachers of this age included Hillel and Shammai, whose schools disagreed on hundreds of points. The Talmud remembers a non-Jew who asked each to teach him the whole Torah while he stood on one foot. Shammai drove him off. Hillel said: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and learn" (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a). 70 CE In 66 CE Judea rose against Rome. The Roman general Titus, son of the new emperor Vespasian, besieged Jerusalem, and in the summer of 70 CE, in the month of Av, his forces captured the Temple Mount and destroyed the Second Temple. Jews still mourn it, and the First Temple's destruction, on the fast of Tisha B'Av. A second revolt, led by Simon bar Kokhba in 132–136 CE, ended with the fall of the fortress of Betar in 135; Hadrian refounded Jerusalem as a Roman city, Aelia Capitolina. The Sadducees, whose world was the Temple, disappeared. The Essenes vanished. The movement that survived, and rebuilt Judaism, was the Pharisees' heirs: the rabbis. Part 5 — After the fall: the rabbis, the Mishnah and the Talmud (70–c. 600 CE) How do you keep a religion centred on a Temple when the Temple is gone? The rabbis' answer was one of the great creative acts in religious history. Yavneh Talmudic tradition tells that during the siege, the sage Yohanan ben Zakkai, who argued for peace, was smuggled out of Jerusalem in a coffin and asked Vespasian for one small thing: Yavneh and its sages. In the coastal town of Yavneh, the rabbis began to rebuild. (Historians treat the story as legend shaped later, and the "Council of Jamnia" that 19th-century scholars imagined fixing the biblical canon there is now widely doubted. But Yavneh became a real centre of rabbinic learning.) The rabbis moved the centre of Jewish life from the altar to three places that did not need a Temple: Prayer replaced sacrifice: the daily services were set at the times of the old Temple offerings. Study of Torah became itself a form of worship, perhaps the highest. The home, with its table, Sabbath candles and Passover meal, took on the holiness of the Temple. The Mishnah Around the end of the 2nd century or the beginning of the 3rd, Judah ha-Nasi ("the Prince") edited the Mishnah, the first written code of the Oral Torah, in Hebrew. It is organised in six "orders" (sedarim) and 63 tractates: on blessings and agriculture, festivals, women and marriage, damages and civil law, Temple offerings, and purity. It records disagreements and attaches names to opinions, so that the losing side is preserved alongside the winning one. The Talmuds The Mishnah in turn became the subject of commentary. Two great collections grew from it: The Jerusalem Talmud, compiled in the Galilee and completed by the early 5th century CE. The Babylonian Talmud (Bavli), compiled in the academies of Babylonia under Persian Sasanian rule, traditionally by Rav Ashi and Ravina around 500 CE, though many scholars think its final editing ran into the mid-6th century or later. It runs to 2,711 double-sided folios and became the central text of Jewish learning. A culture of argument The Talmud is not a law book in the ordinary sense. It is a record of reasoning, full of questions, objections, counter-examples, stories and jokes. Two passages explain its spirit. When the schools of Hillel and Shammai had disagreed for three years, says the Talmud, a heavenly voice declared: "These and these are the words of the living God, but the law follows the school of Hillel" (Eruvin 13b). Why Hillel? Because, the passage explains, they were kind and humble, and they taught their opponents' views as well as their own, and before their own. The second is the story of the oven of Akhnai (Bava Metzia 59a–b). Rabbi Eliezer, outvoted on a point of purity law, calls on miracles to prove him right: a carob tree uproots itself, a stream flows backwards, the walls of the study house bend. Finally a heavenly voice declares that the law follows Rabbi Eliezer. Rabbi Joshua stands and quotes Deuteronomy: "It is not in heaven" (Deuteronomy 30:12). The Torah, once given, belongs to human interpreters, who decide by majority. Later, the story goes, a rabbi met the prophet Elijah and asked what God did at that moment. Elijah answered that God smiled and said: "My children have triumphed over Me." A religion in which God laughs at being outvoted by His students has a very particular idea of authority. The same story has a harder ending, often left out: the rabbis burned the items Rabbi Eliezer had declared pure and excommunicated him, and his grief brought disaster. The conversation has rules, and those who break them can pay dearly. Both halves are part of the tradition. Part 6 — Medieval worlds: Babylon, Spain, France and the codes (c. 600–1600) The Geonim and Saadia After the rise of Islam in the 7th century, most of the world's Jews lived under Muslim rule. The heads of the Babylonian academies, the Geonim, answered legal questions sent from as far as Spain and North Africa, spreading the Babylonian Talmud's authority everywhere. The greatest of them, Saadia Gaon (882–942), born in Egypt and head of the academy of Sura, translated the Bible into Arabic and wrote The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, a founding work of medieval Jewish philosophy, along with a prayer book, a Hebrew dictionary and liturgical poems. He was also fighting a schism. The Karaites, a movement that arose in this period, rejected the Oral Torah and the rabbis' authority and accepted the written Bible alone. Karaite communities survive today, a small reminder that the rabbinic path was not the only one taken. Three great families Medieval Jewry developed into three great cultural families whose names are still used: Family Name from Heartlands Everyday language Sephardi Sepharad, Hebrew for Spain Iberia; after 1492, the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, the Netherlands Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), Judeo-Arabic, Portuguese Ashkenazi Ashkenaz, Hebrew for Germany The Rhineland, then Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Russia Yiddish Mizrahi ("Eastern") A modern Israeli term Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Central Asia, the Caucasus Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, Aramaic and others There were others besides: the Romaniote Jews of Greece, the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, who kept a Bible-based tradition for centuries largely cut off from rabbinic Judaism, the Bene Israel and Cochin Jews of India, and the community of Kaifeng in China, formed most probably in the Song dynasty (960–1279). Al-Andalus and Maimonides Muslim Spain produced a remarkable flowering of Jewish poetry, philosophy and science, the so-called golden age. The poet and philosopher Judah Halevi wrote the Kuzari, a dialogue defending Judaism against philosophy, Christianity and Islam. In 1140 he set out for the land of Israel; he sailed from Alexandria in May 1141 and died that year, and whether he ever arrived is not known. The greatest figure of the age was Moses Maimonides (the Rambam), born in Córdoba in 1138. When the Almohads, a strict Berber dynasty, conquered Córdoba in 1148 and ended the protected status of Jews and Christians, his family fled. After years of wandering, including a stay in Fez, he reached Egypt in 1166, settled in Fustat (Old Cairo), became a celebrated court physician in the Egypt of Saladin, and died there in 1204. He wrote three works that shaped everything after: The Commentary on the Mishnah (completed 1168), which includes his Thirteen Principles of faith: among them the existence and unity of God, God's incorporeality, the prophecy of Moses, the divine origin of the Torah, reward and punishment, the coming of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead. Poetic versions, Yigdal and Ani Ma'amin, entered the prayer book. The Mishneh Torah, a complete code of Jewish law in fourteen books, in clear Hebrew, organised so that a reader would not need the Talmud to know the law. Critics feared exactly that. The Guide of the Perplexed (completed 1190), written for a student torn between philosophy and faith, which reads the Bible's descriptions of God's hands, anger or throne as metaphors and argues that we can say only what God is not. The Guide was so controversial that French rabbis banned it and copies were burned in Montpellier. Today Maimonides is honoured by every branch of Judaism, a nice example of the tradition absorbing its own arguments. Ashkenaz and Rashi In the Christian north, a different style grew up. Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, 1040–1105) of Troyes in Champagne wrote running commentaries on almost the entire Bible and Talmud, so clear and economical that they are still printed beside both texts. Every Jewish child who studies the Torah meets Rashi. The Tosafists, the French and German scholars who came after him, argued with him in the margins, as the Talmud's page shows. The great code In 1563, in Safed in the Galilee, the Sephardi scholar Joseph Karo completed the Shulchan Aruch ("Set Table"), a concise code of practical law, printed in Venice two years later. It followed Sephardi custom; in Kraków, Moses Isserles added glosses, called the Mappah ("Tablecloth"), noting where Ashkenazi practice differed. Printed together, the two became the standard code of Jewish law for Orthodox Jews to this day: a single book that holds two traditions on one page. Part 7 — Kabbalah: the hidden Torah Alongside the legal and philosophical tradition ran a mystical one. Kabbalah ("received tradition") seeks the hidden inner meaning of the Torah, the commandments and the cosmos. The Zohar Its central text, the Zohar ("Radiance"), is a vast commentary on the Torah in Aramaic, presented as the teachings of the 2nd-century sage Shimon bar Yochai and his circle. It first circulated in Castile in the 1280s through Moses de León. Traditional Kabbalists accept its ancient authorship; modern scholars, following Gershom Scholem, overwhelmingly hold that de León and his circle composed it in the late 13th century, drawing on older traditions. Some traditional writers grant that much is medieval while defending an ancient core. The Zohar describes God as Ein Sof, "the Infinite", utterly beyond knowing, who becomes manifest through ten sefirot, divine attributes or emanations such as wisdom, understanding, lovingkindness, judgement and beauty, the last of which is often identified with the Shekhinah, God's indwelling presence, imagined as a feminine aspect of the divine that has gone into exile with her people. Human actions, especially the commandments performed with right intention, help to unite the divine attributes and heal a fractured world. Safed and Isaac Luria After the expulsion from Spain, Kabbalists gathered in Safed in the Galilee, then part of the Ottoman Empire. There Isaac Luria (1534–1572), the "Ari", taught a new myth of creation in only a few years before his early death: Tzimtzum (contraction): to make room for a world, the Infinite withdrew into itself. Shevirat ha-kelim (the breaking of the vessels): the divine light poured into vessels that could not hold it; they shattered, and sparks of holiness fell and were trapped in the material world. Tikkun (repair): every human act of holiness lifts a spark and helps restore the world. When the repair is complete, redemption comes. This idea of tikkun, repair, travelled a long way; in modern times, the phrase tikkun olam, "repairing the world", has become a watchword for Jewish social action, a meaning broader than its older sources. The false messiah Lurianic hopes of imminent redemption fed the most dramatic episode in early modern Jewish history. In 1665 Shabbetai Tzvi, a charismatic and troubled Kabbalist from Smyrna, was proclaimed the Messiah, and much of the Jewish world, from Amsterdam to Yemen, believed. In 1666 the Ottoman authorities arrested him and offered him death or conversion. He converted to Islam. Most followers fell away in shock; a minority kept believing in secret. The trauma made rabbinic authorities wary of mysticism and messianism for generations. Part 8 — Persecution, expulsion and refuge (1096–1903) Jewish history is not a story of suffering only; it is also one of creativity, communal life and long periods of peace. But the medieval and early modern record contains a repeating pattern of violence and expulsion, and it shaped Jewish memory deeply. Under Christendom and Islam Under Islam, Jews were generally dhimmi, protected non-Muslims who paid a poll tax and accepted restrictions. That status was humiliating and occasionally broke down into persecution, as under the Almohads, but it usually allowed stable community life. In Latin Christendom, Jews' position was more precarious. Church teaching held Jews responsible for the death of Jesus, while also, in the Augustinian tradition, protecting their existence as witnesses; mob violence and royal greed often overrode the protection. Year Event 1096 Crusader mobs massacre the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz in the Rhineland 1144 Norwich, England: the first known accusation of ritual murder (the "blood libel"), a myth that later spread across Europe 1215 The Fourth Lateran Council requires Jews and Muslims to wear distinctive dress 1290 Edward I expels all Jews from England (readmitted informally under Cromwell in 1656) 1306, 1394 Expulsions from France 1348–51 During the Black Death, Jews are falsely accused of poisoning wells; communities are attacked from Barcelona and Toulon to Basel, Strasbourg, Frankfurt and Erfurt 1492 The Alhambra Decree of 31 March expels all unconverted Jews from Spain 1496–97 Portugal decrees expulsion in December 1496, then in 1497 forcibly baptises its Jews instead of letting them leave 1516 Venice confines Jews to the Ghetto, giving the word to the world 1648–49 The Khmelnytsky uprising in Ukraine devastates Jewish communities 1881–82, 1903 Waves of pogroms in the Russian Empire; at Kishinev in 1903, around 49 Jews are killed 1492 The Spanish expulsion was the defining catastrophe of Sephardi history. In the century before it, waves of riots and pressure had driven many Spanish Jews to convert; of a Jewish-origin population estimated at around 300,000, more than 200,000 had become Catholic by the time of the expulsion, and somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 who remained Jewish were expelled. Converts, called conversos (and, abusively, marranos), were hunted by the Inquisition for secretly keeping Jewish practices. The exiles scattered to North Africa, Italy, the Netherlands and, above all, the Ottoman Empire, where Salonika, Istanbul and Safed became great Sephardi centres and Ladino flourished for four more centuries. 1648 For the Jews of Poland-Lithuania, the uprising of the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1648 was remembered as the worst catastrophe since the Temple. Older histories gave death tolls of 100,000 or more; recent research puts it much lower. One 1996 estimate counts 15,000 to 30,000 Jews killed or taken captive and some 300 communities destroyed; a 2014 estimate puts Jewish deaths in 1648–49 at 18,000 to 20,000. Refuge The same centuries were also an age of refuge and growth. Poland-Lithuania gave its Jews a large measure of self-government through the Council of Four Lands, an autonomous Jewish body that sat from the second half of the 16th century until 1764, and became the centre of the Ashkenazi world. The Ottoman Empire took in Sephardi exiles, and Amsterdam's Portuguese-Jewish community grew rich and learned. In September 1791 revolutionary France granted its Jews full citizenship, and emancipation spread, slowly and unevenly, across the 19th century. The repeated lesson Jews drew from these centuries was double: that no refuge is permanent, and that a portable religion of book, home and community could survive the loss of almost anything else. Part 9 — Hasidim, their opponents, and the Enlightenment (1700–1900) In 18th-century Eastern Europe, two movements pulled Jewish life in opposite directions. Hasidism In the villages of Podolia, a healer and mystic named Israel ben Eliezer (c. 1700–1760), known as the Baal Shem Tov ("Master of the Good Name"), taught that God could be served not only through learned study but through joy, song, storytelling and fervent prayer, and that the divine is present in everything. His followers, the Hasidim ("the pious"), spread rapidly. They gathered around charismatic leaders, the rebbes or tzaddikim, who became heads of hereditary dynasties, many named after their towns of origin: Belz, Ger, Satmar, Bobov, and Lubavitch, home of the Chabad movement. The Hasidim brought Kabbalah into everyday piety and gave ordinary Jews a sense that their prayer and joy mattered cosmically. They also faced fierce opposition. The Mitnagdim The opponents, the Mitnagdim, were led by the towering Talmudist Elijah ben Solomon, the Vilna Gaon (1720–1797), whose signature appeared on the Vilna community's ban of excommunication against the Hasidim in 1772. They feared a new Sabbatean heresy, objected to changes in the prayer rite, and saw the cult of the rebbe as a threat to the authority of learning. Out of their tradition came the great Lithuanian yeshivas, academies of intense Talmud study. Within a century the two camps had largely made peace, united against a new challenge: modernity. The Haskalah In Berlin, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), a traditionally observant Jew who became a celebrated figure of the German Enlightenment, argued in Jerusalem (1783) that Judaism was a religion of revealed law, not of dogmas imposed by force, and that Jews could be loyal citizens of a modern state while remaining Jews. His circle began the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, whose followers, the maskilim, promoted secular education, the study of European languages and a revived Hebrew. The Haskalah opened the door to two very different futures. For some, it led to the modernisation of Jewish religion; for others, out of religion altogether. As the walls of the ghetto fell, Jews had to answer a question they had never faced: what does it mean to be Jewish when you are free not to be? Part 10 — The modern movements The 19th and 20th centuries produced the denominations that still organise much of Jewish life, especially outside Israel. Each was an answer to emancipation and modern thought. Reform In 1810 Israel Jacobson opened a reformed synagogue in Seesen in Westphalia; in 1818 the Hamburg Temple introduced prayers in German, an organ and a sermon. Its leading thinker, Abraham Geiger (1810–1874), saw Judaism as an evolving religion whose ethical core, "ethical monotheism", could be separated from rituals belonging to past ages. In America, Reform rabbis meeting in 1885 adopted the Pittsburgh Platform, which declared: "We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship… nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state." Over the 20th century, Reform moved back towards tradition and peoplehood; its 1937 Columbus Platform supported building a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Reform was the first movement to ordain women (in America, Sally Priesand in 1972) and, from 1990, openly gay and lesbian rabbis, and in 1983 its American rabbis accepted descent through either parent. Orthodoxy "Orthodox" was at first a label applied by others to those who rejected reform. Two responses emerged. In Frankfurt, Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888) championed Torah im Derech Eretz, "Torah with the way of the world": full observance of the law combined with secular education and citizenship. He is an ancestor of today's Modern Orthodoxy. In Hungary, Moses Sofer, the Hatam Sofer, coined the slogan "the new is forbidden by the Torah", turning a rule about new grain into a rule of life: change itself was the danger. He is an ancestor of the Haredi world. Conservative/Masorti In 1845 Zecharias Frankel walked out of a German rabbinical conference that voted to downgrade Hebrew in worship. He championed "positive-historical Judaism": freedom of historical research combined with loyalty to traditional law and practice. In America, the Jewish Theological Seminary, founded in 1886, became the centre of what was called Conservative Judaism, and outside North America it is called Masorti ("traditional"). Its motto since the 1950s has been "tradition and change". It voted in 1983 to ordain women as rabbis. Reconstructionism Mordecai Kaplan, a JTS professor, argued in Judaism as a Civilization (1934) that Judaism is not only a religion but the evolving civilisation of a people, and that God is best understood not as a supernatural person but as the power in the world that makes for goodness. In 1922 his daughter Judith celebrated the first public bat mitzvah in America. His followers became a separate movement when the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College opened in 1968. Haredi Judaism Haredim ("those who tremble" before God, often translated "ultra-Orthodox") are the communities most determined to preserve traditional life against modern culture: Hasidic dynasties and the heirs of the Lithuanian yeshivas. They study Torah intensively, many men full-time; they dress distinctively; they have large families, and their numbers are growing very fast; in Israel, by about 4 percent a year. At a glance Movement Authority of halakha (Jewish law) Revelation Women rabbis Haredi Binding; change resisted Torah given by God at Sinai No Modern Orthodox Binding; engage modern world within it Torah given by God at Sinai No rabbis; some new roles for women, debated Conservative/Masorti Binding, but developing through history Divine, mediated through human tradition Yes (from 1983) Reconstructionist A heritage each generation reconstructs Human response to the divine Yes Reform Guidance, individual autonomy Inspired, human-authored Yes (in the US from 1972) Humanistic (founded 1963) Culture and ethics, without God-language Not part of its framework Yes The first woman ordained as a rabbi was Regina Jonas in Berlin in 1935; she was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. Every modern movement is an answer to the same question: if the tradition is a conversation, who gets to speak in it now, and how much can they say? Part 11 — The Holocaust (1933–1945) The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the Holocaust as "the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators" between 1933 and 1945. Nearly two out of every three European Jews were killed. The stages Date Event January 1933 Hitler and the Nazi Party take power in Germany; boycotts and anti-Jewish laws follow 15 September 1935 The Nuremberg Laws strip German Jews of citizenship and ban marriage between Jews and "Germans" 9–10 November 1938 Kristallnacht: a state-organised pogrom across Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland; more than 1,400 synagogues burned From June 1941 After the invasion of the Soviet Union, mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, and other forces shoot Jews in mass operations 20 January 1942 At the Wannsee Conference, 15 senior Nazi and German officials coordinate the "Final Solution" 1942–1944 Deportations to the killing centres: Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau May 1945 Germany is defeated The numbers The USHMM's breakdown of how six million Jews were murdered, compiled from Nazi German documents and pre-war and post-war demographic data: How Approximate number of Jewish victims Gassed at the five killing centres 2.7 million Mass shootings and related massacres in more than 1,500 cities, towns and villages About 2 million Deliberate starvation, disease and brutality in ghettos, labour camps and concentration camps 800,000–1,000,000 Other violence outside camps and ghettos At least 250,000 At Auschwitz alone the Germans killed about 1.1 million people, about one million of them Jews. The Nazis and their collaborators also murdered millions of others, including some 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, about 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, Roma and Sinti, and people with disabilities. The world's Jewish population, about 16.5 million on the eve of the war by the demographer Sergio DellaPergola's estimate, fell to about 11 million by 1945; by comparable definitions it has still not fully recovered. Whole civilisations, the Yiddish world of Poland and Lithuania, the Sephardi community of Salonika, the Jewish life of the Hungarian countryside, were destroyed. Rescue and memory Some non-Jews risked their lives to save Jews. Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, has recognised more than 28,000 of them as Righteous Among the Nations (28,707 as of 1 January 2024), while stressing that the numbers reflect the cases brought to it, not the true number of rescuers. Jews themselves resisted in ghetto uprisings, partisan units and countless acts of spiritual defiance, such as secret prayer and study. What the Holocaust did to Jewish thought The Holocaust posed the oldest question in religion, how a just God could allow such suffering, in its most terrible form. Jewish thinkers have answered in very different ways. Richard Rubenstein, in After Auschwitz (1966), argued that the traditional God of history, who rewards and punishes, could no longer be believed in: the covenant, as traditionally understood, had died. Emil Fackenheim proposed a "614th commandment", added to the traditional 613: Jews must not hand Hitler a posthumous victory by abandoning Judaism, God or the Jewish people. Eliezer Berkovits, an Orthodox thinker, in Faith After the Holocaust (1973), drew on the biblical idea of hester panim, God "hiding His face": for humans to be truly free, God must sometimes withdraw, and the cost of that freedom can be monstrous. Many Haredi thinkers declined to offer any theological explanation, or placed the Holocaust within the long chain of exile and suffering that only the Messiah will end; many survivors simply rebuilt observant life, which was its own answer. For many secular Jews, the lesson was not theological but historical and political: Jews must never again be without a refuge. In the Pew Research Center's 2020 survey of American Jews, remembering the Holocaust was the most widely shared element of Jewish identity: 76 percent called it essential to what being Jewish means to them. Part 12 — Zionism: a religious and a secular question Longing for Zion is woven through Jewish prayer. Three times a day the traditional liturgy asks God to return to Jerusalem; the Passover meal ends with "Next year in Jerusalem"; a groom breaks a glass at his wedding in memory of the Temple. For eighteen centuries, though, most rabbis treated the return as something only God, through the Messiah, would bring. The Talmud even speaks of oaths that Israel swore not to "go up as a wall", taken to mean not to return en masse by force before the time (Ketubot 111a). Political Zionism Modern Zionism was largely a secular movement. Shaken by pogroms in Russia and by antisemitism in the West, the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) published Der Judenstaat ("The Jewish State") in 1896 and convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in August 1897. Many of its leaders were not religious; for them Jews were a nation like others, needing a land and a state of their own. Labour Zionists dreamed of a society of Jewish workers and farmers; cultural Zionists of a revived Hebrew culture. The State of Israel was proclaimed on 14 May 1948. (Its history, and the conflict with the Palestinians, are told in the Histories long read on Israel.) Religious responses Religious Jews divided sharply, and still do. Religious Zionism. The Mizrachi movement, founded in Vilna in 1902, brought observant Jews into the Zionist movement. Religious Zionism rests on three pillars: the Land of Israel, the People of Israel and the Torah of Israel. Its great thinker, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, taught that even secular pioneers were unknowingly doing holy work, and that the return to the land was the beginning of redemption. Haredi non-Zionism. Agudat Yisrael, founded in 1912 at Kattowitz, organised Orthodox Jews who opposed the Zionist movement as a secular nationalism that put the nation in place of the Torah. Over time much of the Haredi world came to a practical accommodation with the state, taking part in its politics without granting it religious meaning. Haredi anti-Zionism. Some groups, notably the Satmar Hasidim founded by Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, and the small Neturei Karta, reject the state on principle, citing the Talmud's oaths: only the Messiah may restore Jewish sovereignty. Reform's reversal. Reform Judaism, which in 1885 renounced any return to Palestine, moved by 1937 to support a Jewish homeland, and today most Reform Jews are Zionists of a liberal kind. Today, for many Jews in the diaspora, a relationship with Israel, of support, criticism, or both, is part of Jewish identity; for others it is not central. Debates among Jews about Israel's policies are intense, and Jews hold the full range of views. This piece does not adjudicate them. Part 13 — Living it: the day, the week, the year, a life Judaism is above all a religion of practice. Its law, halakha ("the way of walking"), shapes ordinary time. The degree to which Jews keep it varies enormously, from Haredi families who observe every detail to secular Jews who light candles at Hanukkah and attend a Passover meal. What follows is the traditional pattern. A day An observant Jew wakes with a short prayer of thanks for the return of the soul. Men (and in liberal communities, women too) pray three times daily: Shacharit in the morning, Mincha in the afternoon and Ma'ariv in the evening, ideally with a minyan, a quorum of ten adults (traditionally ten men). At morning prayers they wrap themselves in a tallit, a fringed prayer shawl, and bind tefillin, small leather boxes containing handwritten verses, on the arm and the head, fulfilling the command to bind God's words "for a sign upon thy hand" (Deuteronomy 6:8). Two prayers anchor every service. The Shema, recited morning and evening, opens: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is One" (Deuteronomy 6:4). The Amidah, the "standing prayer" of praise, petition and thanks, is said silently, standing, facing Jerusalem. On the doorpost of a Jewish home hangs a mezuzah, a small case holding a parchment with the Shema, which many touch as they pass. What to eat The dietary laws, kashrut, come from the Torah and were developed by the rabbis. Land animals must chew the cud and have split hooves (Leviticus 11:3): cattle, sheep and goats, but not pigs or rabbits. Fish must have fins and scales (Leviticus 11:9): no shellfish. Animals must be slaughtered by a trained shochet in a prescribed way, and the blood removed. Meat and dairy are never mixed, an elaboration of a verse repeated three times in the Torah: "Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk" (Exodus 23:19). Observant kitchens keep separate dishes, and people wait hours after meat before eating dairy. The week: Shabbat The centre of the week is Shabbat, from just before sunset on Friday until nightfall, when three stars appear, on Saturday. The command is simple: "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour… but the seventh day is a sabbath unto the LORD thy God, in it thou shalt not do any manner of work" (Exodus 20:8–10). The rabbis defined "work" through 39 categories of creative labour, derived from the tasks used to build the Tabernacle in the wilderness: planting, cooking, writing, building, kindling a fire and so on. In modern practice, observant Jews do not drive, use electricity, handle money or use phones on Shabbat. What it feels like from inside is less a list of prohibitions than an island. Women traditionally light candles; the family blesses wine (kiddush) and two braided loaves (challah); there are long meals with songs and guests, synagogue services, study, walks and sleep. At the end, the Havdalah ceremony, with wine, spices and a braided candle, separates the holy day from the week. The theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, in The Sabbath (1951), argued that Judaism is a religion of time rather than space, and that the Sabbath is its way of making time holy. The year The Jewish calendar is lunar, adjusted to the solar year by adding a thirteenth month seven times in nineteen years, so the festivals stay in their seasons. Festival Hebrew date What it marks What people do Rosh Hashanah 1–2 Tishrei (Sept/Oct) New year; day of judgement The shofar (ram's horn) is blown; apples dipped in honey Yom Kippur 10 Tishrei Day of Atonement A 25-hour fast; a day in synagogue confessing and seeking forgiveness Sukkot From 15 Tishrei, seven days The wilderness journey; the harvest Meals in a sukkah, a temporary hut roofed with branches (Leviticus 23:42) Simchat Torah End of Sukkot Completing the yearly Torah reading Dancing with the Torah scrolls, then starting again at Genesis Hanukkah 25 Kislev, eight days (Dec) The Maccabees' rededication of the Temple Lighting the eight-branched menorah; fried foods Purim 14 Adar (Feb/Mar) The rescue told in the Book of Esther Reading the Megillah, costumes, gifts of food, charity Passover (Pesach) From 15 Nisan, seven or eight days (Mar/Apr) The Exodus from Egypt The Seder meal; no leavened bread; matzah Shavuot 6 Sivan (May/June) The giving of the Torah at Sinai All-night study; dairy foods Tisha B'Av 9 Av (July/Aug) Destruction of both Temples A fast; reading Lamentations The Passover Seder may be the most widely kept Jewish ritual of all. Around a table, families retell the Exodus from a book called the Haggadah, eat bitter herbs and unleavened bread, drink four cups of wine, and the youngest child asks four questions beginning "Why is this night different from all other nights?" The Torah itself anticipates the child: "when your children shall say unto you: What mean ye by this service?" (Exodus 12:26). The Seder is a lesson in how Judaism is transmitted: by questions, at home, from one generation to the next. A life Moment Ritual Birth A boy is circumcised on the eighth day at a brit milah and named; a girl is named in synagogue or at a celebration (simchat bat) Coming of age At 13 a boy becomes bar mitzvah, responsible for the commandments, and is called to read from the Torah; in Orthodox practice a girl becomes bat mitzvah at 12; liberal communities celebrate both at 13 Marriage Under a chuppah (canopy), the couple sign a ketubah (marriage contract), hear seven blessings, and the groom breaks a glass Death Quick burial in a plain shroud; seven days of mourning at home (shiva), when the community brings food and prays with the mourners; the mourner's Kaddish, a prayer praising God that never mentions death, recited for eleven months for a parent; the anniversary (yahrzeit) marked every year Conversion Study, acceptance of the commandments, and in traditional practice immersion in a ritual bath (mikveh) and, for men, circumcision; the different movements recognise one another's conversions only partly Who is a Jew? By traditional law, a Jew is anyone born to a Jewish mother or converted according to halakha. In 1983 the American Reform rabbinate declared that the child of one Jewish parent, mother or father, is presumed Jewish if raised as a Jew; Reconstructionists agree. Orthodox and Conservative Judaism hold to matrilineal descent. Because Judaism is both a religion and a people, many Jews who do not believe in God or keep the law are still fully Jewish in the eyes of the tradition and of themselves. Part 14 — Thinking it: God, law and ethics God At the root is the Shema's insistence that God is One, and that God is not part of nature but its creator. Beyond that, Jewish thought has ranged very widely. Maimonides taught a demanding rationalism: God has no body, no emotions, no attributes we can truly name; we come closest by saying what God is not. The Kabbalists described the same unknowable God as Ein Sof, overflowing into the sefirot, intimately involved with the world. Martin Buber (1878–1965), in I and Thou (1923), described God as the "eternal Thou" met in real, mutual encounter, between people and between a person and the world, rather than as an object of theory. Heschel, in books such as The Prophets and God in Search of Man, described the God of the Bible as one who cares about, and is moved by, what humans do: not the unmoved mover of the philosophers but a God who seeks out humanity. Mordecai Kaplan reinterpreted God naturalistically, as the power that makes for human fulfilment and goodness. Baruch Spinoza (died 1677), excommunicated by the Amsterdam Portuguese community on 27 July 1656, identified God with nature. He is not a Jewish religious thinker in any traditional sense, but every modern Jewish philosophy has had to answer him. Jewish tradition has generally cared less about precise doctrine than about practice. Maimonides' thirteen principles are the closest thing to a creed, and even they have been debated by Jewish thinkers for eight centuries. Law Halakha is the heart of rabbinic Judaism. The rabbis counted 613 commandments in the Torah, 248 positive and 365 negative (a teaching of Rabbi Simlai, Babylonian Talmud Makkot 23b). The law grows by interpretation: the Mishnah, the Talmud, the codes of Maimonides and Karo, and an unbroken stream of responsa, rabbis' written answers to new questions, which today cover organ transplants, electricity on the Sabbath, IVF and artificial intelligence. Two principles pull against each other, and much of modern Jewish history is about their balance. The Torah warns: "Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish from it" (Deuteronomy 4:2). Yet the Torah also says the law "is not in heaven" (Deuteronomy 30:12), and the rabbis read that as giving human interpreters real authority. Orthodox Judaism stresses continuity and the authority of past codes; Conservative Judaism stresses continuity with historical development; Reform stresses ethical principle and individual conscience. Ethics Jewish ethics begins with the claim that every human being is made "in the image of God" (Genesis 1:27). From that come some of the most quoted lines in the world's moral literature: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" (Leviticus 19:18). "The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Leviticus 19:34). The Talmud counts thirty-six places, some say forty-six, where the Torah warns against wronging the ger, the stranger or convert (Bava Metzia 59b). "Justice, justice shalt thou follow" (Deuteronomy 16:20). The Mishnah's teaching that humanity began with a single person to teach that whoever destroys one life is as if they destroyed a whole world, and whoever saves one life as if they saved a whole world (Sanhedrin 4:5). Manuscripts differ on whether the text says "a life" or "a life of Israel"; the universal reading is the one most often quoted today, including by Yad Vashem. Hillel: "If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am for my own self only, what am I? And if not now, when?" (Pirkei Avot 1:14). Rabbi Tarfon: "It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to neglect it" (Pirkei Avot 2:16). Charity in Judaism is tzedakah, a word that means justice: giving to the poor is not generosity but obligation. Maimonides ranked eight levels of giving, the highest being to help someone become self-supporting. In the 20th century, Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), a French philosopher shaped by the Talmud and by the Holocaust, argued that ethics is "first philosophy": the face of another person makes a claim on us before any theory does. "Justice, justice shalt thou follow." The rabbis asked why the word is repeated. One answer: even the means of pursuing justice must be just. Part 15 — Antisemitism: what it is and how it has changed Antisemitism is, in the simplest definition, hatred of or prejudice against Jews. That is how the USHMM defines it. It has taken different forms in different ages, and historians usually distinguish several layers that build on one another. Forms through history Form When it flourished Core idea Religious anti-Judaism From late antiquity, especially in medieval Christendom Jews as rejecters and killers of Christ; myths such as the blood libel and well-poisoning Economic and social stereotypes Medieval and early modern Europe Jews as moneylenders, exploiters, outsiders; often a product of laws that barred Jews from other trades Racial antisemitism From the 19th century Jews as a biologically distinct and harmful race, whom no conversion could change; the ideology of Nazism Conspiracy antisemitism From the late 19th century Jews as a secret power controlling finance, media or governments; spread by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery first published in Russia in 1903 Contemporary debates 20th–21st centuries Holocaust denial; and contested questions about when hostility to Israel or Zionism becomes hostility to Jews The word itself is modern. Antisemitismus first appeared in print in Germany in 1879, a scientific-sounding term for plain Jew-hatred. It was popularised by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, who that year published a pamphlet claiming that Jews and Germans were locked in a racial struggle and founded a "League of Antisemites". (Many scholars and institutions now prefer the unhyphenated spelling "antisemitism", because there is no "Semitism" for it to oppose.) The definition debate How to define antisemitism today, especially in relation to Israel, is itself one of the most contested questions in public life, and fair-minded people disagree. The IHRA working definition, a non-legally-binding definition adopted by the plenary of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental body, on 26 May 2016, pairs a short core definition with eleven illustrative examples, seven of which mention Israel; they include denying the Jewish people's right to self-determination and holding all Jews collectively responsible for the actions of Israel. The European Parliament and many national and other bodies have since adopted it, not all of them with the examples. Supporters argue that it captures how antisemitism actually works today. Critics, including legal scholars and Kenneth Stern, who contributed to the original draft, argue that its examples can be used to chill legitimate criticism of Israeli policy. In March 2021 a group of about 200 scholars issued the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which defines antisemitism as "discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)" and offers its own guidance on where criticism of Israel or Zionism does and does not cross that line. Its critics, in turn, argue that it is too permissive. Both sides agree that antisemitism is real and that criticism of a government's policies is not in itself antisemitic. They disagree about where the boundary lies and who should draw it. That disagreement is live, and this piece does not settle it. Part 16 — Judaism today: numbers and open questions How many Jews? Counting Jews depends on definitions: by religion or by identity, by mother or by either parent, by self-description or by law. Every number below should be read with its source and date. Measure Figure Source and date World Jewish population 14.8 million (about 0.2 percent of humanity) Pew Research Center, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020 (June 2025) World "core" Jewish population 15,166,200 Sergio DellaPergola, American Jewish Year Book, estimate for 1 January 2021 (Berman Jewish DataBank) World Jewish population, 2026 compilation About 16.8 million, 45.5 percent of them in Israel Jewish Virtual Library, compiling Israeli government figures (2026) Israel: "Jews and others" 7.828 million of 10.305 million residents Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, provisional estimate for Rosh Hashanah 2026, via Jewish Virtual Library United States 7.5 million (5.8 million adults, 1.8 million children) by Pew's broad definition; about 6.0–6.3 million by DellaPergola's "core" count Pew, Jewish Americans in 2020 (May 2021); DellaPergola (2021); Jewish Virtual Library (2024) Next largest communities France about 438,500; Canada about 400,000; UK about 313,000; Argentina about 170,000 Jewish Virtual Library, 2024 The pattern is clear even if the totals differ by a million or two: about four in five of the world's Jews live in Israel or the United States; Europe's share, once the majority of world Jewry, is now small; and almost all of the world's growth comes from Israel and from Orthodox, especially Haredi, communities with high birth rates. How Jews identify In the United States, Pew's 2020 survey found that 37 percent of Jewish adults identified with Reform, 17 percent with Conservative, 9 percent with Orthodox and about 4 percent with smaller movements such as Reconstructionist and Humanistic Judaism, while 32 percent identified with no particular branch. The young are more polarised: among Jews aged 18 to 29, 17 percent were Orthodox, compared with 3 percent of those 65 and older. In Israel, Jews describe themselves differently. Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics reported for 2026 that among Jewish Israelis aged 20 and over, 39.6 percent described themselves as secular or non-religious, 21.8 percent as traditional but not very religious, 14.0 percent as traditional-religious, 12.4 percent as religious and 11.5 percent as Haredi. (Pew's 2016 survey, Israel's Religiously Divided Society, used four categories: 49 percent hiloni or secular, 29 percent masorti or traditional, 13 percent dati or religious, and 9 percent Haredi.) Open questions Judaism has never had a pope or a single council, and its great arguments are still open. Who is a Jew? Matrilineal or either parent; whose conversions count; and in Israel, where the Orthodox rabbinate controls marriage and conversion for Jews, the question has legal force. Women's roles. Liberal movements ordain women as rabbis; Orthodoxy does not, though some Modern Orthodox communities have created new roles for women as scholars and spiritual leaders, a development that is itself debated. Sexuality. Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism ordain LGBTQ rabbis; Conservative Judaism admitted openly gay rabbinical students from 2006; Orthodox communities are divided about how to welcome LGBTQ Jews within halakha. Intermarriage and continuity. In the diaspora, many Jews marry non-Jews. Some see a threat to continuity; others see a chance to welcome new families. The Haredi future. Haredi communities are growing rapidly. How they relate to the wider society, to work, to secular education and, in Israel, to military service is one of the biggest questions for Jewish life in the coming decades. Israel and the diaspora. How diaspora Jews relate to Israel, and to arguments over its policies, divides families and communities. Belief and belonging. Many Jews are deeply attached to Jewish peoplehood, culture and memory without believing in God. Whether Judaism can remain one people with such different understandings of itself is perhaps the oldest open question of all, and so far the answer has been yes. The takeaway Judaism is both a religion and a people. Its tradition tells of a covenant made with Abraham and at Sinai, carried by a Written and an Oral Torah; historians describe a scripture that took its final shape around the Persian period from older sources, and a people whose identity was forged in exile. After Rome destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, the rabbis rebuilt Judaism around prayer, study and the home, and recorded their arguments, minority opinions included, in the Mishnah and Talmud. Over two thousand years, through Babylon, Spain, France and Poland, through expulsions, the Kabbalah, Hasidism and the Enlightenment, the conversation continued and divided into modern movements. The Holocaust murdered six million Jews and changed Jewish thought for ever; Zionism divided Jews religiously as well as politically. Today about fifteen to seventeen million Jews, mostly in Israel and the United States, still keep the Sabbath, eat at the Seder, argue over the law, and disagree about what it means to be Jewish, as their tradition has always encouraged them to do. Try this: read one page of a Jewish argument. On Sefaria, a free online library of Jewish texts, open Pirkei Avot ("Ethics of the Fathers"), the most widely read tractate of the Mishnah, and read chapter 1. Pick one saying you agree with and one you would argue with. Write down your objection. You will have done what Jewish students have done with the same text for eighteen centuries. Sources & Further Reading Sources - Biblical quotations: The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text: A New Translation (Jewish Publication Society, 1917), via Sefaria. Rabbinic passages (Shabbat 31a, Eruvin 13b, Bava Metzia 59a–b, Makkot 23b, Ketubot 111a, Pirkei Avot 1:1, 1:14, 2:16, Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5) checked against the texts on Sefaria and given in this piece's own translation. - Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18.1.2–6, trans. William Whiston, via the Perseus Digital Library. - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on Maimonides, Saadya, Judah Halevi, Moses Mendelssohn, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas and Spinoza. - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia: "Introduction to the Holocaust", "Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution", "Kristallnacht", "Nuremberg Race Laws", "Wannsee Conference and the 'Final Solution'", "Auschwitz", "Einsatzgruppen" (consulted 31 October 2026). - Pew Research Center, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020 (9 June 2025); Jewish Americans in 2020 (11 May 2021); Israel's Religiously Divided Society (8 March 2016). - Sergio DellaPergola, "World Jewish Population, 2021", American Jewish Year Book, via the Berman Jewish DataBank. - Jewish Virtual Library, "Vital Statistics: Jewish Population of the World" and "Latest Population Statistics for Israel" (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics figures for Rosh Hashanah 2026); "The Pittsburgh Platform". - Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021), text of the definition. - Wikipedia articles consulted as leads, with the scholarship they cite, on the documentary hypothesis, historicity of the Bible, the Merneptah, Tel Dan and Mesha stelae, Khirbet Qeiyafa, the Elephantine papyri, the Cyrus Cylinder, the Babylonian exile, the Second Temple, the Maccabean revolt, the Septuagint, the siege of 70 CE, the Bar Kokhba revolt, Yohanan ben Zakkai, the Mishnah, the Talmud, Daniel Bomberg, Rashi, Maimonides, the Shulchan Aruch, the Zohar, Isaac Luria, Sabbatai Zevi, the Baal Shem Tov, the Vilna Gaon, the Haskalah, Jewish emancipation, the Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Orthodox, Haredi and Humanistic movements, Samson Raphael Hirsch, Moses Sofer, Zecharias Frankel, Abraham Geiger, Mordecai Kaplan, Judith Kaplan Eisenstein, Regina Jonas, Sally Priesand, the Rhineland massacres, the blood libel, Lateran IV, the English and Spanish expulsions, the Venetian Ghetto, the Khmelnytsky uprising, the Kishinev pogrom, Wilhelm Marr, the Protocols, Herzl, the First Zionist Congress, Rabbi Kook, Agudat Yisrael, Satmar, the Three Oaths, Fackenheim, Rubenstein, Berkovits, Heschel, the Righteous Among the Nations, the IHRA definition, and Who is a Jew?. Go deeper - 📘 The Story of the Jews (two volumes) — Simon Schama (a vivid, humane narrative history from ancient Egypt to 1900; companion to his BBC series) - 📘 Judaism: A Very Short Introduction — Norman Solomon (the clearest short account of belief, practice and the modern movements) - 📘 The Essential Talmud — Adin Steinsaltz (how the Talmud works, by the scholar who translated it for a modern audience) - 📘 God in Search of Man — Abraham Joshua Heschel (the great modern statement of Jewish theology, written for readers of any faith) - 📘 The Bible Unearthed — Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (the archaeological case for a later, smaller history; read it with William Dever's What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? for the counter-argument) - 🌐 Sefaria (a free library of Jewish texts in Hebrew and English, with the JPS 1917 Bible, the Mishnah and the Talmud) - 🌐 USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia (authoritative, sourced articles on every aspect of the Holocaust) - 🌐 Companion pieces in this library: The World's Religions, One Page Each, How the Sacred Texts Were Written, Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It, and the Religions long read Zoroastrianism: The Ancient Faith of Iran and the Ideas It Gave the World Step 14. Zoroastrianism: The Ancient Faith of Iran and the Ideas It Gave the World ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: Zoroastrianism. A prophet no one can date, hymns older than writing in Iran, three empires, a long decline, a refuge in India, and a community of perhaps 120,000 people still arguing about how to survive. Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each and How the Sacred Texts Were Written. Companion pieces: the Religions long reads on Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the Histories long read on Iran. In Udvada, a small coastal town in Gujarat about 200 kilometres north of Mumbai, there is a fire that, by its community's tradition, has not gone out in well over a thousand years. Priests in white feed it sandalwood five times a day, at the five watches into which Zoroastrians divide the day and night. Pilgrims come from across India and Pakistan and from the diaspora to stand before it. If you are not a Zoroastrian you will not see it: in India, non-Zoroastrians are not allowed into any room from which the sacred fire can be seen. The fire is called the Iranshah, "King of Iran". The name is the whole story in two words. The people who tend it, the Parsis ("Persians"), descend from Zoroastrians who left Iran after the Arab conquest of the 7th century. Their religion had been the faith of three Persian empires. Its prophet taught, perhaps three thousand years ago, that the world is a battleground between truth and the lie, that every person must choose a side, and that history will end with good's victory, the dead raised and the world made new. Those ideas, many scholars argue, travelled into Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Other scholars think the case is overstated. Either way, the religion that may have helped teach half of humanity to think about heaven, hell and a last judgement now has fewer members than a mid-sized town. This long read tells that story: what Zoroastrians believe and do, how their scripture survived, what historians can and cannot say about their prophet, the much-debated question of their influence, and the hard choices facing the community in 2026. A note on approach: this piece describes Zoroastrian belief in its own terms and sets the tradition's account beside what historians and philologists say, without ranking either. Zoroastrians themselves disagree on many points here, especially between traditionalists and reformists, and both are described. In this long read The prophet nobody can date The Gathas and the Avesta: a scripture carried in memory What Zoroastrians believe: one Wise Lord, truth and the lie, and the choice Empire: the Achaemenid question (c. 550–330 BCE) The Sasanian state church (224–651 CE) Fire, purity and prayer: what Zoroastrians actually do The end of days Did Zoroastrianism shape Judaism, Christianity and Islam? Conquest and the long decline in Iran (from 636 CE) The Parsis of India, and the Iranis The Towers of Silence and the vanishing vultures Zoroastrians today: numbers, conversion and the future Part 1 — The prophet nobody can date The prophet's name in his own language was probably Zarathushtra. The Greeks, who had heard of him by the 5th century BCE, called him Zoroastres, and that became "Zoroaster" in Latin and English; Nietzsche brought the older form back into fashion. The name most likely contains the old Iranian word for camel, and is usually explained as "he who manages camels", though linguists have proposed other readings. The tradition's account Zoroastrian tradition, drawn from the Avesta and from much later Middle Persian books, tells a full life. Zarathushtra was born into the Spitama family, the son of Pourushaspa ("possessing grey horses") and Dughdova ("milkmaid"). He trained as a priest from childhood. At about thirty, at a spring festival, he went to a river at dawn and there met a shining being who revealed himself as Vohu Manah, "Good Mind", and led him into the presence of Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord. From that vision came his teaching: there are two primal spirits, one good and one destructive, and humans must choose between them. For years few listened, and the priests of the old religion opposed him. At about forty-two he won over a ruler named Vishtaspa and his queen, Hutaosa, and with royal protection a community grew. Tradition gives him three wives and six children and says he died at seventy-seven. Several accounts say he was murdered at an altar by a priest of the old religion; others say he died of old age. What historians can say Very little, with confidence. The only texts that may come from him are the Gathas, seventeen hymns preserved inside a later liturgy, and they are poems addressed to God, not a biography. Even his historical existence is not beyond question: some leading specialists, notably Jean Kellens and Prods Oktor Skjærvø, read the Gathas as ritual poetry and doubt that they let us recover an individual author at all. Most scholars still assume a real prophet-poet behind them. The date is the famous problem. The Avesta itself gives no date, and the other evidence pulls in opposite directions. Source or argument Date it implies What to make of it Greek writers (Xanthus, Eudoxus, Aristotle, as reported later) 6,000 years before Xerxes' invasion of Greece (480 BCE), or before Plato Almost certainly a garbled version of Zoroastrian cosmic time cycles, not a historical date Zoroastrian tradition in the Middle Persian Bundahishn "258 years before Alexander", so the 6th century BCE Probably a calculation by later priests counting back generations; Mary Boyce judged it artificial Some modern scholars ("late date") 7th–6th century BCE Tries to link Vishtaspa with Hystaspes, the father of Darius I; but the Avesta never mentions Persians, Medes or any Achaemenid king Most modern scholars ("early date") Roughly 1500–1000 BCE, most often around 1000 BCE Based on language and society: Old Avestan is very close to the Sanskrit of the Rigveda, and the Gathas describe a world of herders and priests with no cities or empires The early date rests mainly on language. The Gathas' Old Avestan is so close to the Vedic Sanskrit of India's Rigveda that, for many linguists, the two cannot have been composed many centuries apart. Mary Boyce, the most influential 20th-century historian of the religion, put him somewhere between 1700 and 1000 BCE. The Encyclopaedia Iranica's general survey (by William Malandra, 2005) put it bluntly: the dating controversy has been a long-standing embarrassment, and if anything like a consensus exists, it is "ca. 1000 BCE give or take a century or so". Bruce Lincoln wrote in 1991 that the majority opinion inclined towards the end of the second millennium or the beginning of the first. The honest summary: probably around 1000 BCE, possibly several centuries earlier, and almost certainly not as late as the Persian Empire. Where he lived is uncertain too. The places named in the Avesta are in eastern Iran and Central Asia, and the texts never mention the western Iranian peoples, the Medes and Persians. The Iranica survey concluded that there is general agreement he did not live in western Iran, while attempts to pin him to one region of the east, such as Bactria (in today's Afghanistan), Sistan or Chorasmia, "remain tentative". Part 2 — The Gathas and the Avesta: a scripture carried in memory Zoroastrian scripture is called the Avesta. It is written in Avestan, an ancient Iranian language known from no other source, which survives in two stages: Old Avestan, the language of the Gathas and a few prayers, and Young Avestan, the language of everything else, which is several centuries later. The Gathas The Gathas are the heart of it. There are five, divided into seventeen hymns, with 238 stanzas in all, and they sit inside the long liturgy called the Yasna: Gatha Where it sits in the Yasna Ahunavaiti Yasna 28–34 Ushtavaiti Yasna 43–46 Spenta Mainyu Yasna 47–50 Vohu Khshathra Yasna 51 Vahishtoishti Yasna 53 Between the first and second Gathas sits the Yasna Haptanghaiti, the "Yasna of seven chapters" (Yasna 35–41), in the same archaic language and probably nearly as old. Each Gatha has its own metre, and the poetry is dense, allusive and notoriously hard. Translations disagree widely, sometimes on the basic sense of a stanza, because Old Avestan survives in so few texts. That is one reason modern Zoroastrians can read the same hymns as stern ritual poetry or as a pure philosophical monotheism. The rest of the Avesta The Young Avestan texts include: The Yasna, the main liturgy, recited at the central ceremony (72 chapters, with the Gathas embedded in it). The Visperad, an extension of the Yasna for festivals. The Vendidad (Videvdad, "the law against the demons"), a priestly code of purity, pollution and penance, including the rules for disposing of the dead. Some reformist Zoroastrians reject its authority; traditionalists defend it. The Yashts, hymns to individual divine beings such as Mithra and the river goddess Anahita, full of old myths. The Khordeh Avesta, the "Little Avesta", the prayer book that ordinary Zoroastrians use. How it survived For most of its history the Avesta lived in memory. Priests learned the texts by heart and recited them in ritual, as Indian priests did the Vedas. It was written down only around the 5th or 6th century CE, under the Sasanian dynasty, using a new alphabet invented for the purpose, with far more letters than the Middle Persian script so that the sounds of the sacred recitation could be recorded exactly. The tradition remembers a much larger book. According to Middle Persian texts, the full Avesta had twenty-one nasks ("books"), which Zarathushtra brought to Vishtaspa, and two master copies were kept until Alexander the Great burned one and scattered the other. Historians treat that story with caution: there is no evidence that a written Avesta existed in Achaemenid times, and the legend may reflect later priests' bitterness towards the Greek conqueror. What is clear is that the Sasanian edition was itself largely lost after the Arab conquest. The 9th- and 10th-century Zoroastrian commentators quote Avestan passages, and only about a quarter of the verses they cite can be found in what survives. The oldest surviving Avestan manuscript dates from 1323 CE. Alongside the Avesta stand the Pahlavi books, works in Middle Persian written or revised mainly in the 9th and 10th centuries, after the conquest: the Denkard, an encyclopedia of the faith; the Bundahishn, on creation; the Arda Viraf Namag, a tour of heaven and hell. They are essential for understanding the developed religion, and they are also a problem for historians, because they were written down more than a thousand years after the Gathas. Their authority is itself a live question: traditionalist Parsis value them highly, while many Iranian and reformist Zoroastrians stress the Gathas alone. A religion whose oldest hymns may be three thousand years old reached writing only in late antiquity, and its oldest surviving manuscript is younger than Dante. Part 3 — What Zoroastrians believe: one Wise Lord, truth and the lie, and the choice Ahura Mazda At the centre is Ahura Mazda, "the Wise Lord": uncreated, wholly good, the creator of the world and of all that is good in it. In the Gathas, Zarathushtra addresses him directly, asking questions and seeking reassurance, in a tone that can feel startlingly personal. In Yasna 44 he asks a run of questions: who set the sun and stars on their paths, who holds up the earth and keeps the sky from falling, who made the waters and the plants. The implied answer is always the same: you, Wise Lord. Truth and the lie The moral world turns on two words. Asha (in Old Persian, arta) means truth, right order, the way things ought to be: cosmic order and moral rightness at once. Its opposite is druj, "the lie", deception and disorder. Asha is the single most frequent concept in the Gathas, appearing 157 times in their 238 stanzas. The two spirits and the choice The most quoted passage in Zoroastrian scripture is Yasna 30, where the prophet tells his hearers that at the beginning there were two spirits, twins, one better and one bad in thought, word and deed, and that between them the wise choose rightly and the foolish do not (Yasna 30.3, paraphrased). The good spirit is Spenta Mainyu, the "bounteous" or "holy" spirit; its opponent is Angra Mainyu, the destructive spirit, later known as Ahriman. Everything follows from that choice. Evil is not part of God's creation and is not God's will. Human beings are free, and their choices matter cosmically: every good thought, word and deed strengthens the good creation, every evil one strengthens the lie. That is why the religion's best-known formula, recited daily, is three words: humata, hukhta, hvarshta, good thoughts, good words, good deeds. The Amesha Spentas Around Ahura Mazda stand the Amesha Spentas, the "bounteous immortals": aspects or emanations of God, each a quality to cultivate and, in later tradition, each the guardian of one part of creation. Amesha Spenta Meaning Guardian of (in later texts) Its name lives on as the Iranian month… Spenta Mainyu Bounteous Spirit Humans — Vohu Manah Good Mind Cattle and animals Bahman Asha Vahishta Best Truth Fire Ordibehesht Khshathra Vairya Desirable Dominion Metals Shahrivar Spenta Armaiti Holy Devotion Earth Esfand Haurvatat Wholeness Water Khordad Ameretat Immortality Plants Mordad That last column is a small sign of how deep the religion runs in Iranian culture: the official calendar of the Islamic Republic of Iran uses the month names of the Zoroastrian calendar, so every Iranian date carries old Zoroastrian divine names. Below them are many yazatas, "beings worthy of worship", including Mithra, god of contracts and light, and Anahita, goddess of the waters. Monotheism, dualism, or something else? Is Zoroastrianism monotheistic? The question sounds simple and is one of the most argued in the field. The monotheist reading, held by most Zoroastrians today, says there is one God, Ahura Mazda; the Amesha Spentas are his aspects, the yazatas something like angels, and evil a destructive force with no creative power of its own. This reading was sharpened in the 19th century, when Scottish missionaries in Bombay, led by John Wilson, attacked the Parsis as dualists and polytheists, and the German scholar Martin Haug (1862) argued that Zarathushtra's original teaching in the Gathas had been a pure monotheism, later corrupted. Parsi reformers took up Haug's reading eagerly. The dualist reading stresses that evil in Zoroastrianism is real, independent and not created by God, which sets it apart from Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Some scholars call it "ethical dualism": one good God facing a real but ultimately doomed adversary. Many specialists now think both labels distort it. Skjærvø has described it as dualistic and polytheistic but with one supreme god, the father of the ordered cosmos; Almut Hintze and Kellens have argued that forcing the faith into Judeo-Christian categories hides what is distinctive about it. Zoroastrians themselves are divided between traditionalists (mostly Parsis), who honour the whole inherited tradition including the Pahlavi books and the Vendidad, and reformists, who centre the Gathas and are more open to change, including on conversion. Part 4 — Empire: the Achaemenid question (c. 550–330 BCE) When Cyrus the Great united the Medes and Persians around 550 BCE and built the largest empire the world had yet seen, was it a Zoroastrian empire? Scholars still argue. The case for. Darius I (ruled 522–486 BCE) begins his great inscription at Behistun by declaring that he is king by the favour of Ahuramazda, who granted him the kingdom, and he invokes Ahuramazda again and again. He presents the rebels he defeated as servants of "the lie", the evil the Gathas call druj, and his son Xerxes recorded that, by the favour of Ahura Mazda, he destroyed a sanctuary of the daivas and proclaimed that they must not be worshipped. Daeva is the very word the Gathas use for false gods. And the father of Darius was himself called Vishtaspa (Hystaspes), the name of the prophet's patron. The case against. No Achaemenid inscription ever mentions Zarathushtra. Worship of Ahura Mazda is not proof of Zoroastrianism, since he may have been honoured in Iran before or apart from the prophet's reform. The kings were buried in rock-cut tombs at Naqsh-e Rustam and Pasargadae, which seems to break the later rule that corpses must not touch earth. And the Greek historian Herodotus, writing around 440 BCE, describes Persian religion without naming the prophet: the Persians, he says, set up no statues, temples or altars, and think those who do so foolish; they sacrifice on mountaintops to the whole circle of the sky, and to the sun, moon, earth, fire, water and winds (Histories 1.131). Herodotus adds a detail that rings true to later practice. The bodies of Persians, he says, are not buried until a bird or a dog has torn them; this is certainly the way of the Magi, who make no secret of it, while other Persians coat the body in wax before burying it (Histories 1.140, Godley translation, 1920). The Magi were a Median priestly tribe, and they became the priests of the religion. Their name survives in a surprising place: through Greek magos and Latin magus, it is the root of the English word magic. And it is Magi, "wise men from the east", who come to Bethlehem in the Gospel of Matthew (2:1). Evidence Points towards Problem Darius invokes Ahuramazda; condemns "the lie" Zoroastrian kings Ahura Mazda worship may predate or extend beyond Zarathushtra's community Xerxes suppresses daiva worship Zoroastrian reform ideas Could be royal policy using shared Iranian vocabulary No royal text names Zarathushtra Not (or not yet) Zoroastrian Silence is not denial Rock-cut royal tombs Not following later purity rules The rules may have developed later Magi expose the dead (Herodotus) Recognisably Zoroastrian practice among priests Practised by priests, not yet by everyone Most historians settle on something in between: by the Achaemenid period, a Zoroastrian form of Iranian religion had reached western Iran and the court, and it became a defining element of Persian culture, without yet being the codified, exclusive state religion it later became. What the Achaemenids are most remembered for in religious history is not their own faith but their tolerance of others. Cyrus allowed the exiled Judeans in Babylon to return home and rebuild their temple, and the Hebrew Bible remembers him, uniquely for a foreign king, as God's "anointed" (Isaiah 45:1). That meeting of Persians and Jews is where the debate in Part 8 begins. After Alexander destroyed the Achaemenid Empire in 330 BCE, Greek kings ruled Iran for a time. The Parthians (247 BCE–224 CE), an Iranian dynasty from the north-east, revived Iranian traditions, and Zoroastrian tradition credits one Parthian king, Valakhsh (probably a Vologases), with first trying to gather the scattered sacred texts. But the religion's great age of organisation came with the next dynasty. Part 5 — The Sasanian state church (224–651 CE) In 224 CE Ardashir, a ruler from Pars (Fars, the Persian homeland in south-west Iran), overthrew the Parthians and founded the Sasanian Empire, which for four centuries rivalled Rome and then Byzantium. The Sasanians made Zoroastrianism something it had perhaps never been before: an organised state church with a hierarchy, a fixed canon and the power to enforce orthodoxy. Kartir: the priest who carved his own story in stone The most vivid figure of this process is Kartir, a priest who served four kings in the 3rd century and rose to be the empire's chief religious authority. Unusually for a priest, he had his own inscriptions carved in rock, including one on the tower called the Ka'ba-ye Zartosht near Persepolis. In them he claims to have founded fire temples across the empire, appointed priests, and "struck down" the followers of other religions: Jews, Christians, Mandaeans, Buddhists and the followers of Mani, the prophet of Manichaeism, who died in prison under Bahram I in the 270s. Historians read Kartir with care. As the historian Parvaneh Pourshariati has noted, it is not clear how far his declarations reflect what actually happened; Jewish and Christian sources of the time do not mention a persecution. Several Sasanian kings before and after were tolerant, and some Christians, especially the Church of the East, found long periods of favour. The Babylonian Talmud, one of Judaism's two great foundational works, was largely composed by rabbis living under Sasanian rule, and modern scholars have found traces of Persian law and culture in it. Zurvan and Mazdak Two movements show how much argument the state church contained. Zurvanism taught that behind both Ahura Mazda and Ahriman stood Zurvan, infinite Time, who fathered them as twins. Some scholars think it was the favoured theology of parts of the Sasanian court; others see it as one current among several. Orthodox Zoroastrians came to reject it, because it made good and evil equal brothers and put a neutral principle above the Wise Lord. Mazdak, a reforming priest of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, preached a radical egalitarianism, including the sharing of property, and won the backing of King Kavad I for a time, until Kavad's son Khosrow, later Khosrow I, crushed the movement and had its leaders killed. What the state church built The Sasanian centuries gave the religion much of the shape it still has: the written Avesta in its new alphabet; the grades of sacred fire; the great royal fire temples; a calendar of festivals; a system of law on purity, marriage and inheritance; and a society formally divided into ranked estates of priests, warriors, commoners and artisans. Much of what we know of it comes from the Pahlavi books written soon after the empire fell, which look back on it as a golden age. The Sasanian Empire gave Zoroastrianism its canon, its clergy and its power. When the empire fell, the religion lost its protector at a stroke. Part 6 — Fire, purity and prayer: what Zoroastrians actually do Outsiders often call Zoroastrians "fire worshippers". Zoroastrians reject the phrase. Fire is not God; it is the purest of Ahura Mazda's creations, the visible sign of truth and light, the presence before which one prays. Zoroastrians also pray facing the sun, the moon or a lamp. A day A devout Zoroastrian's day is framed by the kusti ritual. Every Zoroastrian who has been initiated wears two sacred garments: the sudreh (sedreh), a white cotton undershirt, and the kusti, a long cord of 72 fine white woollen threads, one for each chapter of the Yasna, wound three times around the waist and knotted at front and back. Each morning, after washing and before prayers, and again at other times of prayer through the day, the believer unties and reties the kusti while reciting short prayers, facing a source of light. The ritual takes a few minutes. It is a small daily renewal of the choice in Yasna 30: rejecting the destructive spirit and re-binding oneself to the good. The day is divided into five gahs, watches of prayer, from sunrise to the dead of night. The most loved prayers are short and, for most believers, recited in Avestan whether or not they understand every word: the Ashem Vohu, praising asha, and the Ahuna Vairya (Yatha Ahu Vairyo), the holiest prayer of all, which may originally have been the opening stanza of the first Gatha. Fire temples A fire temple houses one of three grades of sacred fire: Grade What it takes Where Atash Dadgah A hearth fire consecrated in a few hours by two priests Any temple; also used for everyday rituals Atash Adaran ("fire of fires") A consecration by eight priests lasting two to three weeks Many temples in India and Iran Atash Behram ("fire of victory") Sixteen different fires, including one from lightning and one from a cremation pyre, each purified many times; consecration can take about a year and many priests Eight in India (four in Mumbai, two in Surat, one each in Navsari and Udvada), one in Iran (Yazd) The highest-grade fires must never go out. Priests tend them five times a day in a ceremony called the boi, offering sandalwood and reciting prayers. The great ceremony The central ritual is the Yasna, a long liturgy performed by priests in an inner ritual space, in which the whole Yasna text is recited and a drink called haoma (the Iranian counterpart of the Vedic soma) is prepared and consecrated. Only fully qualified priests can perform it. Priests Zoroastrian priesthood is hereditary. In India, priests come from priestly families (the athornan) and are men. An ervad has completed the first stage of initiation; a mobed can perform the higher ceremonies; a dastur is a senior high priest. In 2011, the council of priests in Tehran announced that women had been certified, for the first time, as mobedyar, assistant priests able to perform some ceremonies, in Iran and North America. Indian traditionalists have not followed. Rites of life Navjote (in India) or sedreh-pushi (in Iran): the initiation, typically between about seven and twelve, at which a child, having learned the daily prayers, puts on the sudreh and kusti and performs the kusti ritual for the first time. Many Zoroastrians describe it as the moment the child chooses the faith for themselves. Marriage, celebrated with Indian and Iranian customs that vary by community. Death, with purity rules strict enough to have their own Part 11. Purity Behind much of the practice lies the idea of purity. Death, decay and disease are the work of the destructive spirit; the good creations, above all fire, water and earth, must be protected from them. A corpse is the most powerful source of pollution, which is why it must not be burned (polluting fire), buried (polluting earth) or put in water. Some reformists see these rules as ancient public hygiene; traditionalists see them as sacred law. The year The calendar's great feasts are the six gahambars, seasonal festivals once tied to the farming year and marked by communal meals, and Nowruz, the new year at the spring equinox. Nowruz has long since outgrown its Zoroastrian roots: it is celebrated, mostly as a secular holiday, by many millions of people of every faith from the Balkans to Central Asia, and it remains a holy day for Zoroastrians. At the last festival of the old year the fravashis, the guardian spirits of the dead, are believed to return to their old homes, and they are welcomed with prayers and offerings. Part 7 — The end of days Zoroastrianism has a fully worked-out account of what happens after death and at the end of time. Its outline appears in the Gathas, which speak of a bridge, of reward and punishment, and of a final "making wonderful"; the full drama is spelled out in the Pahlavi books of the 9th and 10th centuries. The individual: the Chinvat Bridge After death, the soul comes to the Chinvat Bridge, the "bridge of the separator". There its deeds are weighed by divine judges, Mithra, Sraosha and Rashnu. The soul then meets its own conscience, its daena, in human form. For the righteous she is a beautiful young woman, sweet-smelling, who leads the soul across a bridge that widens to let it pass into the House of Song. For the wicked she is a foul old hag, and the bridge narrows to a blade's edge, so that the soul falls into the House of the Lie. Those whose good and evil deeds are exactly balanced wait in a neutral place, Hamistagan. Two features stand out. The judgement is purely on one's own thoughts, words and deeds; no one else can save you. And hell is not eternal. Its punishments are real but temporary, a purgation rather than a final destination. Some modern Zoroastrians read the bridge itself as a picture of the choices one makes in life rather than a physical place. The world: the renovation History, in the developed tradition, runs in great cycles of 3,000 years. In the last age, as evil makes its final assault, three saviours called Saoshyants will be born, one every thousand years, each conceived miraculously from the seed of Zarathushtra preserved in a lake. The last Saoshyant will raise the dead. Then comes the final judgement: all humanity must pass through a river of molten metal, which to the righteous will feel like warm milk and which will purify everyone else. Evil will be defeated for ever; the mountains will be levelled, the world made perfect, and all humanity will live forever with Ahura Mazda in body and soul. The word for this is frashokereti, the "making wonderful" of the world. Idea In Zoroastrianism Also found in Judgement of each soul after death Chinvat Bridge Later Judaism, Christianity, Islam (Islamic tradition has its own narrow bridge over hell, the sirat, which many scholars compare to the Chinvat) Heaven and hell House of Song, House of the Lie Christianity, Islam A saviour figure at the end of time The Saoshyant Jewish messianism, Christian second coming, Islamic Mahdi Resurrection of the body At the renovation Daniel 12:2, then Pharisaic Judaism, Christianity, Islam A final battle and the end of evil Frashokereti Jewish and Christian apocalyptic writing That table is the reason Zoroastrianism matters far beyond its own community, and the reason for the argument in the next part. Part 8 — Did Zoroastrianism shape Judaism, Christianity and Islam? This is one of the most interesting questions in the history of religion, and one of the most often overstated. The library's one-page survey says simply that Zoroastrian ideas influenced later Abrahamic concepts of heaven, hell and judgement. Many scholars agree. Others think the case is far weaker than it sounds. Here are both, at their strongest. The case for influence The timing fits. The Hebrew Bible's older books have almost no developed afterlife: the dead go down to Sheol, a shadowy pit. The ideas of a cosmic adversary (Satan), angels with names and ranks, a final judgement and the resurrection of the dead appear in Jewish texts after the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE, when Jews lived for two centuries as subjects of a Persian empire, and they become prominent in the Second Temple period. The first clear statement of bodily resurrection in the Hebrew Bible comes in the Book of Daniel, usually dated to about 164 BCE: "many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to reproaches and everlasting abhorrence" (Daniel 12:2, JPS 1917). The contact is documented. Persian rulers freed the exiles and funded the rebuilding of the Temple; the Bible praises Cyrus as God's anointed (Isaiah 45:1) and quotes a decree of Cyrus (Ezra 1:2–3). Some of the latest books of the Bible use Persian loanwords, among them pardes, an enclosed garden, from Old Iranian, which reached Greek as paradeisos and English as "paradise". Later, rabbis compiled the Babylonian Talmud under Sasanian rule. The pattern is coherent. Mary Boyce, in Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1979), argued that Zarathushtra was the first to teach individual judgement, heaven and hell, the resurrection of the body, the last judgement and everlasting life, and that these became familiar to much of mankind through borrowing by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, while finding their fullest logical coherence in Zoroastrianism itself. Norman Cohn's Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come (1993) made the broader case that Zarathushtra broke with the ancient world's static picture of order endlessly threatened by chaos, and imagined history moving towards a final victory of good, a vision later taken up by Jewish apocalyptic groups and the early Christians. The case against, or for caution The dating problem. The detailed Zoroastrian accounts of resurrection, saviours and the end of the world are found in Pahlavi books of the 9th and 10th centuries CE, written after Christianity and Islam already existed. The Gathas contain only hints. So when a Pahlavi text and a Christian text agree, who borrowed from whom? It is possible that some influence ran the other way, or that both drew on shared ideas of the ancient Near East. The evidence is circumstantial. In an influential 1985 article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, "The Question of Religious Influence", the Old Testament scholar James Barr argued that resemblance is not proof of borrowing; that the Jewish developments can often be explained from inside Israel's own tradition and its other neighbours; and that scholars on both sides had been too quick to assume what they wanted to find. Other routes. Some scholars point to Greek thought, through Hellenism, as at least as important: the immortality of the soul, for example, owes more to Plato than to Zarathushtra. Others note real differences: Zoroastrian evil is independent of God, whereas in Judaism even Satan is a servant in God's court, as in the Book of Job. Where the debate stands Most scholars today take a middle position. The historian Lester Grabbe has written that there is general agreement that Persian religion had its influence on Judaism over the centuries, and that the real question is where, and which developments can be ascribed to the Iranian side rather than to Greek or other cultures. In other words: influence is likely; its exact scope is unproven. Claim Strength of evidence Jews and Zoroastrians were in close contact for centuries Strong: documented in the Bible, Persian records and the Talmud Some Persian words and court culture entered Jewish texts Strong Jewish angelology and demonology were shaped partly by Persian ideas Plausible, widely held Resurrection and final judgement came to Judaism from Zoroastrianism Contested: plausible on timing, weakened by late Zoroastrian sources Zoroastrianism was "the first monotheism" Contested: depends on dating and on whether it counts as monotheism at all The most defensible sentence is this one: Persian religion was in the room when Judaism developed its ideas about the end of time, and nobody can yet prove exactly what it said. For Islam, the question is different. Muslims came to treat Zoroastrians as a protected "People of the Book" (Part 9), and Islamic thought absorbed much of Persian culture. Some scholars have proposed Persian echoes in Islamic images such as the bridge over hell; others regard such parallels as common heritage of the region. Muslims, for their part, understand Islam's teachings as revealed, not borrowed. Part 9 — Conquest and the long decline in Iran (from 636 CE) In the 630s the armies of the new Islamic caliphate, fresh from the Arabian peninsula, struck a Sasanian Empire exhausted by decades of war with Byzantium. The Arabs won at al-Qadisiyyah (in the mid-630s) and took the capital, Ctesiphon; at Nahavand in 642 the last great Sasanian army was destroyed. The last king, Yazdegerd III, fled east and was killed near Merv in 651, by tradition by a miller. How Iran became Muslim Iran did not convert overnight, and mostly not by the sword. Because Zoroastrians were so numerous, Muslim jurists came to classify them, with some hesitation, among the dhimmi, protected non-Muslims who could keep their religion in exchange for a poll tax, the jizya, and acceptance of a lower status. At first there was little pressure to convert. Over time the pressures accumulated: the jizya, exclusion from power, and social and economic advantages that lay with Muslims. Nobles and city-dwellers converted first, peasants later. The historian Richard Bulliet's well-known "conversion curve", reconstructed from the spread of Muslim names in medieval biographical records, suggests that Muslims were perhaps a tenth of Iran's population under the Umayyad caliphs, about 40 percent by the mid-9th century and nearly 80 percent by the end of the 11th. There was also violence and humiliation. In the 9th century a famous cypress in Khorasan, said in legend to have been planted by Zarathushtra himself, was cut down for a caliph's palace. In Bukhara, according to one account, the Arab governor converted the city several times before it stayed converted, turning the fire temple into a mosque and paying people to attend Friday prayers. Medieval Zoroastrian texts look back on this as an age of grief. Survival on the desert's edge Zoroastrians gathered where they could be inconspicuous, especially in Yazd and Kerman, oasis cities on the edge of Iran's great salt deserts, which remain the heart of Iranian Zoroastrianism. Yazd became the seat of the Iranian high priests. Muslims called them gabr, a contemptuous word for infidel. Their Persian-derived dialect, called Dari or Behdini ("of the Good Religion"), still survives among them. Meanwhile, Zoroastrian priests did something crucial: in the 9th and 10th centuries they wrote down their tradition in the Pahlavi books, many of them written expressly to encourage the faithful to stand firm. And Iranian Muslim culture kept the old stories alive. Around 1010, the poet Ferdowsi completed the Shahnameh, the "Book of Kings", Iran's national epic, full of the legendary kings and heroes of Zoroastrian tradition. In a 16th-century letter to their co-religionists in India, the priests of Yazd lamented that no period, not even Alexander's, had been as hard for the faithful as this "millennium of the demon of Wrath". The 19th and 20th centuries Conditions in Qajar Iran (1789–1925) were often harsh. Help came from India. In 1854 the Parsi philanthropist Dinshaw Maneckji Petit founded the Persian Zoroastrian Amelioration Fund, which sent an emissary, Maneckji Limji Hataria, to Iran. He opened schools, organised community councils and campaigned for the community's rights; in 1882 the jizya on Iranian Zoroastrians was finally remitted, a step his campaigning may have helped bring about. The Pahlavi shahs (1925–1979) celebrated Iran's pre-Islamic past as part of their nationalism, and Zoroastrians prospered. The Islamic Republic's constitution of 1979 recognises Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians as the only official religious minorities, free "within the limits of the law" to perform their rites and follow their own rules in personal matters (Article 13), and reserves one seat in parliament for a Zoroastrian (Article 64). Conversion from Islam, however, is not recognised and is legally dangerous, so the community cannot accept Iranian Muslims who want to join it. Part 10 — The Parsis of India, and the Iranis The story of Sanjan The Parsis' founding story is told in a Persian poem, the Qissa-i Sanjan ("Story of Sanjan"), written by a priest named Bahman Kaikobad in 1599 or 1600, many centuries after the events it describes. It tells how, after the fall of the Sasanians, a group of the faithful left Khorasan, stayed for years at the island of Diu off the Indian coast, survived a storm at sea and landed in Gujarat. They asked the local Hindu ruler, Jadi Rana, for refuge. He asked them to explain their faith and set conditions: they should adopt the local language, their women should dress like local women, they should lay down their weapons, and their weddings should take place in the evening. They agreed, settled at Sanjan, and in time consecrated a sacred fire there. Many Parsis also tell a story that is not in the poem: that the king sent the newcomers a bowl full to the brim with milk, meaning that his land was full, and that their priest stirred in sugar without spilling a drop, to show that they would sweeten the community without overflowing it. It is folklore, and it is the best-loved image Parsis have of themselves. When did they land? The poem is vague and contradictory about elapsed time, and scholars have proposed 716, 785 and 936 CE, among other dates; arguments over the date have long been fierce within the community. Historians also note that the poem is the only account, and that trade between Iran and India's west coast long predates the conquest; persecution alone may not explain the migration. Later, Sanjan was sacked, probably in 1465, and the refugees carried the sacred fire into the hills, then to Navsari, and finally, in the 1740s, to Udvada, where the Iranshah fire from this piece's first paragraph burns today. Bombay For centuries the Parsis were farmers, weavers, traders and priests in Gujarat. Their fortunes changed with the British. The East India Company settled first at Surat and then at Bombay (Mumbai), and Parsis became brokers, shipbuilders and merchants for it. In 1728 the community founded the Bombay Parsi Punchayet to govern its affairs. British schools gave Parsi boys and girls an early modern education, and by the 19th century Parsis were among the most prominent communities in India: industrialists like Jamsetji Tata, often called the father of Indian industry, and the Godrej and Wadia families; Dadabhai Naoroji, an early leader of the Indian national movement; later, the nuclear physicist Homi J. Bhabha and the conductor Zubin Mehta. Wealth flowed back into the community and the faith: fire temples, hospitals, schools and housing colonies, and the funds that helped the Zoroastrians of Iran. The Iranis India has a second Zoroastrian community, the Iranis: descendants of Zoroastrians who came from Iran much later, mostly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, escaping poverty and discrimination under the Qajars. They kept a stronger Iranian identity and dialect, and they are famous for the Irani cafés they opened in Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad, known for their Irani chai; Mumbai had about 350 in the 1950s and only about 25 by 2005. Today the two communities intermarry and share temples, but the distinction is still felt. Part 11 — The Towers of Silence and the vanishing vultures On Malabar Hill, one of the most expensive neighbourhoods of Mumbai, there is a large forested estate called Doongerwadi. Inside stand the city's Towers of Silence (dakhmas): low, round, roofless stone towers. A Parsi body is carried there by a special class of pallbearers, laid on the platform, and left to the sun and the birds. The platform has three rings, for men, women and children; once the bones have been bleached dry, they are swept into a central pit, where they crumble, with lime, into dust. Why exposure The logic follows from the purity rules in Part 6. A corpse is the most polluting thing there is; burying it pollutes the earth, burning it pollutes fire, putting it in water pollutes water. Exposure lets the body be consumed without defiling any of the good creations. Parsis also describe it as a final act of charity: giving one's body to the birds. Herodotus saw something like it among the Magi in the 5th century BCE, but the towers themselves are much later: they are first documented in Zoroastrian texts of the 9th century CE. Iranian Zoroastrians gave them up in the 20th century, moving to burial in cemeteries with cement-lined graves; in India the towers remain in use. The collapse The system depended on vultures, and in the 1990s the vultures of South Asia began to die. In just over a decade, populations of the white-rumped vulture, once one of the most common large birds of prey in the world, fell by more than 95 percent. In 2004 a team led by Lindsay Oaks of The Peregrine Fund published the cause in Nature: diclofenac, a cheap painkiller given to cattle, which caused fatal kidney failure in vultures that ate the carcasses. India banned veterinary diclofenac in 2006, and the decline has slowed, but the birds that once cleared a body in hours are almost gone. The consequences went far beyond the Parsis. In a 2024 paper in the American Economic Review, economists Eyal Frank and Anant Sudarshan estimated that the functional extinction of India's vultures, by leaving carcasses to rot and feral dogs to multiply, increased human mortality by more than 4 percent, with damages they valued at $69.4 billion a year. What the community did For Parsis the question became urgent and painful. Bodies in the towers now took months to decompose. The community has tried large solar concentrators (mirrors) to speed decomposition, which work poorly in the monsoon, and in 2002 asked bird-of-prey specialists for help with vulture breeding. Some families now choose cremation or burial, which traditionalists regard as forbidden. Who may use the towers is itself disputed: the trusts that manage them often refuse the children of mixed marriages. Traditionalists insist the towers remain the only proper way; reformers argue that the deeper purpose, protecting the good creation and honouring the dead, can be met in other ways. A ritual designed to protect the good creation from death now depends on the survival of a single bird, and the bird was killed by a medicine meant to heal cows. Part 12 — Zoroastrians today: numbers, conversion and the future How many? Counting Zoroastrians is surprisingly hard. The best worldwide count is a demographic survey compiled for the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America (FEZANA) in 2012. It gave a world total of 111,691 using the community's own estimate of 15,000 for Iran, or 121,962 using the Iranian census figure of 25,271, and warned that it was not a rigorous census. Country Zoroastrians (latest figure found) Source and date India 57,264 Census of India 2011, as reported by the Government of India (69,601 in the 2001 census) Iran 15,000–25,271; scholarly estimates 11,000–25,000 FEZANA 2012; Iranian census 2011; EUAA report, May 2025 United States 14,405 FEZANA 2012 Canada 6,442 FEZANA 2012 United Kingdom 5,500 FEZANA 2012 Australia 2,577 FEZANA 2012 Pakistan 1,675 FEZANA 2012 A note of caution on Iran. A 2020 online survey by GAMAAN, a Netherlands-based research group, found that 8 percent of weighted respondents in Iran called themselves Zoroastrian. The researchers who analysed it, in a 2023 article, called this "survey Zoroastrianism": an expression of Iranian identity and protest against the Islamic Republic, not membership in the historic community, which is far smaller. The decline is real. India's Parsi population has fallen steeply since the mid-20th century, and the community is old: it marries late, has few children, and has seen many of its young people emigrate. Deaths outnumber births by a wide margin. The conversion debate This is the question that divides the community most deeply. Traditionalists, especially among the Parsis, hold that one is born a Zoroastrian. In their view the Parsis are an ethno-religious community, like the Jews, whose identity was preserved for over a thousand years in India precisely by not accepting converts, and the promise made at Sanjan not to proselytise is part of that history. Many also hold that only children of a Parsi father may be initiated, a rule that falls hardest on Parsi women who marry outside the community, whose children may be refused navjote and who may themselves be barred from fire temples and the Towers of Silence. Traditionalists see these rules as the walls that kept the community alive. Reformists, more common in Iran and the diaspora, argue that the Gathas speak to all humanity, that Zarathushtra himself made converts, that older Zoroastrian authorities allowed conversion, and that a community of ageing families cannot survive by closing its doors. Many accept the children of mixed marriages through either parent, and some accept adult converts. Iran's council of priests in Tehran endorses conversion in principle, though Iranian law forbids Muslims to convert. In practice, the boundary is moving. In North America and Europe, many associations welcome mixed families. New communities of converts have appeared, notably among Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan, where some turned to Zoroastrianism after the war with the Islamic State, and in Sweden. Claims about their number vary widely: estimates of new converts in 2015 alone ranged from 10,000 to 100,000 (US Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2017); in 2019 the community's representative to the regional government said more than 10,000 were registered, while an academic in Sulaimani called "at least several thousand" a conservative estimate. None of these figures has been independently confirmed. Many born Zoroastrians welcome them; others doubt that they are joining the same religion. A famous son The most famous person of Zoroastrian heritage in modern times was probably born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar in 1946, to Parsi parents from Gujarat. The world knew him as Freddie Mercury of Queen. He rarely spoke about his background, though it was part of the boarding-school childhood in India that shaped him, and when he died in 1991 his funeral in London was conducted by a Zoroastrian priest. Parsis tend to mention him with a mixture of pride and gentle amusement, which seems the right spirit. Open questions Who belongs? Birth, choice, father, mother, or the Gathas' universal call. Which texts rule? The Gathas alone, or the whole inherited tradition including the Vendidad and the Pahlavi books. What to do with the dead? Towers without vultures, cremation, or burial. Can women be priests? Iran and North America have begun; India has not. How to survive? With roughly 120,000 members by the best count, the community faces a question few religions ever face: whether it will exist at all in a century. The takeaway Zoroastrianism grew from hymns composed, most scholars think, around 1000 BCE by a priest-poet in eastern Iran, carried in memory for perhaps fifteen centuries before they were written down. It taught that one Wise Lord stands against a real but doomed evil, that every person chooses a side through good thoughts, words and deeds, and that history will end in judgement, resurrection and a renewed world. It became the faith of Persian empires and an organised state church under the Sasanians, then declined over centuries of Muslim rule in Iran, while a small group of refugees preserved it in India. Its ideas may have helped shape Judaism, Christianity and Islam, though how much is still argued. Today it is a community of roughly 110,000–125,000 people, divided over conversion and the dead, and still feeding the same fires. Try this: for one day, take the religion's three-word formula as an experiment. Each evening, ask yourself one question for each word: what was one good thought, one good word and one good deed today, and what was its opposite? Then notice what Zoroastrians notice: that the choice comes back every few hours, and that it is never made once and for all. Sources & Further Reading Sources - Wikipedia, "Zoroaster", "Zoroastrianism", "Gathas", "Avesta", "Amesha Spenta", "Parsis", "Qissa-i Sanjan", "Tower of Silence", "Fire temple", "Atash Behram", "Iranshah Atash Behram", "Kartir", "Zurvanism", "Maneckji Limji Hataria", "Battle of Nahavand", "Yazdegerd III", "Indian vulture crisis", "Freddie Mercury", "Solar Hijri calendar" (consulted 31 October 2026 as leads, with the scholarly works they cite: Boyce, Malandra (Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2005), Kellens, Lincoln, Skjærvø, Hintze, Grabbe, Pourshariati). Encyclopaedia Iranica itself could not be fetched directly. - Yasna translation: L. H. Mills and C. Bartholomae/I. J. S. Taraporewala as presented on avesta.org (Gathas paraphrased in this piece rather than quoted). - Herodotus, Histories 1.131 and 1.140, trans. A. D. Godley (1920), Perseus Digital Library. - The Qissa-i Sanjan, trans. S. H. Hodivala, Studies in Parsi History (Bombay, 1920), avesta.org edition. - Daniel 12:2, Isaiah 45:1, Ezra 1:2–3: The Holy Scriptures (JPS, 1917), via Sefaria. - James Barr, "The Question of Religious Influence: The Case of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity", Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53:2 (1985), 201–236. - Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come (Yale University Press, 1993; 2nd ed. 2001), publisher's description. - J. L. Oaks et al., "Diclofenac residues as the cause of vulture population decline in Pakistan", Nature 427 (2004). - Eyal Frank and Anant Sudarshan, "The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence from the Decline of Vultures in India", American Economic Review (October 2024), abstract. - Roshan Rivetna, "The Zarathushti World: A 2012 Demographic Picture", FEZANA Journal (Fall 2013), population table. - Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, Response to Information Request IRQ106299.E, "Iraq: Conversion to Zoroastrianism in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq" (3 July 2019), citing USCIRF (May 2017) and interviews. - European Union Agency for Asylum, COI Query Response, "Iran: Situation of individuals who have converted from Islam to Zoroastrianism" (May 2025). - Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1979, rev. 1989), Articles 13 and 64, via the Constitute Project. - M. Stausberg, P. Tamimi Arab and A. Maleki, "Survey Zoroastrians: Online Religious Identification in the Islamic Republic of Iran", Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 62:4 (2023), as cited by EUAA. Go deeper - 📘 Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices — Mary Boyce (the classic one-volume history, from the prophet to the modern Parsis; strong on practice, and the boldest statement of the influence thesis) - 📘 Zoroastrianism: An Introduction — Jenny Rose (a clear, current introduction that is careful about what the evidence can and cannot show) - 📘 The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism — Michael Stausberg and Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina (eds.) (the scholarly state of the field, chapter by chapter, for readers who want the debates in full) - 📘 Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come — Norman Cohn (the influence argument told as a sweeping history of the idea of the end of the world; read it alongside Barr's critique) - 🌐 Avesta — Zoroastrian Archives (translations of the Avesta, the Qissa-i Sanjan and much else, compiled by Joseph H. Peterson) - 🌐 Companion pieces in this library: The World's Religions, One Page Each, How the Sacred Texts Were Written, Pilgrimage: Why Humans Walk to Holy Places, and the Religions long read Judaism: A People, a Covenant and a Conversation Across 3,000 Years Step 15. Buddhism: The Path of Awakening, From the Ganges to the Whole World ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: Buddhism. A prince who walked away from a palace, a diagnosis of suffering and a cure for it, and the 2,500-year journey of an idea that has been a monastery, a philosophy, a devotion, a state religion, a political weapon and an app on your phone. Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each, Bodhidharma: Pointing Directly to the Mind and the Birth of Zen and Meditation, Without the Woo An old man lies down between two sal trees near a small town in northern India. He is about eighty. He has walked these roads for forty-five years, teaching, and now his body is, in his own image, like a worn-out cart that only keeps moving with a great deal of care. His closest companion is weeping. The old man asks the monks around him three times whether anyone has a last question. Nobody speaks. So he gives them a final sentence instead: everything that is put together falls apart, so work out your liberation with diligence. That, according to the oldest account of his death, is how the Buddha left the world. He named no successor. He left no writings. He told his followers to take the teaching itself as their lamp. Out of that refusal to appoint an heir came one of the most varied religious families on Earth: silent Zen halls in Kyoto, saffron-robed monks walking their alms rounds at dawn in Laos, Tibetan lamas chanting before golden statues, Pure Land devotees calling the name of a Buddha of infinite light, and office workers in London following a ten-minute breathing exercise. The World's Religions, One Page Each gives Buddhism a single card. This long read is the full version: what the tradition says about its own beginnings and what historians say, kept carefully apart; what the Buddha taught, in the oldest texts' own words; how the community and its scriptures took shape; how the teaching split into schools and travelled across Asia; how ordinary Buddhists actually live; and how Buddhism has met colonialism, modern science, nationalism and the Chinese state. It describes; it does not rank or judge. In this long read The life: the story the tradition tells and what historians can say The diagnosis: the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path No self, dependent origination, karma, rebirth and nirvana The sangha, the councils and the Pali Canon Ashoka: the emperor who changed the map The Great Vehicle: bodhisattvas, emptiness and mind Pure Land and Chan/Zen: faith and the direct path Vajrayana: the diamond vehicle and Tibet Across Asia by road and by sea, and the disappearance from India How Buddhists live: monks, nuns, lay people and the year Colonialism, revival, modernism and mindfulness Engaged Buddhism, and Buddhism's darker entanglements with power Tibet and the question of the next Dalai Lama Buddhism today: numbers, branches and open questions Part 1 — The life: the story the tradition tells and what historians can say Every Buddhist child learns some version of the story. Here it is as the tradition tells it, and then as a historian sees it. Both deserve to be heard on their own terms. The tradition's account A boy named Siddhartha Gautama is born at Lumbini, in what is now the Nepalese lowlands near the Indian border. His father, Suddhodana, rules the Sakya clan from the town of Kapilavastu; his mother is Queen Maya. Sages foretell that the child will become either a world-conquering king or a world-renouncing teacher. His father, wanting the first, surrounds him with comfort and keeps sorrow out of sight. For twenty-nine years the plan works. Then, in the best-known form of the story, the prince rides out and sees four things he has never been shown: an old man, a sick man, a corpse and a wandering holy man whose face is calm. The first three show him what waits for everyone. The fourth shows him that someone has decided to look for a way out. Siddhartha leaves the palace at night, cuts off his hair and becomes a wanderer. He studies meditation under two famous teachers, Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta, masters their methods and finds that they do not end suffering. He then tries extreme asceticism with five companions, starving himself until, the texts say, he can feel his spine through his stomach. That fails too. After about six years of striving he accepts a bowl of rice milk, sits under a fig tree at Bodh Gaya and resolves not to rise until he understands. Through the night, the tradition says, he is assailed by Mara, the tempter, and remains unmoved. At dawn he awakens. He is now the Buddha, "the awakened one." At first he hesitates to teach: what he has seen is subtle, and people love their attachments. According to the texts, the god Brahma Sahampati appears and begs him to teach for the sake of those who will understand. He walks to the Deer Park at Isipatana, near Varanasi, finds his five former companions and gives his first sermon, "setting the wheel of the teaching in motion." For the next forty-five years he walks the Ganges plain, teaching kings, merchants, courtesans, farmers, outcastes and philosophers, founding an order of monks and, after some hesitation, of nuns. He dies at Kusinara at about eighty. Near the end, the oldest account has him name four places a believer should visit "with feelings of reverence and awe": where he was born, where he awakened, where he first taught and where he died. Lumbini, Bodh Gaya, Sarnath and Kushinagar are still Buddhism's great pilgrimage sites. What historians can say Historians start from a different question: not "what happened?" but "what can our sources bear?" The Buddha wrote nothing. His teachings were memorised and recited for at least three centuries before they were written down. The Pali texts are not regarded by scholars as his exact words, and how faithfully they preserve him is, as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, an unanswerable question. The early texts contain more teaching than biography. The full life story, with the four sights and the palace, comes together in later works: the Sanskrit Buddhacarita of Asvaghosa (2nd century CE), the Mahavastu and Lalitavistara, and the Pali Nidanakatha. The oldest discourses mention episodes of his life only here and there. Supernatural elements are best read as hagiography, writing that honours a saint; whether they happened is a matter of faith, not of evidence. The dates are genuinely uncertain. Theravada Buddhists most commonly date his life to 623–543 BCE. Western scholars from the mid-19th to the late 20th century generally put it around 560–480 BCE. Most scholars now move it about a century later, into the 5th century BCE; Richard Gombrich, for instance, proposed that he died around 404 BCE. No one can settle it conclusively. Dating Life of the Buddha Who holds it Traditional Theravada 623–543 BCE Most Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia Older Western scholarship c. 560–480 BCE 19th- and 20th-century textbooks Most current scholarship 5th century BCE; death perhaps c. 404 BCE Gombrich and others What almost no scholar doubts is that a real teacher stands behind the texts: a man of the Sakya clan who renounced household life, taught in the towns of the middle Ganges valley and founded a community that outlived him. The coherence of the core teaching, which keeps returning to the same few ideas in the same characteristic way, persuades many that it bears the mark of one mind. The tradition asks: what did he see under the tree? The historian asks: how do we know anything he said? Neither question cancels the other. Part 2 — The diagnosis: the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path The Buddha's first sermon is short enough to read in five minutes. The oldest English translation, by T. W. Rhys Davids in 1881, calls it The Foundation of the Kingdom of Righteousness; in Pali it is the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, "Setting the Wheel of the Teaching in Motion" (Samyutta Nikaya 56.11). It opens by rejecting two lives the Buddha had already tried. One is the pursuit of sensual pleasure, which he had known as a prince. The other is self-torment, which he had known as an ascetic. Between them, he says, "There is a middle path, O Bhikkhus, avoiding these two extremes", one that "leads to peace of mind, to the higher wisdom, to full enlightenment, to Nirvana!" (SN 56.11, §3, Rhys Davids). Then come the four "noble truths." Many teachers compare them to a doctor's method: name the illness, find its cause, say whether it can be cured, prescribe the treatment. Truth In the sermon The doctor's version 1. Dukkha "Birth is attended with pain, decay is painful, disease is painful, death is painful" The symptom 2. Its origin "that thirst (or craving), causing the renewal of existence" The cause 3. Its cessation the destruction "in which no passion remains, of this very thirst" The prognosis: it can be cured 4. The path "this noble eightfold path" The treatment What "dukkha" means Dukkha is usually translated "suffering," and the word does include pain. But it covers far more: the low hum of dissatisfaction, the way pleasant things end, the way even getting what you want leaves you wanting. Some translators prefer "unsatisfactoriness" or "stress." The sermon's last item makes the scope clear: the five "aggregates" that make up a person are themselves dukkha when we cling to them. The claim is not that life is miserable. It is that nothing we cling to can finally satisfy us, because everything changes. Craving, not desire in general The second truth names the cause as tanha, literally "thirst." The sermon lists three kinds: craving for sensual pleasure, craving for existence (to be, to become, to last forever) and craving for non-existence (to be rid of things, or of oneself). It is not wanting a cup of tea that is the problem. It is the grasping, the clutching, the "I must have this and keep it" that turns experience into a constant transaction. The Eightfold Path The fourth truth is the practical part, and it is the bit most Buddhists actually spend their lives on. The sermon gives the eight factors in Rhys Davids' words: "Right views; Right aspirations; Right speech; Right conduct; Right livelihood; Right effort; Right mindfulness; and Right contemplation." Later tradition groups them into three trainings. Training Factors What it looks like on a Tuesday Wisdom right view, right intention Seeing how craving and change actually work; turning the mind toward kindness and away from harm Ethics right speech, right action, right livelihood Not lying, gossiping or speaking harshly; not killing, stealing or misusing sex; earning a living without harming others Concentration right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration Cultivating good mental states and letting go of bad ones; steady awareness of body, feelings and mind; deep meditative stillness "Right" (samma) does not mean obedient to a rule. It means complete, well-tuned, the way an instrument can be in tune. The path is not eight steps in order but eight strands of one rope, each strengthening the others. "Not to commit any sin, to do good, and to purify one's mind, that is the teaching of (all) the Awakened." — Dhammapada 183, trans. F. Max Müller (1881) The Dhammapada, a collection of verses that has been memorised by Buddhists for two thousand years, opens with the same psychological emphasis: "All that we are is the result of what we have thought" (v. 1). And it states the ethic in a line that has travelled far beyond Buddhism: "hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule" (v. 5). Notice what is missing. The sermon does not ask anyone to believe in a creator. It does not open with a revelation. It describes a problem, claims a cause, promises a cure and prescribes a training. The Buddha's disciples did believe many things on his word, and traditional Buddhism is full of gods, heavens, hells and miracles. But the core structure is a path to be walked and tested, and Buddhists across every school hold to it. Part 3 — No self, dependent origination, karma, rebirth and nirvana The Four Noble Truths say what to do. Four further ideas explain why it works. They are the hardest part of Buddhism to grasp, and the part that most sharply separates it from the religions it grew up among. Anatta: not-self India in the Buddha's time was full of teachers who said that behind the changing body and mind there was an eternal self, the atman, and that liberation meant realising it. The Buddha's second discourse, the Anattalakkhana Sutta (SN 22.59), goes the other way. It takes the five "aggregates" that make up a person, one by one: physical form, feelings (pleasant, painful, neutral), perceptions, mental formations (intentions, habits, moods) and consciousness. Of each it asks: is it permanent or impermanent? Impermanent. Is what is impermanent satisfying or unsatisfying? Unsatisfying. Then is it fitting to regard it as "this is mine, this I am, this is my self"? No. The listener is encouraged to see each aggregate as "this is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self." This is not a claim that you do not exist. You still have a name, a history and responsibilities, and the texts use "I" freely. It is a claim that no permanent, independent owner sits behind experience, pulling the levers. Look for the self and you find processes: sensations, thoughts, intentions, moments of awareness, arising and passing. Seen that way, there is nothing to defend at all costs and nothing that has to last forever. Buddhists say the relief that comes from seeing this is the point. "'All forms are unreal,' he who knows and sees this becomes passive in pain; this is the way that leads to purity." — Dhammapada 279, trans. Müller Dependent origination If there is no fixed self, what holds a life together? The answer is paticca samuppada, "dependent origination" or "conditioned arising": everything arises in dependence on conditions, and when the conditions cease, it ceases. The tradition applies this to the cycle of suffering in a chain of twelve links: ignorance conditions mental formations; formations condition consciousness; consciousness conditions "name-and-form" (mind and body); that conditions the six senses; the senses condition contact; contact conditions feeling; feeling conditions craving; craving conditions grasping; grasping conditions becoming; becoming conditions birth; and birth conditions old age and death. Each link is a necessary condition of the next, not its only cause. The chain can be read over three lifetimes or in a single moment. In a moment: you hear your name said in an unkind tone (contact); a painful feeling arises; craving for it to stop, or to strike back, follows; you grab hold of a story about who you are and what they meant; and a whole small "self" is born, suffers and passes. Break the chain anywhere, most practically at the point where feeling turns into craving, and the rest does not follow. Karma Karma means "action." The Buddha redefined it in one sentence that the IEP quotes from the Pali: "It is intention, monks, what I call action." What counts morally is the will behind a deed. Intentional actions leave traces in the mind and shape what comes next, in this life and beyond. Karma is not fate, and it is not a cosmic accountant handing out rewards. It is more like a law of mental gravity: generosity makes you more generous and greed makes you greedier, and each tendency bears fruit. Rebirth Traditional Buddhism teaches that beings are reborn, again and again, in a cycle called samsara, among five (sometimes six) realms: hell beings, animals, hungry ghosts, humans and gods (with a realm of demigods added in some lists). Where one is reborn depends on karma and on one's state of mind, especially at death. If there is no self, what is reborn? The tradition's classic answer is that nothing passes over intact, but a stream of causes continues, as one candle lights another: the second flame is neither the same as the first nor different from it. Modern Buddhists divide here. For most Buddhists in Asia rebirth is simply true, and it is the reason merit-making matters. Some Western and modernist Buddhists treat it as a metaphor or set it aside; their critics, including many Asian teachers, reply that a Buddhism without rebirth has quietly dropped the problem the Buddha set out to solve. Nirvana Nirvana (Pali nibbana) literally means "blowing out," as of a flame: the extinguishing of the fires of greed, hatred and delusion. It is not a place and not a heaven. The texts distinguish nirvana "with remainder," the state of an awakened person still living out their life with body and mind, from nirvana "without remainder" at death, after which there is no more rebirth. What is nirvana like? The Buddha mostly declined to say. Asked whether an awakened one exists after death, does not exist, both or neither, he set the question aside as one that does not lead to liberation. He was, in his own words, a teacher with no "closed fist," hiding nothing that mattered (Mahaparinibbana Sutta II.32). But he was also practical. His famous comparison: a man hit by a poisoned arrow who refuses treatment until he knows the archer's name and caste will die first. Idea Short version Common misunderstanding Anatta No permanent owner behind experience "Buddhists believe you don't exist" Dependent origination Everything arises from conditions "Everything is random" or "everything is fixed" Karma Intentional action shapes the future "Fate" or "cosmic punishment" Rebirth The causal stream continues after death "A soul moves to a new body" Nirvana The fires of craving go out "Annihilation" or "a heaven" Part 4 — The sangha, the councils and the Pali Canon The Buddha did not leave a book. He left a community: the sangha. In the narrow sense it means the order of fully ordained monks (bhikkhus) and nuns (bhikkhunis). In the wider sense, used especially in the West, it means all practising Buddhists. Together with the Buddha and the Dhamma (his teaching), it makes up the "Three Jewels" in which every Buddhist "takes refuge." The rule of the order Monastic life is governed by the Vinaya, the discipline: rules on robes, food, property, sexuality, speech and how disputes are settled, each traditionally tied to a story of the incident that prompted the Buddha to make it. Monks own almost nothing, eat only what is given, and in Theravada countries may not eat solid food after midday. Every fortnight the community gathers to recite the core rules, the patimokkha, and confess breaches. The four gravest offences (sexual intercourse, theft, killing a human and falsely claiming spiritual attainments) mean expulsion. The councils How did a teaching carried in memory stay together after its teacher died? Buddhist tradition answers: by communal recitation, sangiti, the word usually translated "council." The accounts come from different schools, which disagree with each other, and scholars question parts of all of them. Here is what the traditions say, with the scholarly caveats attached. Council Where and when (tradition) What it did (tradition) Scholarly caveats First Rajagaha, just after the Buddha's death Under Mahakassapa, Ananda recited the discourses and Upali the discipline That the whole canon was recited is considered an exaggeration; some think the story was modelled on the Second Council Second Vesali, about 100 years later Rejected ten lax practices, including monks accepting money Different schools tell it differently; how it relates to the first schism is debated Third Pataliputra, under Ashoka Purged the order and sent missions abroad Known only from Theravada sources; contested, though missions under Ashoka are supported by archaeology Fourth Two different "fourth councils": Sri Lanka, 1st century BCE; Kashmir under the Kushan king Kanishka Sri Lanka: wrote the canon down. Kashmir: Sarvastivada commentaries Each tradition recognises its own Fifth and Sixth Mandalay, 1871; Yangon, 1954–56 Burmese recitations to check the canon; the Sixth closed on Vesak 1956, the traditional 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha's death Modern, well documented The first great split came within roughly the first two centuries. The traditional Theravada account blames lax monks who formed the Mahasanghika ("great community"); the Mahasanghika's own account says the other side, the Sthaviras ("elders"), had added rules. There is no clear answer as to which version of the discipline came first. Over the following centuries early Buddhism divided into many schools, traditionally counted as eighteen. Of their lines of monastic discipline, only three survive: the Theravada (Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia), the Dharmaguptaka (China, Korea, Vietnam) and the Mulasarvastivada (Tibet and Mongolia). The Pali Canon The scriptures of the Theravada, the one early school that survives as a living tradition, are the Tipitaka, the "Three Baskets," preserved in Pali, a language close to what the Buddha may have spoken. Vinaya Pitaka: the monastic discipline. Sutta Pitaka: the discourses, gathered into five "collections" (nikayas): the long discourses, the middle-length discourses, the "connected" discourses arranged by theme, the "numerical" discourses arranged by number, and a miscellany that includes the Dhammapada and the Jataka tales of the Buddha's past lives. Abhidhamma Pitaka: systematic analyses of mind and matter, later in origin. As How the Sacred Texts Were Written in this library describes, the canon was carried orally for centuries. Sri Lanka's chronicles say that in the 1st century BCE, under King Vattagamani, monks met at Aluvihare and wrote it down on palm leaves because famine and war threatened the lives of the monks who held it in memory. The Pali Canon was not the only early canon. Other schools kept their own, in Sanskrit and the Gandhari language of the north-west, which scholars describe as one of the most important vehicles for early Buddhist literature; much survives in Chinese and Tibetan translation, and recent manuscript finds in Pakistan and Afghanistan are adding more. Where the Pali and Chinese versions of the same discourse agree, scholars feel on firmer ground about what the earliest teaching was. Why the Buddha left no successor Just before his death, the oldest account says, Ananda hoped the Buddha would leave instructions for the order. The answer is one of the most quoted passages in Buddhist literature. "Therefore, O Ananda, be ye lamps unto yourselves. Be ye a refuge to yourselves. Betake yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp." — Mahaparinibbana Sutta II.33, trans. Rhys Davids (1881) And his last words in the same text: "Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!" (VI.10). No pope, no caliph, no single scripture closed by authority. That is a large part of why Buddhism became so many things. Part 5 — Ashoka: the emperor who changed the map For two centuries Buddhism was one movement among many in north India. What turned it into a world religion was, more than anything, the patronage of one ruler. Ashoka was the third king of the Maurya dynasty, which ruled most of the Indian subcontinent. The Buddhist scholar-monk S. Dhammika, introducing his translation of the edicts, gives Ashoka's birth as about 304 BCE and his death as 232 BCE, in the thirty-eighth year of his reign. Early in that reign he conquered Kalinga, on India's east coast. Then he did something no conqueror had done before: he published his regret on stone. Rock Edict XIII, carved at sites across his empire, counts the cost. In Dhammika's translation: "One hundred and fifty thousand were deported, one hundred thousand were killed and many more died (from other causes)." The king, it says, "feels deep remorse for having conquered the Kalingas." From now on, "it is conquest by Dhamma" that he "considers to be the best conquest." What the edicts say Ashoka's inscriptions, on rocks and polished pillars, were unreadable for centuries until the scholar James Prinsep deciphered their script in 1837. They speak directly in the king's voice. They urge compassion, truthfulness, generosity and respect for parents, teachers, servants and animals. They announce public works: wells, shade trees, rest houses and medical care for humans and animals. They promote not narrow Buddhism but Dhamma, a broad morality, and they ask religious groups to respect one another. Rock Edict XII warns that whoever "praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others" in fact "only harms his own religion." They name Greek kings far to the west, Antiochos, Ptolemy, Antigonos, Magas and Alexander, as places his envoys of Dhamma had reached. The first great Buddhist king did not command conversion. He carved an apology for a war on rock and asked his subjects to respect each other's faiths. Ashoka in Buddhist memory Buddhist tradition remembers Ashoka as far more than a moral king. The Sri Lankan chronicles credit him with the Third Council and with sending missions in every direction, including his son Mahinda, who in their telling brought Buddhism to Sri Lanka, and his daughter Sanghamitta, who brought the nuns' ordination and a cutting of the Bodh Gaya tree. Northern traditions have their own Ashoka legends, including the building of 84,000 stupas. Historians separate the Ashoka of the edicts, which say surprisingly little about Buddhist doctrine, from the Ashoka of the chronicles, written centuries later by monks with reasons to magnify him. But on one point the evidence and the tradition agree: from Ashoka's time, Buddhist missions really were active far beyond the Ganges, and a model was set that lasted two thousand years. A Buddhist king protects and supports the sangha; the sangha gives the king legitimacy. That partnership would build the great temples of Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Tibet and Japan. Part 12 looks at what happens when it goes wrong. Part 6 — The Great Vehicle: bodhisattvas, emptiness and mind Around the turn of the Common Era, new scriptures began to appear in India, presented as the word of the Buddha and often set in vast cosmic scenes with countless buddhas and bodhisattvas. Their followers called their path the Mahayana, the "Great Vehicle," and some called the older path, rather dismissively, the "Lesser Vehicle" (Hinayana). (The word is now avoided in respectful usage; the surviving early school calls itself Theravada, "the teaching of the elders.") How Mahayana began is debated. It was not one organisation, and for centuries Mahayana monks lived in the same monasteries, under the same discipline, as non-Mahayana monks. What marked it out was a set of ideas and a body of texts. The bodhisattva In the early texts the goal is to become an arahant, a "worthy one" who has reached nirvana. The Buddha himself had been a bodhisattva, a being on the way to full buddhahood, over countless lives. Mahayana texts invite everyone to take that longer road: to vow to become a fully awakened buddha in order to free all beings, and to postpone one's own final release until all are freed. The bodhisattva path is built on two qualities held together: wisdom, especially the insight into emptiness, and compassion, which is the motive for the whole journey. Great bodhisattvas became objects of devotion in their own right: Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion (Guanyin in China, Kannon in Japan, Chenrezig in Tibet), Manjusri of wisdom, Ksitigarbha who vows to empty the hells, and Maitreya, the buddha to come. The new sutras The Perfection of Wisdom (Prajnaparamita) sutras, including the short Heart Sutra ("form is emptiness, emptiness is form") and the Diamond Sutra, chanted daily across East Asia. The Lotus Sutra, which teaches that the Buddha's many teachings are "skilful means" suited to different listeners, that all may become buddhas, and that the Buddha is eternal. Its Chinese translation by Kumarajiva's team in 406 became the standard text across East Asia. The Pure Land sutras about Amitabha's land of bliss, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy traces to north-western India around the 1st century CE (Part 7). Sutras teaching buddha-nature: that every being already has the potential of buddhahood within. Followers of the older schools did not accept these as the Buddha's word, and modern historians date them centuries after him. Mahayana Buddhists have answered in several ways: that the Buddha taught them to those who could receive them and they were preserved in hidden realms; that whatever is well spoken leads to awakening and so is the Buddha's word; or that inspired visionaries received them from buddhas in meditation. Madhyamaka: the middle way of emptiness The most influential Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha is Nagarjuna, who lived around 150–250 CE, probably in southern India. His Mulamadhyamakakarika ("Root Verses on the Middle Way"), about 450 verses, founded the Madhyamaka school. His central term is emptiness (sunyata). Emptiness is always the emptiness of something, and what things are empty of is svabhava, "own-being": an independent, self-standing essence. Nothing exists from its own side; everything exists in dependence on causes, parts and the concepts we use to pick it out. Emptiness, then, is not a mysterious void behind the world. It is dependent origination taken all the way down, and Nagarjuna turned it against every view that tries to fix reality in a final description, including Buddhist ones. To manage this without collapsing into nihilism, Madhyamaka distinguishes two truths: conventional truth, in which tables, persons and karma work as we ordinarily think, and ultimate truth, in which nothing has its own essence. Yogacara: the practice of mind The other great Indian Mahayana school, Yogacara ("practice of yoga"), is associated with the half-brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu, whom the SEP places in the 4th to 5th centuries CE. Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses opens with the claim that everything in the three realms is "only appearance" (vijnaptimatra), often translated "consciousness-only." Yogacara analyses how experience is constructed. It describes a "storehouse consciousness" (alayavijnana) holding the seeds of past actions, which ripen into the appearances of a world. It speaks of three natures: how a thing appears, the dependent process that produces the appearance, and the "perfected" nature, which is the absence of the thing as it falsely appears. Whether this is idealism, the view that only minds exist, is one of the oldest live debates in Buddhist studies. Some scholars read it that way; others argue it is a phenomenology of experience that makes no claim about what lies beyond it. Madhyamaka asks what things are empty of. Yogacara asks how the mind builds a world. Both are trying to loosen the same grip. Both schools were carried to Tibet and East Asia. When Xuanzang (602–664), the most famous Chinese pilgrim, spent years studying in India, it was Yogacara above all that he brought home. Part 7 — Pure Land and Chan/Zen: faith and the direct path Two East Asian forms of Mahayana have shaped more lives than any philosophical school. They can look like opposites: one relies on the saving power of a Buddha, the other on seeing your own nature directly. Both grew from Indian roots but took their final form in China and Japan. Pure Land The Pure Land sutras tell of a monk named Dharmakara who, long ago, made forty-eight vows, promising to become a buddha only if he could create a land of perfect conditions for awakening, open to all who call on him with faith. He fulfilled them and became Amitabha (Amida in Japanese), the Buddha of Infinite Light. His "primal vow" became the heart of a devotional tradition. Chinese masters such as Tanluan (476–542) and Shandao (613–681) developed the practice of calling on Amitabha's name. In Japan, Honen (1133–1212) made the spoken nembutsu, "Namu Amida Butsu," "I take refuge in Amida Buddha," an independent path. His disciple Shinran (1173–1263) went further. For Shinran, even the effort of reciting is a kind of pride. Buddhism, he taught, distinguishes "self-power," practices that rely on one's own efforts, from "Other Power," entrusting oneself wholly to Amida's vow. Shinran's movement, Jodo Shinshu, allowed its priests to marry and became one of the largest Buddhist denominations in Japan. To outsiders Pure Land can look like Christianity in Buddhist dress. Its practitioners see it as the most honest form of Buddhism: an admission that ordinary people in a degenerate age cannot reach awakening by their own strength, and a trust that compassion reaches them anyway. Chan and Zen The library's piece on Bodhidharma tells the founding story of Chan (from Sanskrit dhyana, "meditation"; Seon in Korea, Thien in Vietnam, Zen in Japan): an Indian monk who arrived in China, meditated facing a wall for nine years, and passed on a "special transmission outside the scriptures." Here, as with the Buddha, the tradition's account and the historians' account need to be kept apart. The tradition's account. Chan lineages trace an unbroken "mind-to-mind" transmission from the Buddha through twenty-eight Indian patriarchs to Bodhidharma, the first Chinese patriarch, then through Huike (487–593) to the sixth patriarch, Huineng (638–713), an illiterate labourer whose teaching, the Platform Sutra, was given a title normally reserved for a buddha's words. Chan presented itself in four famous phrases: a special transmission outside the scriptures; not founded on words and letters; pointing directly to the human mind; seeing one's nature and becoming a buddha. What historians say. Scholars such as John McRae and Bernard Faure regard much of this lineage history as an "invention of tradition," assembled from the late 6th century onward and well established only by the 10th; the four-phrase summary was used in the Song dynasty to define Chan's distinctiveness. That does not make the practice less real. It means the story of a single line of transmission was written backward by a movement establishing its identity. Chan flourished in the Tang dynasty, survived the great Huichang suppression of Buddhism (841–846) better than the scripture-based schools, and developed its distinctive literature: records of encounters between masters and students, later collected as gong'an (Japanese koan, "public cases") such as the 13th-century Gateless Barrier. Linji (died 866), whose lineage became Rinzai Zen, is said to have dismissed the great scriptures as hitching posts for donkeys. In Japan, Eisai brought the Linji/Rinzai line in the late 12th century, and Dogen (1200–1253) the Caodong/Soto line, with its emphasis on shikantaza, "just sitting," as itself the expression of awakening. Zen shaped Japanese gardens, ink painting, the tea ceremony, poetry and the martial arts. The library's Laozi piece notes that Chan absorbed Daoist sensibilities; the SEP is more careful, saying that Confucian and Daoist ideas about nature, spontaneity and "the Way" shaped the Chinese culture in which Chan's teaching resonated. Pure Land Chan/Zen Core practice Calling Amitabha's name Seated meditation, koan study Relies on "Other Power" of Amida's vow Seeing one's own buddha-nature Key Japanese figures Honen, Shinran Eisai, Dogen Image in the West Little known The face of Buddhism for many Followers in East Asia Very large Smaller but culturally enormous Part 8 — Vajrayana: the diamond vehicle and Tibet From around the 7th century, a third great current took shape in India: Vajrayana, the "diamond" or "thunderbolt" vehicle, also called Tantric or esoteric Buddhism. It accepts the Mahayana goal of buddhahood for the sake of all beings but claims a faster method, capable in principle of awakening within a single lifetime. What is different Vajrayana practice is based on texts called tantras and is transmitted in initiations from teacher to student. Its methods include: Deity yoga: visualising oneself as a fully awakened buddha or bodhisattva, in a sacred palace (mandala), to dissolve the ordinary sense of self and train the mind to see itself as already pure. Mantras, sacred syllables, such as Avalokitesvara's Om mani padme hum, carved on stones and turned in prayer wheels across the Himalayas. Mudras, ritual hand gestures, and ritual implements such as the vajra (thunderbolt) and bell. Advanced yogas working with breath and subtle energies, and in some lineages practices that use what is normally forbidden (meat, alcohol, sexual imagery) as a way of transcending attachment and aversion. Absolute centrality of the guru or lama, the teacher who embodies the lineage. Because these methods are powerful and easily misunderstood, they have traditionally been secret, given only to initiates. Critics, inside and outside Buddhism, have long worried about the power the guru relationship concentrates; Part 14 returns to that. How Tibet became Buddhist Tibetan tradition says Buddhism was first established at court under King Songtsen Gampo in the 7th century and firmly planted under King Trisong Detsen in the 8th, when the Indian scholar Shantarakshita and the tantric master Padmasambhava, revered as "Guru Rinpoche," came to Tibet. Tradition says Padmasambhava subdued the local spirits so that Samye, Tibet's first monastery, could be built, and that the first Tibetan monks were ordained there. A famous debate at Samye in the late 8th century, between an Indian master and a Chinese Chan monk, was remembered as settling Tibet's allegiance to Indian rather than Chinese Buddhism. After a period of persecution and fragmentation, a "second diffusion" from the late 10th century brought new translations and lineages from India. Tibetan Buddhism took shape as four major schools: School Founded / associated with Known for Nyingma ("old ones") Padmasambhava; the first diffusion Dzogchen ("great perfection"); "treasure" texts Kagyu Marpa, Milarepa, Gampopa (11th–12th c.) Mahamudra; long retreats; the Karmapa lineage Sakya The Khon family (11th c.) Scholarship; ruled Tibet for the Mongols in the 13th–14th c. Gelug ("virtuous ones") Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) Monastic discipline, philosophical debate; the Dalai and Panchen Lamas Tibetan Buddhism brought two distinctive institutions to the world. The first is the tulku, a recognised reincarnation of a deceased master, identified as a child and raised to take up the predecessor's role. The second is the Dalai Lama. In 1578 the Mongol ruler Altan Khan gave the title "Dalai Lama" ("ocean" lama) to the Gelug leader Sonam Gyatso, who became the third of the line, the first two being recognised retrospectively. From the 17th century the Dalai Lamas were both religious and political heads of Tibet. Vajrayana also travelled well beyond Tibet: to Mongolia, Bhutan (where it is the state religion), Nepal, Ladakh and the Russian republics of Buryatia, Kalmykia and Tuva, and, in another form, to Japan, where Kukai (774–835) founded the esoteric Shingon school. Theravada is often pictured as the path of the monk, Mahayana as the path of the bodhisattva, Vajrayana as the path of transformation. Each tradition claims, with good reason, to contain the other two. Part 9 — Across Asia by road and by sea, and the disappearance from India Buddhism became a world religion without armies. It travelled with merchants, monks, translators, pilgrims and princesses along two great networks: the overland Silk Roads and the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean. The northern route From the Ganges valley Buddhism moved north-west into Gandhara (today's northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan), where under the Kushan empire, in the first centuries CE, sculptors made some of the earliest surviving images of the Buddha in human form, in a style that borrowed from Greek and Roman art. (Earlier Buddhist art had shown him only through symbols such as a footprint, a tree or an empty seat; whether Gandhara or Mathura, in north India, made the first human images is debated.) From Gandhara, monasteries spread along the oasis cities of Central Asia and into China. Chinese accounts of Buddhism's arrival include a famous dream of the Han emperor Ming, which historians treat as semi-legendary. The first documented translations of Buddhist scripture into Chinese were made by An Shigao, a Parthian monk working in Luoyang from about 148 CE. Translation became one of the great intellectual projects in history. Over centuries Chinese and foreign monks rendered thousands of texts, coining new vocabulary and at first borrowing Daoist terms to explain foreign ideas. Kumarajiva, a monk from the Silk Road kingdom of Kucha, led a translation bureau in Chang'an whose versions, like the Lotus Sutra of 406, became classics of Chinese literature. Chinese pilgrims also walked the other way. Faxian set out at the end of the 4th century; Xuanzang spent some seventeen years travelling to India and back in the 7th, and his account later inspired the novel Journey to the West, with its Monkey King. From China, Buddhism reached Korea, where the kingdom of Goguryeo adopted it in 372 and Silla in 528, and Japan, where the official introduction was an embassy from the Korean kingdom of Baekje bearing an image and sutras, dated to 538 or 552 depending on the source. Vietnam received both Chinese Mahayana and Indian influences. Tibet, as Part 8 described, drew on India directly. The southern route By sea, Buddhism went south and east. Sri Lanka became the great centre of the Theravada, based in the Mahavihara monastery at Anuradhapura, and its monks and texts later shaped Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. Across maritime South-East Asia, Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms rose and fell. The Srivijaya kingdom on Sumatra was a centre of Buddhist learning; on Java, the colossal Mahayana monument of Borobudur, a mountain of carved stone stairs leading pilgrims past scenes of the Buddha's lives toward a summit of stupas, still draws pilgrims every Vesak. In Cambodia, Angkor's temples changed from Hindu to Buddhist and back again as kings changed. Over the second millennium, the Theravada gradually became the dominant religion of mainland South-East Asia, and Islam that of most of the Indonesian and Malay islands. The decline in India The strangest fact in Buddhist history is that the religion almost vanished from the land of its birth. In the first millennium CE India had great monastic universities. Nalanda, in today's Bihar, was founded according to Nalanda University by the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta in 427 CE, and is believed to have had some 2,000 teachers and 10,000 students; Xuanzang studied there. It ended in the 12th century. By around 1300, institutional Buddhism had all but disappeared from most of India, surviving at the Himalayan fringes. Historians give several reasons, and argue about their weight: Dependence on monasteries and royal patrons. Indian Buddhism was centred on large monasteries supported by kings and merchants. Lay Buddhists often worshipped at Hindu shrines too, and had no separate parish life. When patronage dried up, there was little to fall back on. Hindu revival and absorption. Devotional Hinduism, with temples, saints and philosophies that answered many of Buddhism's questions, flourished; Hindu texts even came to count the Buddha among the avatars of Vishnu. Invasion. The great monastic centres of the north-east, Nalanda among them, were sacked during the Turkic conquests at the end of the 12th century. Monasteries were easy targets, and once destroyed were not rebuilt. How much weight to give the last factor is politically charged in today's India. Some accounts emphasise the destruction by invaders; others stress a long internal decline that left the monasteries vulnerable. Most historians see a combination. Buddhism thrived wherever it became a people's religion with village temples and family rituals. Where it stayed the religion of great monasteries, it was fragile. The return Buddhism came back to India in the 20th century in two ways. In 1956 B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit jurist who chaired the committee that drafted India's constitution, converted publicly at Nagpur together with hundreds of thousands of followers, presenting Buddhism as a religion of equality and reason against caste. Most of India's Buddhists today, about 10 million by Pew's estimate for 2020 (under 1 percent of the population), belong to this "Navayana" or Ambedkarite movement. And from 1959, Tibetan refugees rebuilt their monasteries in India, with the exile government seated at Dharamshala. Part 10 — How Buddhists live: monks, nuns, lay people and the year Surveys of Buddhism often stop at doctrine. But most Buddhists are not meditating philosophers. Here is what Buddhist life tends to look like, with the caution that it varies enormously between Thailand, Tibet, Taiwan and Toronto. An ordinary day For a Theravada monk in Thailand, Laos or Myanmar, the day begins before dawn with chanting and meditation, then the alms round: walking barefoot through the village in silence while lay people kneel to place rice and food in the bowl. The monk does not thank them; in the logic of the gift, they are thanking him for the chance to make merit. There is one main meal, finished before noon, then study, teaching, chores, meditation and evening chanting. For a lay Buddhist, a day might include bowing three times before the household shrine, offering flowers, a candle, incense or water to the Buddha image, and reciting the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts: to refrain from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, false speech and intoxicants. In East Asia, it might mean a Pure Land chant or a visit to a temple to light incense for a sick relative or ask a bodhisattva for help with exams. Merit The central idea of lay Buddhist life across much of Asia is merit (punna): the good karma produced by generosity, morality and meditation. The most meritorious act for most lay people is dana, giving, especially to the sangha. Merit can be shared or "transferred," above all to dead relatives. Feeding monks, sponsoring a temple building, releasing captive animals, copying a sutra or ordaining a son can all produce merit. Outsiders sometimes dismiss this as a spiritual economy. Buddhists tend to see it as the training ground of the whole path: generosity loosens craving, and the sangha and lay people sustain each other. Monks receive food and robes; the laity receive teaching, blessings, rituals and the merit of having given. The week and the year Many Theravada lay people observe uposatha days, linked to the phases of the moon, by visiting the temple and taking eight precepts instead of five, adding celibacy, not eating after noon, and abstaining from entertainment and luxurious seats. The monastic year turns on the rains retreat (vassa), about three months in the monsoon season when monks stay in one place for study and practice, ending with the Kathina festival, when lay people present new robes and other necessities to the monks. Festival When What happens Vesak (Buddha Day) Full moon of May (dates vary) Celebrates the Buddha's birth, awakening and death; lanterns, temple visits, giving Rains retreat (Vassa) About three months in the monsoon season Monks stay put; some laity take extra precepts Kathina The month after the rains retreat Lay offering of robes to the sangha Ullambana / Obon 7th lunar month (China); mid-summer (Japan) Offerings to help ancestors and "hungry ghosts" Losar Tibetan New Year Temple rituals, offerings, family gatherings Lunar New Year January–February Temple visits for blessings across East Asia In 1999 the United Nations General Assembly recognised the Day of Vesak internationally (resolution 54/115), describing it as the day Buddhists commemorate "the birth, the attainment of enlightenment and the passing away of the Buddha." Nuns The Buddha, according to the texts, agreed after some hesitation to ordain women, and the order of nuns, bhikkhunis, flourished in India and Sri Lanka and still exists in East Asia, where Taiwan's nuns are among the most visible and active Buddhists in the world. But the full ordination line for women appears to have lapsed in Sri Lanka around the 11th century, and it is commonly said never to have reached Tibet or most of South-East Asia (some historians dispute this). Since the late 20th century, women have been ordained again in Sri Lanka and elsewhere with the help of East Asian nuns. Supporters see this as restoring what the Buddha established; many conservative monks, especially in Thailand and Myanmar, hold that a lapsed lineage cannot be revived. It is one of the liveliest debates in Buddhism today. Life's passages In Theravada countries many young men ordain temporarily, for weeks or months, sometimes to make merit for their parents. In Japan, as the companion long read on China and Japan describes, Buddhism is above all the religion of death and memory: funerals, posthumous names, memorial services and the summer festival of Obon, when the dead are believed to return. Part 11 — Colonialism, revival, modernism and mindfulness The modern history of Buddhism begins with an encounter that went badly for Buddhists: European empire. The colonial shock By the 19th century, Sri Lanka, Burma and much of South-East Asia were under British or French rule. Colonial governments ended royal patronage, which had sustained the sangha for two thousand years; in Burma the British abolished the monarchy in 1885. Christian missionaries opened schools and published attacks on Buddhism. European scholars, meanwhile, were discovering the Pali texts and constructing "Buddhism" as an object of study, often admiring a supposedly pure, rational original teaching while disparaging the ritual and devotional religion actually practised in Asia. Revival Buddhists answered. In Sri Lanka a revival movement held public debates with missionaries and founded Buddhist schools. Two Americans, Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society, formally took the refuges and precepts in Ceylon in 1880; Olcott wrote a Buddhist Catechism (1881) modelled on Christian ones and helped design the Buddhist flag (1885), now used worldwide. His young protégé Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933) campaigned to restore Bodh Gaya to Buddhist hands and spoke for Buddhism at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, alongside the Japanese Zen teacher Soyen Shaku. Dharmapala's legacy is double-edged. He gave Sri Lankans pride in a tradition colonial rulers looked down on. He also fused Buddhism with Sinhala nationalism, in language hostile to Christians, Muslims and Tamils, a strand whose consequences Part 12 describes. Scholars call the result Buddhist modernism, and sometimes, following the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, "Protestant Buddhism" because of its lay leadership, emphasis on texts and suspicion of ritual. As the scholar David McMahan has described it, modernist Buddhism reinterpreted the tradition in dialogue with Western rationalism, science, Romanticism and Protestant Christianity. It presented Buddhism as a philosophy rather than a religion, compatible with science, centred on meditation, and individual rather than communal. The meditation revolution Before the 20th century, intensive meditation was largely the work of a minority of monks. In colonial Burma, teachers such as Ledi Sayadaw and later Mahasi Sayadaw opened vipassana (insight) meditation to lay people, with simplified methods suited to busy lives. It was a revolution: meditation centres where office workers and housewives could practise for days. From Burma, Thailand, Japan and the Tibetan diaspora, teachers brought meditation to the West from the 1950s to the 1970s. Mindfulness In 1979 the molecular biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn developed the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme at what is now UMass Memorial Health in Massachusetts: eight weeks of meditation and yoga drawn from Buddhist practice but taught without Buddhist language or belief. MBSR and its offshoots, such as Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for recurrent depression, spread to hospitals, schools, armies and corporations. The library's Meditation, Without the Woo covers the practice itself. The evidence is real and moderate. A 2014 meta-analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine (Goyal and colleagues) pooled 47 randomised trials with 3,515 participants. It found moderate evidence that mindfulness programmes improved anxiety, depression and pain, with effect sizes around 0.3, low or insufficient evidence for many other claimed benefits, and no evidence that meditation was better than other active treatments such as drugs or exercise. The critics Mindfulness has critics from several directions, and their arguments differ. Critique The argument The reply "McMindfulness" (Ronald Purser, 2019) Stripped of ethics and social critique, mindfulness becomes a tool to make stressed workers more productive and blame individuals for systemic problems Many teachers include ethics and compassion; reducing suffering in any setting is worthwhile Traditionalist Buddhist Mindfulness (sati) in the Eightfold Path is one factor among eight, tied to right view and ethics; cut loose, it is no longer the Buddha's path Secular programmes never claimed to be the whole path; they are a doorway Scientific Early studies were small and hyped; effects are modest; adverse experiences are under-reported Evidence has improved; moderate effects for common problems matter Cultural Western Buddhism of meditation centres ignores the Asian Buddhists who form the overwhelming majority, and their devotional practice Buddhism has always adapted to new cultures To one teacher, secular mindfulness is the Buddha's medicine finally reaching everyone. To another, it is the medicine with the active ingredient removed. Both are Buddhists, and both have a point. Part 12 — Engaged Buddhism, and Buddhism's darker entanglements with power Buddhism is often presented in the West as the religion of peace. Its history, like every religion's, is more complicated, and its modern history includes both some of the most admired peace movements of the century and some of its most troubling nationalist violence. Both deserve to be described plainly. Engaged Buddhism The Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022) was ordained at sixteen and, during the war in Vietnam, developed what he called engaged Buddhism: a Buddhism that responds directly to the suffering of society, through relief work, peace activism and mindful daily life. His calls for peace led to decades of exile. From his community at Plum Village in France he became, perhaps more than anyone, the person who taught mindfulness to the West. He suffered a severe stroke in November 2014, returned to Vietnam, and died on 22 January 2022, aged 95. Engaged Buddhism has many other faces: Ambedkar's movement against caste in India; the Sarvodaya Shramadana village development movement in Sri Lanka; Thai monks who "ordain" trees to protect forests from logging; Taiwanese Buddhist relief organisations; and the Dalai Lama's long advocacy of non-violence, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. In Myanmar in 2007, after the military government removed fuel subsidies, tens of thousands of monks marched through Yangon and other cities in what became known as the Saffron Revolution. Human Rights Watch reported that on 24 September estimates reached 30,000 to 50,000 monks. Their most powerful weapon was religious: they "overturned their bowls," refusing alms from soldiers and officials, which denied the regime the merit and legitimacy that came from supporting the sangha. The army cracked down on 26 and 27 September, raiding monasteries, detaining thousands of monks and killing an unknown number of people. Buddhist nationalism: Myanmar The same country shows the other face. After political reforms began in 2011, Myanmar saw what the UN's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar called "an increase in Buddhist nationalism, virulent anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence between Buddhists and Muslims." The largest nationalist organisation, the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion (MaBaTha), "cast itself as the protector of Buddhism." The ultranationalist monk Ashin Wirathu became its best-known voice. In the mission's account, a campaign of hatred against the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Rakhine State, was led from 2012 by Rakhine nationalist parties and organisations, "radical Buddhist monk organizations," officials and others, spreading through publications, rallies, shop boycotts and, crucially, Facebook, which for most users in Myanmar "is the Internet." Wirathu preached in northern Rakhine in May and July 2017. After Rohingya militants (ARSA) attacked police posts on 25 August 2017, the army launched what it called "clearance operations." By mid-August 2018, nearly 725,000 Rohingya had fled to Bangladesh. The mission's 2018 report concluded that there was sufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution of senior military officers for genocide, as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes. Myanmar's government and military rejected the findings, describing the operations as a response to terrorist attacks. In 2019 The Gambia brought a case against Myanmar under the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice. The court ordered provisional measures to protect the Rohingya in January 2020, confirmed its jurisdiction in July 2022, and heard the merits from 12 to 29 January 2026. As of October 2026 it had not delivered its judgment. Buddhist nationalism: Sri Lanka In Sri Lanka, Buddhism is woven into the state. Article 9 of the constitution gives Buddhism "the foremost place" and makes it "the duty of the State to protect and foster the Buddha Sasana, while assuring to all religions" the rights to freedom of religion. Since independence, a strand of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism has seen the island as a land entrusted to Buddhism and its Sinhala people as its guardians, a vision with roots in the ancient chronicles and in Dharmapala's revival. Its harder edge has turned against minorities. In June 2014, according to Human Rights Watch, a rally by the hardline Buddhist group Bodu Bala Sena in Aluthgama escalated into anti-Muslim riots that killed four Muslims, injured at least 80 people and destroyed many Muslim homes and businesses. In March 2018 anti-Muslim riots in Ampara and then Kandy, linked by HRW to ultranationalist Sinhala Buddhist groups, killed at least two people and led to a ten-day nationwide state of emergency. After the Easter Sunday bombings of 21 April 2019, in which Islamist suicide bombers killed more than 250 people in churches and hotels, mobs attacked Muslim property, some of them encouraged, HRW reported, by hardline monks. How to understand this Describing these events is not the same as blaming Buddhism, and it is not the same as excusing it. Three points are fair to all sides. The nationalists' own case. Nationalist monks present themselves as defenders of a minority faith worldwide and of a heritage they see as threatened by demographic change, conversion and, after 2019, terrorism. Many of their supporters remember colonial rule as a time when Buddhism was humbled. The critics within Buddhism. Many Buddhist monks and lay people in both countries have condemned the violence as a betrayal of the first precept, against killing, and of the Buddha's teaching that hatred is never ended by hatred. Scholars have pointed out that Buddhist texts were used to justify war long before modern nationalism (the collection Buddhist Warfare, 2009, edited by Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer, gathers examples). The general pattern. When a religion becomes the badge of a nation, and its clergy depend on the state, religious language is easily recruited for ethnic conflict. Buddhism is not exempt from that pattern, and neither is any other faith. The same monasteries produced the monks who overturned their bowls against a dictatorship and the monks who preached hatred against a minority. Neither group is the "real" Buddhism. Both are part of its history. Part 13 — Tibet and the question of the next Dalai Lama No question in Buddhism is more political than who will be the next Dalai Lama. The background In 1950 the People's Liberation Army entered Tibet. After a failed uprising in Lhasa in 1959, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, born on 6 July 1935, fled to India, followed, according to the Central Tibetan Administration, by some 80,000 Tibetans. On 29 April 1959 he established an exile administration, now based in Dharamshala; the exile population is over 140,000, about 100,000 of them in India. Beijing regards Tibet (which it calls Xizang) as an inalienable part of China and its rule there as liberation from feudal serfdom and the driver of economic development; Tibetan exile groups and international human rights organisations describe decades of political and religious repression. The 1995 precedent The fear on both sides comes from what happened to the Panchen Lama, the second-highest Gelug lama, who traditionally helps identify the Dalai Lama's reincarnation and vice versa. On 14 May 1995 the Dalai Lama recognised a six-year-old boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, as the 11th Panchen Lama. Shortly afterwards, as UN human rights experts recounted in 2020, he and his parents were taken from their village by Chinese authorities. The government said he was under "government protection," later that he was living a normal life, but has refused to give precise information about his whereabouts. It installed its own candidate. In 2007 the State Religious Affairs Bureau issued Order No. 5, setting out rules under which reincarnations of "living Buddhas" require state approval. The two positions The Dalai Lama and the exile institutions The government of the People's Republic of China Who decides The Gaden Phodrang Trust, the Dalai Lama's own office The central government, with approval required by law How Search and recognition "in accordance with past tradition" The "golden urn" lot-drawing and central approval, said to date from the Qing Where The Dalai Lama has written that his successor would be born in the "free world" A "domestic search" inside China Key texts Statements of 24 September 2011 and 21 May 2025 2007 measures on reincarnation of living Buddhas; official statements In a statement dated 21 May 2025 and released on 2 July 2025, days before his 90th birthday, the Dalai Lama declared: "I am affirming that the institution of the Dalai Lama will continue." He said that "the Gaden Phodrang Trust has sole authority to recognize the future reincarnation" and that "no one else has any such authority to interfere in this matter." China's position, as set out in an official China Daily commentary in June 2025, is that the reincarnation of living Buddhas must "abide by national laws and regulations and follow religious rituals and historical customs," including "the golden urn lot-drawing and the approval of the central government," and a "domestic search." Since then the dispute has become international. In March 2026 the Czech Senate passed a resolution saying China has no legitimate authority over the succession. In August 2025, Human Rights Watch reported, President Xi Jinping visited Tibet and called on Tibetan Buddhism to "adapt to socialist society," and authorities tightened restrictions at several monasteries around the Dalai Lama's birthday. Why it matters Many observers expect that when the 14th Dalai Lama dies there may be two Dalai Lamas, one recognised by his own office and almost certainly found outside China, and one chosen inside China with state approval, just as there are now two Panchen Lamas. For Tibetan Buddhists the question is not political at all: it is whether the compassionate intention of a bodhisattva can be directed by a government. For Beijing it is a question of sovereignty and stability. For everyone else, it is a test of whether a religion's own institutions can decide its succession. A reincarnation system designed to keep a teaching alive across lifetimes has become one of the sharpest tests of religious freedom in the world. Part 14 — Buddhism today: numbers, branches and open questions How many Buddhists? Counting Buddhists is harder than counting adherents of most faiths, because in East Asia many people mix Buddhist practice with folk religion, Confucian ethics and ancestor rites without identifying as "Buddhist" on a survey. With that caution, the most careful global estimate comes from the Pew Research Center, published in June 2025. Measure (Pew Research Center, 2025) Figure Buddhists worldwide, 2010 343 million Buddhists worldwide, 2020 324 million (4.1% of humanity) Change -5%; the only major religious group to shrink in number Share living in Asia and the Pacific 98% Largest Buddhist populations, 2020 Thailand 68 million (94%); China 53 million (about 4%) Buddhist-majority countries Cambodia 97%, Thailand 94%, Myanmar 89%, Bhutan 75%, Sri Lanka 70%, Laos 64%, Mongolia 51% Fastest growth (from small bases) North America up 27% to 5.0 million; Europe up 26% to 2.5 million Pew attributes the decline mainly to people raised Buddhist in East Asia ceasing to identify with any religion (China lost 23 million self-identified Buddhists over the decade and Japan 7 million; South Korea's Buddhist share fell about 7 points to 19 percent), together with low birth rates and ageing populations. For every 1.0 person who became Buddhist, 1.8 raised Buddhist left. These numbers carry a large uncertainty in China. Only about 4 percent of Chinese adults identify Buddhism as their religion, but, as the companion long read describes, a third of Chinese adults told one 2018 survey they believe in the Buddha or bodhisattvas. Depending on how you count, there are between three hundred million Buddhists in the world and well over half a billion. The branches today Branch Where it is strongest Rough character Theravada Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia Pali Canon; monastic-centred; merit and alms East Asian Mahayana China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Vietnam Pure Land, Chan/Zen, Tiantai, Huayan; strong lay movements Vajrayana Tibet, Bhutan, Mongolia, Himalayas, Russian republics, and Japan's Shingon Tantra, lamas, tulkus Modern and new movements Worldwide Lay-led, often meditation-centred; Japanese lay movements such as Soka Gakkai; Ambedkarite Buddhism Open questions inside Buddhism What did the Buddha actually teach? Scholars and practitioners still argue over which layers of the texts are earliest, and some Western and Asian movements try to recover an "early Buddhism" stripped of later additions. Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhists reply that later teachings are not additions but fuller revelations. Rebirth. Is it essential, or can a Buddhism without literal rebirth still be the Buddha's path? (Part 3.) Women's ordination. Can the full ordination of nuns be restored where it lapsed, and should women have equal standing in the sangha? (Part 10.) Teachers and power. Several Western Buddhist communities, in both Zen and Tibetan lineages, have been shaken by revelations of sexual and financial abuse by revered teachers. The debate is over how a tradition that asks students to trust a teacher deeply can also protect them. Religion and nation. Can the old partnership between the sangha and the state survive without Buddhism becoming a tool of ethnic politics? (Part 12.) Secularisation and the mindfulness market. East Asian Buddhism is ageing and shrinking even as Buddhist-derived practices spread worldwide in secular form. Is that decline or transformation? The takeaway Buddhism began with a man of the Sakya clan, probably in the 5th century BCE, who diagnosed the human condition as dukkha, unsatisfactoriness rooted in craving, and prescribed a path of ethics, meditation and wisdom to end it. He taught that there is no permanent self behind experience, that everything arises from conditions, that intention shapes the future and that the fires of craving can go out. He left no successor, only a community and a teaching carried in memory. From that open beginning grew the Theravada of South and South-East Asia, the Mahayana of East Asia with its bodhisattvas, emptiness, Pure Land and Zen, and the Vajrayana of Tibet. Spread by monks and merchants rather than armies, Buddhism nearly vanished from India, met colonial rule with revival and reinvention, and gave the modern world both mindfulness and engaged Buddhism, while also, like other faiths, lending its language to nationalism and violence. Today about 324 million people identify as Buddhist, most in Asia, and many more live with Buddhist practices without the label. Try this: read the Buddha's first sermon in full; it takes about five minutes, and free translations are linked below. Then, for one day, watch for the moment in the second noble truth: the instant a pleasant or unpleasant feeling turns into "I must have this" or "make it stop." You do not have to believe anything to notice it. Noticing it is where the path begins. Sources & Further Reading Sources - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Buddha" (iep.utm.edu/buddha): traditional and scholarly dates (623–543 BCE; c. 560–480; 5th century; Gombrich c. 404 BCE), the sources for his life, the core teachings, karma as intention, the five destinations, nirvana. - T. W. Rhys Davids (trans.), Buddhist Suttas, Sacred Books of the East vol. 11 (Oxford, 1881, public domain; via archive.org): Dhamma-kakka-ppavattana Sutta (SN 56.11) §§3–8; Maha-parinibbana Suttanta II.32–33, V.16–20, VI.10. - F. Max Müller (trans.), The Dhammapada, Sacred Books of the East vol. 10 (1881, public domain; Project Gutenberg #2017): verses 1, 5, 183, 279. - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Nagarjuna" (dates, MMK, svabhava); "Vasubandhu" (dates, vijnaptimatra, three natures, idealism debate); "Japanese Pure Land Philosophy" (sutras, Tanluan, Shandao, Honen, Shinran, self-power and Other Power); "Chan Buddhism" (Huike, Huineng, Linji, Huichang suppression, gong'an, McRae and Faure on "invention of tradition"; Xuanzang's dates). - S. Dhammika, The Edicts of King Asoka (Buddhist Publication Society, Wheel 386/387, 1993), accesstoinsight.org, reproduced for free distribution under the BPS licence: Rock Edicts XII and XIII; Ashoka's dates; Prinsep's decipherment (1837). - Traditional accounts of the councils and the schools, with scholarly caveats, from the standard literature summarised in Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism (1998); Gandhari as a vehicle of early Buddhist literature: gandhari.org. - Nalanda University, "History and Revival" (founding by Kumaragupta in 427 CE, scale, end in the 12th century). - United Nations, "Day of Vesak" (resolution 54/115, 1999); Plum Village, "Thich Nhat Hanh" (dates, stroke, death); UMass Memorial Health, Center for Mindfulness (MBSR, 1979). - M. Goyal et al., "Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: a systematic review and meta-analysis," JAMA Internal Medicine 174(3), 2014, 357–68. - Human Rights Watch, Crackdown: Repression of the 2007 Popular Protests in Burma (December 2007); World Reports 2015, 2019 and 2020 (Sri Lanka chapters) and 2026 (China chapter). - UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, report A/HRC/39/64 (12 September 2018); International Court of Justice, The Gambia v. Myanmar, case page (accessed October 2026). - Constitution of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, Article 9 (parliament.lk). - Central Tibetan Administration (tibet.net): "Statement Affirming the Continuation of the Institution of Dalai Lama" (dated 21 May 2025, released 2 July 2025) and "About CTA"; UN special procedures communication AL CHN 12/2020 (2 June 2020) on Gedhun Choekyi Nyima and State Religious Affairs Bureau Order No. 5; China Daily, "Dalai Lama clique up to its tricks again" (4 June 2025), for the PRC position. - Pew Research Center, "How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020" and "Buddhist population change" (9 June 2025); "Measuring Religion in China" (30 August 2023). - Dates for the spread to Korea and Japan, Samye, the Dalai Lama title (1578), the 14th Dalai Lama's birth and Nobel Prize, Olcott and Dharmapala, Ambedkar's 1956 conversion and the Lotus Sutra translation of 406 follow standard reference accounts and were cross-checked where possible against the sources above. Go deeper - 📘 What the Buddha Taught — Walpola Rahula (1959). A Sri Lankan monk-scholar's short, clear account of the core teachings from the Pali texts; still the best first book. - 📘 The Foundations of Buddhism — Rupert Gethin (1998). The best one-volume scholarly introduction to the shared ideas and practices of all the schools. - 📘 In the Buddha's Words — Bhikkhu Bodhi (2005). An anthology of the Pali discourses arranged by theme, with introductions; the way to read the sources themselves. - 📘 Mahayana Buddhism — Paul Williams (2nd ed., 2008). The standard guide to the Great Vehicle, from Madhyamaka and Yogacara to Pure Land and Tibet. - 📘 The Making of Buddhist Modernism — David McMahan (2008). How Buddhism was reinvented in conversation with science and the West; essential context for mindfulness. - 📘 McMindfulness — Ronald Purser (2019). The sharpest critique of the corporate mindfulness boom; read it alongside Goyal et al. - 🌐 Access to Insight — thousands of free translations of Pali texts, including the first sermon (SN 56.11) and the discourse on not-self (SN 22.59), offered for free distribution. - 🌐 Pew Research Center, "How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020" — the numbers, country by country. - 🌐 Related pieces in this library: The World's Religions, One Page Each; Bodhidharma; Meditation, Without the Woo; How the Sacred Texts Were Written; Mysticism 101; Pilgrimage; and in this series, China and Japan: Confucianism, Daoism and Shinto. Step 16. Jainism and Sikhism: India's Paths of Non-Violence and the Saint-Soldier --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: Jainism and Sikhism. One tradition asks its followers to harm no living thing, not even an onion. The other asks its followers to defend the defenceless, sword at the hip, after a shared meal open to anyone. Two minority faiths of India, and the long histories that shaped them. Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each, How the Sacred Texts Were Written and Kabir: The Weaver of the Heart. Companion pieces: the Religions long reads on Hinduism and on Buddhism, Pilgrimage: Why Humans Walk to Holy Places and If I Was Born in India. Two numbers from the largest recent survey of religion in India say a great deal about two of its smaller faiths. Among India's Jains, 92 percent told the Pew Research Center that they are vegetarian, and 67 percent go further, refusing potatoes, onions, garlic and other root vegetables, because pulling a plant from the soil destroys it whole along with countless tiny lives around it. Among India's Sikhs, 40 percent said they go to a gurdwara, a Sikh house of worship, every day. Jains are less than half of one percent of India's people; Sikhs are under two percent. Yet the Jain idea of ahimsa, non-violence, shaped Gandhi and through him many of the protest movements of the twentieth century, and the Sikh langar, the free kitchen where anyone of any caste or faith sits on the floor and eats the same meal, has become one of the most recognisable acts of hospitality in the world. They are very different traditions. Jainism is one of the oldest living religions of India, with roots in the same era of wandering ascetics that produced the Buddha. Sikhism is one of the youngest of the world's major religions, born in the Punjab in the late fifteenth century. One centres on liberation of the soul through self-discipline, with no creator God; the other on loving remembrance of one God, lived out in ordinary working life. What they share is a homeland, a rejection of caste hierarchy in principle, a deep ethic of service, and the experience of being minorities whose identity has been contested, protected and sometimes paid for in blood. A note on approach: this piece describes Jain and Sikh traditions as their followers understand them and sets beside that what historians have found, keeping the two clearly distinct and treating both with respect. Where branches disagree (Digambara and Shvetambara, Khalsa and non-initiated Sikhs, the Ravidassias), each is described as its own members would recognise it. Painful modern history, above all the events of 1984, is told through dated official inquiries and independent human rights reports, with disputed figures given as ranges. Scripture quotations come from public-domain translations: Hermann Jacobi's Jaina Sutras (1884) and Max Arthur Macauliffe's The Sikh Religion (1909). In this long read Two faiths of the Indian world The Jinas: Mahavira and the twenty-four Tirthankaras The vows: ahimsa, aparigraha and many-sided truth Digambara and Shvetambara: how the community divided Monks, nuns and lay life Sallekhana: a vow of peaceful death, and India's courts Jains in history and today Guru Nanak and a new path (1469–1539) The ten Gurus (1539–1708) The Guru Granth Sahib: a scripture of many voices The Khalsa and the five Ks (1699) Gurdwara, langar and the Sikh day From the Mughals to Ranjit Singh to the British (1708–1947) Partition (1947) 1984: Operation Blue Star, an assassination and the killings that followed The diaspora and the questions Sikhs argue about today Part 1 — Two faiths of the Indian world Both Jainism and Sikhism grew up alongside the traditions now called Hinduism, and both share with them a common vocabulary: karma, rebirth, liberation, the guru, the sacred name. That closeness has been both a bridge and a source of friction. India's Constitution, in its article on religious freedom, says that references to Hindus "shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion", and the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 covers Jains and Sikhs too. Many Jains and Sikhs regard that grouping as a failure to recognise them as distinct religions, a point their leaders have pressed for decades. How close do they feel? Pew's survey found that two-thirds of Jains and about half of Sikhs say they have a lot in common with Hindus. Jainism Sikhism Began Traditionally eternal, taught anew by 24 Tirthankaras; Mahavira, the last, lived c. 6th–5th century BCE Guru Nanak, born 1469, in the Punjab God No creator God; liberated souls are perfected and worshipped as ideals One God, formless, creator, beyond birth and death Goal Liberation of the soul from karmic matter Liberation through union with God, by grace and remembrance Path Right faith, right knowledge, right conduct; strict non-violence Remembering God's name, honest work, sharing with others Scripture The Agamas (Shvetambara canon); Digambaras hold the original canon lost The Guru Granth Sahib, regarded as the living Guru Members in India (2011 census) 4,451,753 (0.37%) 20,833,116 (1.72%) Members worldwide (estimate) About 4–5 million About 25–30 million The world figures are estimates. Pew's global studies count both faiths within a combined "other religions" category, so the best numbers come from national censuses. India's last completed census was in 2011; the next is under way and will report after 2027. JAINISM Part 2 — The Jinas: Mahavira and the twenty-four Tirthankaras The tradition's account In Jain teaching the universe has no beginning and no creator. Time turns like a wheel, through a half-cycle of ascent and a half-cycle of decline (utsarpini and avasarpini). In each half-cycle, twenty-four great teachers appear. They are called Tirthankaras, "ford-makers", because they find and show the crossing over the river of rebirth, and Jinas, "conquerors", because they have conquered their own passions. The religion takes its name from them: Jains are followers of the Jinas. In our present age of decline, the first Tirthankara was Rishabha, credited in tradition with founding civilised society itself, teaching farming, writing and the arts. The twenty-third was Parshva; the twenty-fourth and last was Mahavira. On the Jain view Mahavira did not found Jainism. He restored, in his own time, an eternal teaching. Mahavira's story is told in the scriptures, above all the Kalpa Sutra, which is recited aloud each year during the festival of Paryushan. He was born Vardhamana, "ever-increasing", into a royal Kshatriya family at Kundagrama, near Vaishali in what is now Bihar. Tradition dates his birth to 599 BCE. At about thirty he renounced his position, gave away his possessions, and spent some twelve and a half years in fasting, silence and meditation, enduring heat, cold, insects and the hostility of villagers. He then attained kevala jnana, omniscience, the complete knowledge of a soul freed from all obscuring karma. He taught for about thirty years and gathered a community of monks, nuns and lay followers, and attained final liberation at Pavapuri. The two great branches of Jainism tell his life with some differences. Shvetambara tradition says he married a princess, Yashoda, and had a daughter; Digambara tradition says he never married. Shvetambaras tell a striking story of his conception, in which the embryo was transferred by the gods from the womb of a Brahmin woman, Devananda, to that of the Kshatriya queen Trishala. The two branches also date his liberation differently: 527 BCE for Shvetambaras, the start of their Vira Samvat era, and 510 BCE for Digambaras. What historians say Historians do not doubt that Mahavira existed. He appears, as a rival teacher called Nigantha Nataputta, in early Buddhist texts, which makes him an older or near contemporary of the Buddha. Many scholars place him later than the traditional dates, often by up to about a century, in the fifth century BCE, though the Buddha's own dates are uncertain too. Parshva is a harder case. Jain tradition places him in the ninth century BCE, about 250 years before Mahavira; many historians accept that a teacher of that name probably existed, somewhat later, in the eighth or seventh century BCE. Early texts mention followers of Parshva who met Mahavira's disciples, and Mahavira is credited with adding a fifth vow to the four that Parshva had taught. The earlier Tirthankaras, whose lives in tradition last hundreds of thousands of years, belong to sacred cosmology rather than history. Jains do not say Mahavira invented their religion. They say he was the most recent person to walk all the way across, and to leave the ford open behind him. Gods without a creator Jains are sometimes described as atheists, which is accurate only in a narrow sense. There is no creator God, and the Jinas, being liberated, do not intervene in the world or answer prayers in the ordinary sense. But Jains worship the Jinas in temples, with offerings and hymns, as models of what every soul can become. Jain temples also house guardian deities, such as the goddesses Padmavati and Ambika, who can grant worldly help. The worshipper honours the Jina in order to become like the Jina. Part 3 — The vows: ahimsa, aparigraha and many-sided truth The soul and karma Jain teaching divides reality into jiva, souls or living beings, and everything that is not soul: matter, space, time, and the media of motion and rest. Souls are numberless. They exist not only in humans, animals and plants, but in the elements themselves: in particles of earth, drops of water, flames and gusts of wind. The oldest Jain scripture, the Acharanga Sutra, opens by working through each class of life in turn, from earth-bodies to animals, and draws the same conclusion every time: "Knowing them, a wise man should not act sinfully towards animals, nor cause others to act so, nor allow others to act so." — Acharanga Sutra 1.1.6 (Jacobi) The formula is precise: do no harm, cause none, and permit none. What makes harm so serious is the Jain understanding of karma. In Jainism karma is not only a moral law. It is described as a kind of subtle matter that sticks to the soul when it acts with passion, weighing it down and keeping it in the cycle of rebirth. Liberation means stopping the inflow of new karma and burning off the old through austerity, until the soul, freed, rises to the top of the universe and dwells there in perfect knowledge and bliss. The three jewels The Tattvartha Sutra, composed by Umasvati sometime between the second and fifth centuries CE and the only text accepted by every Jain sect, begins with the formula of the whole path: right faith, right knowledge and right conduct together are the path to liberation. These are the "three jewels" (ratnatraya). The five great vows Right conduct is summed up in five vows, taken in full by monks and nuns and in lesser, adapted forms by lay people. Vow Meaning For monks and nuns For lay Jains Ahimsa Non-violence No harm to any being, however small: sweeping the path, filtering water, not eating after dark Vegetarianism; avoiding occupations that destroy life; care in daily acts Satya Truthfulness Never to speak falsely Honesty in speech and business Asteya Not taking what is not given Accepting only what is freely offered Honesty in trade, no theft or fraud Brahmacharya Chastity Complete celibacy Faithfulness in marriage Aparigraha Non-possession, non-attachment Owning almost nothing Limiting possessions and desires; giving generously Aparigraha, non-possession, is the vow the modern world finds most surprising. It is not simply about owning little. It is about not being owned by what one has, since attachment itself binds the soul. Many Jain lay people voluntarily set lifetime limits on their wealth or possessions and give the rest away. Many-sided truth The most philosophically distinctive Jain teaching is anekantavada, "the doctrine of non-one-sidedness". Reality is complex and has many aspects, so any single statement about it captures only part. Jain thinkers illustrated this with the story of blind men who each touch one part of an elephant, the trunk, a leg, an ear, and each confidently describe a different animal. From this came two refinements. Nayavada, the doctrine of standpoints, holds that every judgement is true only from a particular point of view. Syadvada adds the little word syat, "from a certain perspective" or "in some respect", to every claim. A pot, a Jain logician would say, exists in some respect (as this pot, here and now), does not exist in another (as a cloth, or elsewhere), and so on through seven possible combinations. Anekantavada is ahimsa applied to thought: a refusal to do violence to the truth by pretending your part of it is the whole. Jain writers have long presented anekantavada as a basis for tolerance between viewpoints and religions. Critics, including classical Hindu and Buddhist philosophers, argued that it collapses into contradiction or relativism. Jain logicians replied that it is not relativism, since it affirms that reality is definite but many-sided, and that each standpoint, properly qualified, is true. The Tattvartha Sutra contains a short phrase that many Jains today treat as a motto: parasparopagraho jivanam, "souls render service to one another" (5.21). It appears on the Jain emblem adopted in 1975. Part 4 — Digambara and Shvetambara: how the community divided The two branches Jainism's great division is between the Digambaras, "sky-clad", whose most advanced monks renounce even clothing, and the Shvetambaras, "white-clad", whose monks and nuns wear simple white robes. Jainpedia, the academic reference project on Jainism, describes the split as likely to have begun early in the Common Era and as more than 1,500 years old. Each side tells its own story of the division. A well-known Digambara account links it to a twelve-year famine in the north in the time of the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta, when the monk Bhadrabahu led part of the community south to Karnataka, where they kept the strict rule of nudity; those who stayed behind, on this account, relaxed the discipline and adopted clothing. Historians treat the story as tradition rather than established history. The real differences grew gradually, around a few central disagreements. Question Digambara view Shvetambara view Must a monk renounce clothing? Yes; complete non-possession requires nudity for full ascetics No; white robes are compatible with non-possession Can a woman attain liberation? Not in a female body; she must first be reborn as a man Yes Was Malli, the 19th Tirthankara, a woman? No; all Tirthankaras were men Yes The ancient scriptures The original canon was lost; surviving teachings were written down in the 2nd century CE A canon survives, fixed at a council at Valabhi in the 5th century CE Images of the Jinas Unclothed, unadorned Often with eyes, crowns and ornaments added The scriptures The Shvetambara canon, the Agamas, is written mainly in Ardhamagadhi, an ancient Prakrit language. By Shvetambara tradition it was recited and preserved orally for centuries and finally written down at a council at Valabhi in Gujarat, under the monk Devarddhigani, about 980 or 993 years after Mahavira's death, which corresponds to roughly 453 or 466 CE. Both branches agree that some of the oldest texts, the Purvas and the twelfth Anga, were lost early. Digambaras go further and regard the whole original canon as lost; they revere later texts such as the works of the great teacher Kundakunda and the Shatkhandagama instead. Branches within the branches Each side later divided again, often over image worship. Murtipujaka ("image-worshipping") Shvetambaras are the largest group. They worship in temples and divide into monastic lineages called gacchas. Sthanakvasis grew from the reforms of a 15th-century layman, Lonka Shah, who rejected image worship; they meet in simple halls rather than temples, and their monks and nuns wear a cloth over the mouth. Terapanthis follow a reform led by Acharya Bhikshu, a former Sthanakvasi monk who led the new order from 1760 until 1803. Uniquely, the whole order is led by a single acharya, chosen by his predecessor. One of them, Acharya Tulsi, founded the Anuvrat movement in 1949 to promote "small vows" of non-violence and honesty among people of any faith. Digambara communities are found across much of India, including Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan; Shvetambaras are concentrated mainly in Gujarat, Rajasthan and coastal Maharashtra. The divisions are real, sometimes bitter, as in disputes over the control of shared pilgrimage sites, but both sides recognise one another as Jains, share the Tattvartha Sutra and celebrate many of the same festivals. Part 5 — Monks, nuns and lay life The mendicants Jainism is organised around a fourfold community: monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen. The ascetics are its living ideal. A Jain monk or nun takes the five great vows in full. They own almost nothing: robes (for Shvetambaras), a begging bowl, a water pot, scriptures, and a small broom or whisk to brush insects gently from their path and seat. Digambara monks carry a broom of peacock feathers and a water pot as almost their only equipment. They walk everywhere barefoot, moving from place to place, and settle only during the rainy season, when the ground teems with life. They eat only what lay families offer, following detailed rules about what may be accepted: Shvetambara image-worshipping monks and nuns go for alms twice a day, while a Digambara monk takes food from his cupped hands. They use only water that has been boiled, to limit harm to living beings. At initiation, and periodically after, they pull out their hair by hand rather than cut it, a ritual called keshalocha that is a test of endurance. Among Shvetambaras, nuns outnumber monks; in the largest modern lineage, the Tapa Gaccha, by about three and a half to one. Among Digambaras, women can become nuns but, on the Digambara view, cannot attain liberation in that life. Lay life Most Jains are householders, and their religion is woven into ordinary days. The lay path adapts the great vows into smaller ones (anuvratas) and adds further vows of discipline and generosity. Food is where Jain practice is most visible. Pew found that 92 percent of Indian Jains are vegetarian, most of them avoiding eggs as well, and 67 percent also avoid root vegetables. Many observant Jains do not eat after sunset, when insects are drawn to lamps and food, filter their water, and avoid honey and alcohol. Worship may take place daily: 81 percent of Indian Jains told Pew they perform puja every day, and 73 percent pray daily. In a temple, worshippers bathe the image of a Jina, offer rice, flowers, sandalwood paste and lamps, and meditate on the Jina's qualities. Sthanakvasis and Terapanthis, who reject images, focus on meditation and the teaching of their mendicants. Giving is central. Lay people support the mendicants with food and shelter, and Jain communities have long funded temples, libraries of manuscripts, schools, hospitals, and shelters for sick and aged animals. The Jain year Festival Season What happens Paryushan (Shvetambara, eight days) and Das Lakshana (Digambara, ten days, beginning after) Late August–September The holiest time: fasting, temple sermons, public reading of the Kalpa Sutra; ends with mutual forgiveness Samvatsari Last day of Paryushan Confession and the phrase micchami dukkadam Mahavir Jayanti March–April Mahavira's birth; processions and charity Divali October–November Mahavira's liberation at Pavapuri; lamps, fasting, temple vigils; business families open new account books invoking Mahavira and his disciple Gautama On Samvatsari, Jains ask forgiveness of everyone they may have harmed in the past year with the Prakrit phrase micchami dukkadam, roughly "may the wrong I have done be in vain". The phrase is spoken to family, friends, colleagues and strangers, and in recent years is often sent by text message. Holy places Jain pilgrimage places include Pavapuri, where Mahavira was liberated; the temple-covered hill of Shatrunjaya in Gujarat; and Shravanabelagola in Karnataka, where a monolithic statue of Bahubali, a son of the first Tirthankara who stood in meditation so long that he attained liberation, rises about 17 to 18 metres from a hilltop. It was commissioned by the general Chamundaraya and consecrated around 981–983 CE. Every twelve years it is anointed from scaffolding with milk, saffron and other substances in the Mahamastakabhisheka, the "great head-anointing". In Jain practice the smallest acts, what you eat, when you eat it, how you walk, become the place where the largest questions are answered. Part 6 — Sallekhana: a vow of peaceful death, and India's courts A note on this topic: this part discusses a religious practice of fasting at the end of life and the legal debate about whether it is suicide. It describes the practice and the arguments; it does not recommend it. If you are struggling with thoughts of ending your life, please reach out to a local crisis line or emergency service now. What it is The most controversial Jain practice is sallekhana, also called santhara: a vow to end one's life by gradually giving up food and then water, in calm meditation, when death is near or normal religious life has become impossible. Jain texts set strict conditions. It is meant for those facing the approach of death through old age, incurable illness, extreme calamity or famine, not for people escaping suffering or despair. It should be undertaken with the permission and guidance of a monk or nun. The fast proceeds in stages. A classical lay manual, the Ratnakaranda Shravakachara, describes the gradual reduction: "Giving up solid food by degrees, one should take to milk and whey, then giving them up, to hot or spiced water" (verses 127–128, trans. Champat Rai Jain, 1917), before finally giving up water too. Why Jains say it is not suicide Jains insist that sallekhana is the opposite of suicide. Suicide, on their account, is an act driven by passion: despair, anger, shame or attachment. Sallekhana is meant to be free of passion, a final act of non-violence and non-attachment, in which a person who knows death is coming meets it consciously rather than in fear, without harming anyone else and while shedding karma. The jurist T. K. Tukol made this case in his book Sallekhana Is Not Suicide (1976), which was widely cited in court. The practice has deep roots: Jain tradition holds that the emperor Chandragupta Maurya and the monk Bhadrabahu died by fasting at Shravanabelagola, a story Jainpedia describes as historically dubious. How many people take the vow is uncertain. One estimate cited in a 2016 article in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry puts it at around 200 to 600 Jains a year in India. The court case In 2006 a lawyer, Nikhil Soni, petitioned the Rajasthan High Court arguing that santhara was a form of suicide, and that helping someone undertake it was abetment, both crimes under the Indian Penal Code. Critics of the practice, including some doctors and rights advocates, raised concerns that elderly people, especially women, might be pressured into it, and that a "religious" death could hide neglect. On 10 August 2015 the High Court agreed with the petitioner. It held that the Constitution's protection of the right to life does not include a right to end one's life, that the practice had not been shown to be an essential part of Jainism protected as religious freedom, and that it should be treated as suicide, with police cases filed against those who assisted. Jain communities across India responded with silent marches and protests. Their organisations appealed, and on 31 August 2015 the Supreme Court of India stayed the High Court's ruling, allowing the practice to continue while the appeal was heard. In 2017 Parliament passed the Mental Healthcare Act, which largely removed the punishment for attempted suicide, changing the legal background. Date Step 2006 Petition filed in Rajasthan High Court 10 August 2015 High Court rules santhara illegal, equivalent to suicide August 2015 Protests by Jain communities nationwide 31 August 2015 Supreme Court stays the High Court ruling 2017 Mental Healthcare Act largely decriminalises attempted suicide The case raised questions that reach well beyond Jainism: how a secular state should judge which practices are "essential" to a religion, and how to distinguish a freely chosen death at the end of life from a death that society should prevent. Some ethicists compare sallekhana with modern debates about voluntarily stopping eating and drinking in terminal illness. Jains themselves point out that the vow has been practised for over two thousand years, under strict conditions, and that most people who take it are already dying. Part 7 — Jains in history and today Kings, merchants and scholars Jain tradition remembers royal patrons from the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta onwards, and Jain monks were influential at the courts of many medieval kingdoms in the west and south. Jain authors wrote in Prakrit, Sanskrit, Kannada, Tamil, Gujarati and other languages, on philosophy, grammar, mathematics, astronomy and poetry, and composed their own versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Jain temples, from the marble halls of western India to rock-cut caves, are among the masterpieces of Indian architecture, and Jain manuscript libraries preserved countless texts, Jain and non-Jain alike. The Mughal emperor Akbar met the Shvetambara monk Hiravijaya at Fatehpur Sikri in 1582. The monk won imperial decrees banning the slaughter of animals during Paryushan and releasing prisoners. Akbar's successor Jahangir swung between favour and hostility, at one point banning Shvetambara mendicants from his court. Because ahimsa ruled out farming (which destroys life in the soil) and warfare, many Jains turned historically to trade, moneylending and banking. Jain merchant families became prominent across western India. In the 17th century the Ahmedabad jeweller Shantidas Jhaveri sold jewels to the Mughal elite and obtained imperial decrees that helped his business. Jain business communities remain prominent today, and their ethic, honesty in dealing, frugality and generous giving, is a point of community pride. The same prominence has made Jains, at times, the target of resentment or of stereotypes about wealth, which many Jains reject as a caricature of a community that includes ordinary families of every income. Gandhi and the Jain connection Jainism's greatest modern influence came through someone who was not a Jain. As a young lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi befriended the Jain poet and teacher Rajchandra (1867–1901) in Bombay, and later wrote of him: "In my moments of spiritual crisis, he was my refuge." Gandhi's lifelong commitment to ahimsa, his fasts, his vows of simplicity and his habit of seeing truth as many-sided all show the mark of the Jain world of his Gujarati youth. Through Gandhi, and through those he inspired, from Martin Luther King Jr to anti-apartheid activists, Jain ideas reached people who have never heard of Mahavira. Jains today Measure Figure Source Jains in India 4,451,753 (0.37%) Census 2011 Largest state population Maharashtra, about 1.4 million Census 2011 Fertility 1.2 children per woman, the lowest of India's religious groups Pew, 2021 Vegetarian 92% Pew survey, 2019–20 Daily puja 81% Pew survey, 2019–20 In reservation-eligible caste categories About 15%, lowest of any religious group Pew, 2021 England and Wales About 25,000 (write-in answers) Census 2021 Worldwide About 4–5 million Scholarly estimates In January 2014 India's central government granted Jains the status of a national minority community, the sixth group to receive it, a long-standing demand that protects the community's educational and religious institutions. Jain communities abroad, in Britain, North America, East Africa and elsewhere, have built temples, many of which, in the United States for example, house Shvetambara and Digambara images under one roof, setting aside divisions that still matter in India. Questions Jains debate Strict practice in a modern economy. How can a family keep the dietary rules while travelling, working in offices, or eating with others? Some Jains, in India and especially abroad, have extended ahimsa to veganism, arguing that modern commercial dairy production harms animals; others point out that the classical texts never forbade milk. Women and liberation. The Digambara teaching that women must be reborn as men to be liberated is defended by some as part of the tradition and questioned by others. Numbers. Very low fertility and marriage outside the community worry some leaders about the future size of a small faith. Recognition. Many Jains want to be seen as a distinct religion in law and in public life, not as a branch of Hinduism. Sallekhana. The Supreme Court appeal, and the ethics of end-of-life choices, remain open. Jainism's oldest promise is also its most demanding: that a person can live in the world while doing it as little harm as possible. SIKHISM Part 8 — Guru Nanak and a new path (1469–1539) The tradition's account Nanak was born in 1469 in the village of Talwandi, now Nankana Sahib in Pakistan, into a Hindu family of the Khatri trading caste. The janamsakhis, the traditional life stories of Nanak written down in the generations after him, describe a child who questioned rituals, who refused as a boy to put on the sacred thread of the high castes, and who preferred the company of holy men to the business his father planned for him. As a young man he worked as a storekeeper for the Muslim governor Daulat Khan at Sultanpur. A much-loved story says that when weighing out provisions he would reach the number thirteen, tera in Punjabi, which also means "yours", and keep repeating it, "yours, yours", lost in devotion to God. Another says that he went to bathe in the river one morning and disappeared for three days. The townspeople thought he had drowned. When he returned, he gave away all he had and, after a day of silence, spoke the words that the Sikh tradition remembers as the start of his mission: "There is no Hindu and no Musalman." — Guru Nanak, as remembered in the janamsakhis (Macauliffe, The Sikh Religion, vol. 1) Sikhs have understood the saying in several ways: that both Hindus and Muslims had forgotten the true meaning of their faiths; that before God there are only human beings, not religious labels; or that Nanak was beginning something that was neither. The janamsakhis then describe long journeys, the udasis, to holy places of Hindus and Muslims across South Asia and, in some accounts, as far as Mecca and Baghdad, accompanied by the Muslim minstrel Mardana, who played the rebec while Nanak sang his hymns. Historians treat these accounts as devotional literature, written down long after Nanak's death, with a core of historical memory and many legendary details. Kartarpur In his last years Nanak settled at Kartarpur, on the river Ravi, and lived as a farmer and teacher among a community of disciples. Macauliffe's account, drawn from Sikh tradition, describes the rhythm of the day there: the morning hymns, Japji and Asa di Var, sung before dawn; teaching through the day; the evening hymn Sodar; all the community eating together; and the night prayer Sohila before sleep. That daily pattern, worship, work and a shared meal, is recognisably the Sikh life of today. Nanak died at Kartarpur in 1539. Kartarpur is now in Pakistan, a few kilometres from the Indian border. In November 2019 the two countries opened the Kartarpur Corridor, allowing Indian pilgrims to visit without a visa; India suspended it in May 2025 during a military crisis with Pakistan, and its reopening has been a recurring Sikh demand. What Nanak taught The heart of Nanak's message is in the opening lines of his great hymn, the Japji, recited by devout Sikhs every morning. They begin with the numeral one, Ik Onkar, "One Creator": "There is but one God whose name is true, the Creator, devoid of fear and enmity, immortal, unborn, self-existent; by the favour of the Guru." — Japji, the Mul Mantar (Macauliffe, 1909) God is one, formless and beyond description, and yet present in all creation and within every person. The human problem is haumai, self-centredness or ego, which separates us from God and keeps us in the cycle of rebirth. The remedy is not renunciation, ritual or pilgrimage, which Nanak criticised when they became empty forms, but living as a gurmukh, a person turned toward the Guru and God, rather than a manmukh, turned toward the self. Sikh teaching summarises the practical path in three phrases: Practice Meaning Naam japna Remembering and meditating on God's name, in prayer, song and silence Kirat karni Earning an honest living by one's own work Vand chhakna Sharing what one has with others, especially the needy Nanak rejected caste distinctions in worship, honoured women, and taught that the spiritual life is lived as a householder, not by leaving the world. These convictions, taught by one man in a farming village, were turned into the institutions of a community by the nine Gurus who followed him. Part 9 — The ten Gurus (1539–1708) Before he died, Nanak passed his authority not to his sons but to a devoted disciple, Lehna, whom he renamed Angad. Sikhs believe the same divine light passed from each Guru to the next, as one flame lights another. Guru Guruship Remembered for Nanak (1469–1539) Founder; the Japji; the community at Kartarpur Angad 1539–1552 Consolidating the community at Khadur Amar Das 1552–1574 Organising the community; making the free kitchen a rule; founding Goindval Ram Das 1574–1581 Founding Ramdaspur, the city that became Amritsar Arjan 1581–1606 Building the Harmandir Sahib; compiling the scripture (1604); executed at Lahore Hargobind 1606–1644 The Akal Takht; the "two swords" of spiritual and temporal power Har Rai 1644–1661 A peaceful guruship centred at Kiratpur Har Krishan 1661–1664 Became Guru as a child; died of smallpox in Delhi at about seven Tegh Bahadur 1664–1675 Founding Anandpur; executed in Delhi Gobind Singh 1675–1708 Creating the Khalsa (1699); naming the scripture as the eternal Guru Martyrdom and the turn to arms The fifth Guru, Arjan, completed the great temple at Amritsar, the Harmandir Sahib, which the world knows as the Golden Temple. According to the SGPC, the body that manages it today, its foundation stone was laid by a Muslim holy man from Lahore, Mian Mir, and it was built with a door on each of its four sides, a sign that it was open to people of every caste and creed. In 1604 Arjan installed in it the scripture he had compiled. In 1606 Arjan was arrested on the orders of the Mughal emperor Jahangir and died in custody at Lahore on 30 May 1606. Sikhs remember him as the first Sikh martyr. Historians debate the emperor's motives, which seem to have combined suspicion of the Guru's growing influence with his support, or perceived support, for a rebel prince. Arjan's son Hargobind responded by wearing two swords, one for piri, spiritual authority, and one for miri, temporal authority. Opposite the Harmandir he raised the Akal Takht, "the throne of the Timeless", in 1606, as the seat of the community's temporal authority. The Sikhs began to bear arms. In 1675 the ninth Guru, Tegh Bahadur, was executed in Delhi on 11 November by order of the emperor Aurangzeb. Sikh tradition holds that he went to his death defending the right of Kashmiri Brahmins, who were not Sikhs, to practise their own religion against forced conversion; for this he is called Hind di Chadar, "the shield of India". Mughal and Persian sources tell a different story, of a rebel or bandit, and some historians, such as Satish Chandra, note that no contemporary source mentions a persecution of Hindus in Kashmir. The memory of a Guru dying for another community's freedom of religion is central to Sikh identity today. Two Gurus executed by the Mughal state turned a devotional community into one that was ready, if it had to, to fight. Part 10 — The Guru Granth Sahib: a scripture of many voices How it was made The Sikh scripture is unusual among the world's holy books: it was compiled by the founders of the faith themselves, and it includes the words of saints from other traditions. Guru Arjan gathered the hymns of the first four Gurus, which had been preserved in collections within the community, added his own, and had the volume written out by the scholar Bhai Gurdas. In 1604 he installed it in the Harmandir Sahib, with Baba Buddha as its first reader. This first version is known as the Adi Granth, "the first book". According to the SGPC, in 1706 Guru Gobind Singh, staying at Damdama Sahib, dictated a final version to Bhai Mani Singh, which includes the hymns of his father, Guru Tegh Bahadur. Before he died in 1708 he declared that after him there would be no more human Gurus: the scripture, now called the Guru Granth Sahib, would be the Guru for ever. What is in it The standard printed edition has 1,430 pages. It is arranged not by author but by musical mode: its hymns are set in 31 ragas, because they were composed to be sung. According to the SGPC's count it holds 5,894 hymns. Contributors Hymns (SGPC count) Guru Nanak 974 Guru Angad 62 Guru Amar Das 907 Guru Ram Das 679 Guru Arjan 2,218 Guru Tegh Bahadur 115 Fifteen bhagats (saints) 922, of which Kabir contributed the most, 541 Eleven bhatts (bards) and others Panegyrics and other compositions The fifteen bhagats are Hindu and Muslim saints from across India and several centuries: Jaidev, Namdev, Trilochan, Parmanand, Sadhna, Ramanand, Beni, Dhanna, Pipa, Sain, Kabir, Ravidas, Farid, Surdas and Bhikhan. They include a Muslim Sufi, Sheikh Farid; a weaver, Kabir; a leather-worker, Ravidas, from a caste then treated as untouchable; a barber, Sain; and a Brahmin, Ramanand. Their presence is a deliberate statement: holiness does not depend on caste or creed. Kabir, whose life the library tells in Kabir: The Weaver of the Heart, speaks in it in his own voice: "Kabir is a child of Ram and Allah, and accepteth all gurus and pirs." — Kabir, in the Guru Granth Sahib (Macauliffe, vol. 6) The language is mostly a mixture of old Punjabi and other north Indian languages, with some Persian and Sanskrit, written in the Gurmukhi script. The living Guru Sikhs do not treat the Guru Granth Sahib simply as a book. In Pew's survey, 94 percent of Indian Sikhs said it is the word of God. In every gurdwara it is installed on a raised throne under a canopy, a person waves a whisk (chaur) over it as an attendant would over a king, and everyone who enters bows before it. Each night it is ceremonially closed and carried to a resting room; each morning it is brought out again. A decision taken in its presence by an assembly of Sikhs carries the authority of the Guru. It is opened at random each day for a hukamnama, "order", the hymn on the left-hand page read as the day's guidance. Complete readings, unbroken over about 48 hours (akhand path), mark births, weddings, deaths and anniversaries. A second collection, the Dasam Granth, contains writings attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, some of which are used in daily prayers. The authorship of parts of it has long been debated, and some Sikhs question its authenticity. Part 11 — The Khalsa and the five Ks (1699) Vaisakhi, 1699 The most famous event in Sikh history took place, by tradition, at the spring festival of Vaisakhi in 1699 at Anandpur. Guru Gobind Singh, before a great gathering, drew his sword and asked for a Sikh willing to give his head. One man came forward and went with him into a tent; the Guru emerged alone with a bloodied sword and asked for another. Five in all came forward. Then the Guru brought out all five, alive (in some tellings, the blood was that of goats). These were the Panj Pyare, "the five beloved ones". They came, tradition stresses, from different castes and regions. The Guru initiated them with amrit, water and sugar stirred in an iron bowl with a double-edged sword while hymns were recited. Then he asked them to initiate him in turn: the Guru became a disciple of his own disciples. The initiated formed the Khalsa, "the pure", a community of saint-soldiers. Men took the name Singh, "lion", and women came to take Kaur, often translated "princess" (the name became the standard identifier for Sikh women in the twentieth century). By taking a common name, they also gave up the caste names that marked their place in the social hierarchy. What historians say Historians accept that Guru Gobind Singh founded the Khalsa at the end of the 17th century, and that it transformed the Sikh community. Details of the event come from later sources. Some early 18th-century accounts place the founding a few years before 1699; the familiar date became fixed largely through 19th-century histories. Sikh tradition and scholarship agree on the substance: a deliberate creation of a disciplined, egalitarian and armed community, bound by a common initiation and a common appearance. The five Ks Initiated Sikhs keep five articles of faith, each beginning in Punjabi with the letter K: Article What it is Meanings given to it Kesh Uncut hair, usually covered by a turban Acceptance of the body as God made it; discipline; identity Kangha A small wooden comb Cleanliness and order Kara A steel or iron bracelet A reminder of the bond with God and of restraint in action Kirpan A sword or dagger The duty to protect the weak and resist injustice Kachera Cotton undershorts Moral restraint and readiness for action Initiated Sikhs also undertake to avoid four prohibited acts: cutting hair, eating meat slaughtered in the ritual Muslim way (kutha), sexual relations outside marriage, and using tobacco, alcohol or intoxicants. Not all Sikhs are initiated. Those who take amrit are called Amritdhari; many others keep their hair uncut (Keshdhari) without being initiated; some cut their hair while still identifying fully as Sikh (often called Sahajdhari or simply non-practising). In Pew's survey, 76 percent of Indian Sikhs said they keep their hair long. How far the Khalsa discipline defines a "real" Sikh is one of the community's most sensitive questions, with legal consequences for who may vote in elections for gurdwara management. India's Constitution protects the kirpan explicitly: "The wearing and carrying of kirpans shall be deemed to be included in the profession of the Sikh religion." In other countries, the turban and kirpan have prompted long arguments over school uniforms, motorcycle helmets, airport security and military dress codes, most of them resolved over time with accommodations. The turban makes a Sikh visible in any crowd. That was the point: a Sikh, the Gurus taught, should be someone others can find when they need help. Part 12 — Gurdwara, langar and the Sikh day The gurdwara A gurdwara, "door of the Guru", is any place where the Guru Granth Sahib is installed. It is open to all. Visitors cover their heads and remove their shoes; inside, everyone sits on the floor at the same level, with the scripture on its raised throne before them. Services consist mainly of kirtan, the singing of hymns from the scripture with harmonium and tabla, a reading or explanation, and the Ardas, a standing prayer that recalls the Gurus and the community's martyrs and asks God's blessing on all humanity. At the end, everyone receives karah prashad, a sweet offering of flour, sugar and ghee. Langar Every gurdwara has a langar, a free community kitchen. Tradition credits the first Gurus with founding it and Guru Amar Das with making it a rule that everyone, including the rich and powerful, should eat in the langar before meeting the Guru. Its meaning lies in its form: all sit together on the floor in rows (pangat), whatever their caste, religion, wealth or gender, and eat the same simple vegetarian meal, cooked and served by volunteers. In a society where caste rules governed who could eat with whom, this was a radical act, and it remains one. The kitchen at the Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar serves very large numbers of people every day, and gurdwaras worldwide feed the homeless, travellers, and victims of disasters. Volunteering in the langar, cleaning the gurdwara or the shoes of worshippers, is seva, selfless service, regarded as a form of worship in itself. The Sikh day and year Devout Sikhs rise before dawn, bathe, and recite morning prayers, the Nitnem ("daily rule"), beginning with the Japji, with further prayers at sunset (Rehras) and before sleep (Sohila), echoing the routine of Nanak's Kartarpur. In Pew's survey, 37 percent of Indian Sikhs read or listen to the Guru Granth Sahib daily. Festival Season What it marks Vaisakhi April The harvest and the founding of the Khalsa; processions and initiations Gurpurabs Through the year Birth and martyrdom anniversaries of the Gurus, above all Guru Nanak's birthday (October–November) Bandi Chhor Divas October–November, with Diwali Guru Hargobind's release from Mughal imprisonment; the Golden Temple is illuminated Hola Mohalla March, after Holi Martial displays and gatherings at Anandpur, begun by Guru Gobind Singh Sikh marriages are performed in the Anand Karaj ceremony, in which the couple walk four times around the Guru Granth Sahib while four verses by Guru Ram Das, the laavan, are sung; the form became standard after the Anand Marriage Act of 1909, replacing the older circling of a sacred fire. At death the body is cremated with hymns and prayers. Mourning is meant to be restrained, since death is the soul's return to God. Part 13 — From the Mughals to Ranjit Singh to the British (1708–1947) Persecution and resistance After Guru Gobind Singh's death in 1708, a disciple he had commissioned, Banda Singh Bahadur, led a Sikh uprising in the Punjab. In May 1710 his forces defeated the Mughal governor of Sirhind at Chappar Chiri and took the city; Banda is remembered for giving land to the peasants who tilled it. After an eight-month siege he was captured at Gurdas Nangal in December 1715 and executed in Delhi in June 1716, with many of his followers. For much of the 18th century Sikhs were hunted by Mughal governors and by the Afghan invader Ahmad Shah Abdali (Durrani), who attacked Amritsar repeatedly; by the SGPC's account he demolished the Harmandir Sahib in 1757 and blew it up with gunpowder in 1762. Sikhs organised in bands called misls, rebuilt the shrine each time, and gradually won control of the Punjab. The Sikh empire Ranjit Singh (c. 1780–1839), leader of one misl, took Lahore in 1799 and was proclaimed Maharaja on 12 April 1801. He united the misls into a single kingdom, the Sikh empire, and extended it to Multan (1818), Kashmir (1819) and Peshawar (1834). His army, modernised with the help of European officers, was one of the most formidable in Asia. His court was strikingly diverse: his foreign minister, Fakir Azizuddin, was a Muslim, and his prime minister, Dhian Singh, a Hindu. He restored and gilded the Harmandir Sahib, the work that gave it its golden appearance. After his death in 1839, the kingdom fell into succession struggles. Two wars with the British East India Company, in 1845–46 and 1848–49, ended with Britain's annexation of the Punjab in 1849. Under the British The British, impressed by Sikh soldiers, recruited them heavily into the Indian army, where Sikhs served in numbers far beyond their share of the population, in both world wars and across the empire. The colonial period also brought a religious revival, the Singh Sabha movement, founded in Amritsar in 1873 in response to Christian missionary conversions and later Arya Samaj campaigns, which sought to restore what it saw as pure Sikh practice through schools, Punjabi newspapers in the Gurmukhi script and the promotion of the Khalsa ideal. On 13 April 1919, at the Vaisakhi festival, British troops under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer opened fire on an unarmed crowd in the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, near the Golden Temple. The official Hunter Committee counted 379 dead; Indian National Congress estimates were around 1,000. The massacre turned many Indians, Sikhs among them, against British rule. In the 1920s the Gurdwara Reform Movement (the Akali movement) campaigned, through non-violent protest, often met with beatings and arrests, to take control of gurdwaras from hereditary custodians (mahants) who had treated them as private property. In November 1920 a Sikh assembly at the Akal Takht formed the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC). The Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925 placed the main shrines under an elected Sikh body, a form of democratic religious self-government that still exists. Within a century the Sikhs went from a hunted community to the rulers of an empire, then to soldiers of the empire that conquered them. Part 14 — Partition (1947) When British India was divided in August 1947, the line between India and Pakistan ran through the middle of the Punjab, the Sikh homeland. The Sikhs had no state of their own. Many of their most sacred places, including Nankana Sahib, Guru Nanak's birthplace, and Kartarpur, where he died, ended up in Pakistan, along with some of the richest farmland Sikh families owned. The violence that accompanied partition was among the worst of the 20th century. Muslims on one side, and Hindus and Sikhs on the other, killed one another in massacres, attacks on refugee trains and the abduction of women. Across the subcontinent, scholarly estimates of the dead range from about 200,000 to 2 million, and some 12 to 20 million people were displaced. Almost the entire Sikh and Hindu population of what became Pakistani Punjab moved east, and almost all Muslims of East Punjab moved west. Sikhs were both victims and perpetrators of the violence, a history that Sikh, Muslim and Hindu families still remember in different ways. Date Event August 1947 Partition divides the Punjab; Sikh refugees flood into Indian Punjab and Delhi 1966 After the Punjabi Suba movement, Indian Punjab is divided on linguistic lines into Punjab and Haryana, with hill areas going to Himachal Pradesh; the new Punjab has a Sikh majority 9 November 2019 The Kartarpur Corridor opens, letting Indian pilgrims reach Guru Nanak's last home in Pakistan 7 May 2025 India suspends the corridor during a military crisis with Pakistan The new Indian Punjab became, through the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the granary of India. But disputes over river waters, the status of the shared capital Chandigarh, and the degree of autonomy Punjab should have left many Sikhs dissatisfied, setting the stage for the crisis of the 1980s. Part 15 — 1984: Operation Blue Star, an assassination and the killings that followed A note on this part: it describes events in which thousands of people were killed, and it relies on official inquiries and independent human rights reports. Casualty figures are disputed; official counts and other estimates are both given. The road to Blue Star In 1973 the main Sikh political party, the Akali Dal, adopted the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, calling for greater autonomy for Punjab within India. Its supporters saw it as a federalist programme; the central government treated it as a step toward secession. In 1982 the Akalis launched a mass campaign, the Dharam Yudh Morcha. Around the same time, a charismatic preacher, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, rose to prominence, calling for a return to strict Sikh practice and denouncing the government's treatment of Sikhs. To his followers he was a defender of the faith; to the government and many others he was responsible for, or tolerated, a wave of killings of political opponents and Hindus. Some militants demanded a separate Sikh state, Khalistan. Bhindranwale and armed followers occupied and fortified the Golden Temple complex, including the Akal Takht. Operation Blue Star (June 1984) In early June 1984 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the army to remove the militants. Operation Blue Star ran from 1 to 10 June, with the main assault on the complex on the night of 5–6 June. Bhindranwale was killed on 6 June. The army used tanks; the Akal Takht was largely destroyed. The attack came at the time of the anniversary of Guru Arjan's martyrdom, when the complex was crowded with pilgrims. The government's White Paper put the dead at 83 soldiers and 493 militants and civilians combined. Sikh organisations, eyewitnesses and independent researchers have long argued that the true toll, especially of pilgrims, was far higher, with estimates in the thousands. No independent inquiry has settled the figure. For Sikhs worldwide, the assault on their holiest shrine was a profound wound, regardless of their views of Bhindranwale. Prominent Sikhs resigned posts or returned honours in protest; the writer Khushwant Singh, for one, gave back his Padma Bhushan. The government rebuilt the Akal Takht, but Sikhs refused to accept a structure rebuilt by the state that had damaged it; in early 1986 they demolished it and rebuilt it themselves through voluntary service. The assassination and the killings On 31 October 1984, Indira Gandhi was shot dead at her home in New Delhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards, in revenge for Blue Star. Over the next three days, mobs in Delhi and other cities hunted down Sikhs. Men were dragged from homes, beaten and burned alive; gurdwaras, homes and shops were set alight. The official Ahuja Committee counted 2,733 Sikhs killed in Delhi alone; the government's nationwide figure is about 3,350, and other estimates are considerably higher. Human Rights Watch, summarising the findings of later inquiries, noted that the violence could not have spread so swiftly without the backing of influential people, and that the police largely failed to act. The inquiries Inquiry Appointed or reported What it did or found Marwah Commission Appointed November 1984 Investigated the police; halted in 1985 Ranganath Misra Commission Appointed 1985; report 1986, public 1987 Recommended no individual prosecutions; criticised by rights groups for clearing senior figures Kapur–Mittal Committee 1987–1990 Named 72 police officers; recommended dismissing 30 Jain–Banerjee, Potti–Rosha, Jain–Aggarwal, Narula committees 1987–1994 Recommended cases against named Congress politicians; most were not pursued for years Ahuja Committee Report 1987 Counted 2,733 killed in Delhi Nanavati Commission Appointed 2000; report 2005 Found local Congress leaders had incited or aided mobs; "credible evidence" against Jagdish Tytler; a "colossal failure" of law and order by the police In all, ten government commissions and committees examined the violence. By 2014, Human Rights Watch noted, only about 30 people, mostly low-ranking party supporters, had been convicted, and no police officer. On 11 August 2005 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, India's first Sikh prime minister, told Parliament: "I have no hesitation in apologising not only to the Sikh community but the whole Indian nation." In December 2018 the Delhi High Court sentenced the former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar to life imprisonment for murders committed in the violence, and in February 2025 a Delhi court convicted him in a second case and again sentenced him to life. The insurgency Punjab then endured a decade of insurgency. Sikh militant groups killed civilians, Hindus and Sikhs alike, along with politicians and police officers; on 23 June 1985 a bomb attributed to Sikh militants of the Babbar Khalsa, operating from Canada, destroyed Air India Flight 182 over the Atlantic, killing 329 people. The security forces' counter-insurgency was marked, according to Human Rights Watch, by arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial executions and "disappearances" of thousands of young Sikh men. The human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra documented more than 6,000 secret police cremations in Amritsar district alone; he was abducted and killed by police in 1995, and six officers were later convicted for his murder. The insurgency was crushed by the mid-1990s; Punjab's chief minister, Beant Singh, was assassinated on 31 August 1995. Government figures count more than 11,000 non-combatants and thousands of militants and security personnel killed. 1984 remains the open wound of Sikh memory: an attack on the holiest shrine, followed by the killing of thousands of innocents, followed by decades in which few were held to account. How the period should be remembered is still contested. For many Sikhs, the events of 1984 were an organised pogrom and Bhindranwale a martyr. For many other Indians, Blue Star was a tragic necessity against an armed separatist movement, and Bhindranwale its cause. Almost everyone now agrees that the November killings were a crime and that justice was long denied. Part 16 — The diaspora and the questions Sikhs argue about today A global community Sikhs began emigrating in the late 19th century, many as soldiers and policemen of the British empire, to Malaya, Hong Kong, East Africa and the Pacific coast of North America. After the Second World War, and especially from the 1960s, large communities grew in Britain, Canada and the United States. Place Sikh population Source and date India 20.8 million (1.72%) Census 2011 Punjab (India) A majority of the state Census 2011, via Pew Canada About 770,000 (2.1%), up from 0.9% in 2001 Census 2021 Wolverhampton, England 12.0% of residents Census 2021 Worldwide About 25–30 million Scholarly estimates Canada has the largest Sikh share of population of any country outside India, and Sikhs have held senior offices there. In September 2023 the Canadian prime minister told Parliament that Canadian security agencies were pursuing allegations of a potential link between agents of the Indian government and the killing, in June that year, of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist activist shot outside a gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia. India rejected the allegations as "absurd and motivated". The dispute led to the expulsion of diplomats on both sides in October 2024. The affair showed how the unresolved politics of the 1980s, including the Khalistan demand, which most Sikhs in India do not support but which retains some backing in the diaspora, continue to shape the community's relations with India. Diaspora Sikhs have also faced hostility from people who mistake them for others. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, Sikhs in the United States were targets of hate crimes; the first, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a turbaned petrol-station owner in Mesa, Arizona, was shot dead on 15 September 2001 by a man who took him for an Arab Muslim. Sikh organisations have campaigned for recognition of the turban and kirpan in schools, workplaces and the military. Sikhs in India today Most Sikhs in India are deeply attached to the country: 95 percent told Pew they are very proud to be Indian, and only 14 percent said Sikhs face a lot of discrimination. Sikhs are prominent in farming, the armed forces, business and sport, and Manmohan Singh, prime minister from 2004 to 2014, became one of the most respected statesmen of his era. The farm protests of 2020–21, led by farm unions mainly from Punjab and Haryana and fed around the clock by langars at the camps on Delhi's borders, which ended when the government repealed the three farm laws in November 2021, showed how Sikh institutions can mobilise. Open questions inside Sikhism Who is a Sikh? The SGPC's code of conduct, the Sikh Rehat Maryada, (approved in its final form in 1945) defines a Sikh as a person who believes in one God, follows the ten Gurus and the Guru Granth Sahib, and believes in the amrit initiation of the tenth Guru. Whether a Sikh who cuts their hair, or who has not taken amrit, is fully Sikh is argued in families, in gurdwara elections and in courts. Caste. The Gurus rejected caste, and the langar enacts that rejection. Yet caste persists among Sikhs, in marriage choices, in separate gurdwaras built by some caste groups, and in tension between landowning Jat Sikhs and Dalit Sikhs. The most dramatic result came after a 2009 attack in Vienna that killed a leader of the Dera Sachkhand Ballan, a community devoted to the bhagat Ravidas: in 2010 the dera declared the Ravidassia faith a separate religion, with its own scripture, the Amritbani. Mainstream Sikh bodies urged them to reverse the decision. Authority and the calendar. The SGPC adopted a new solar Nanakshahi calendar in 2003; it has been highly controversial and is not universally accepted. The relationship between the SGPC, the Akal Takht and political parties is itself a subject of debate. Living gurus and deras. Popular deras, centres led by living spiritual masters, attract many followers, especially poorer and lower-caste Punjabis, and orthodox Sikhs often object to any living person being treated as Guru alongside the scripture. Memory and justice. Demands for full accountability for 1984, for the reopening of the Kartarpur corridor, and for an honest account of the insurgency years remain central to Sikh politics. Sikhism was founded on the claim that God is found in ordinary life, among ordinary people, at a shared table. Its arguments today are about how to keep that table open. The takeaway Jainism and Sikhism are two of India's minority faiths, and both have shaped the world far beyond their numbers. Jainism, taught by twenty-four Tirthankaras of whom Mahavira was the last, offers a path to liberation without a creator God: freeing the soul from karmic matter through right faith, knowledge and conduct, above all through ahimsa, non-possession and a many-sided view of truth. Its monks and nuns live that path to the limit; its lay families live it through food, worship, giving and forgiveness, and its end-of-life vow, sallekhana, led to a Supreme Court case still unresolved. Sikhism, founded by Guru Nanak in 1469 and shaped by ten Gurus, teaches remembrance of one God, honest work and sharing, embodied in the langar, the Khalsa and a scripture that includes Hindu and Muslim saints and is treated as the living Guru. Its history runs through Mughal persecution, a Sikh empire, British rule, partition and the trauma of 1984, and its global community today argues about identity, caste and justice. Try this: visit a gurdwara and eat in the langar. Cover your head (a scarf is fine; gurdwaras usually lend them), take off your shoes, sit on the floor in the row and accept what is served. If there is a Jain temple near you, visit during Paryushan, usually in late August or September, and ask a member of the community what micchami dukkadam means to them. Then think of one person you would like to say it to. Sources & Further Reading Sources - Pew Research Center, Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation (29 June 2021; 29,999 adults surveyed Nov 2019–Mar 2020): Jain vegetarianism, root vegetables, puja and prayer; Sikh gurdwara attendance, hair, views of the Guru Granth Sahib, pride, discrimination; shared ground with Hindus. - Pew Research Center, "Religious Composition of India" and "Population growth and religious composition" (21 September 2021): census trends, Jain fertility, caste categories; Pew, "How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020" (9 June 2025). - Census of India 2011; Statistics Canada, 2021 Census (26 October 2022); Office for National Statistics, Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021. - Constitution of India, Articles 17 and 25, via constitutionofindia.net. - Jainpedia (Institute of Jainology and partner universities): Mahavira; sects; the Shvetambara canon and Valabhi; the Tattvartha Sutra; Divali; Paryushan; mendicant lifestyle; Terapanth; Shravanabelagola; Jains and the Mughals; Rajchandra. - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Jain Philosophy" (vows, karma as matter, anekanta, syat, naya). - Hermann Jacobi (trans.), Acharanga Sutra, Sacred Books of the East 22 (1884). - O. Somasundaram et al., "Jainism: its relevance to psychiatric practice, with special reference to the practice of Sallekhana", Indian Journal of Psychiatry 58:4 (2016): conditions, the Rajasthan High Court ruling of 10 August 2015 and the Supreme Court stay of 31 August 2015, estimates of numbers. - SGPC, "Sri Guru Granth Sahib" and "Sri Harmandir Sahib": compilation and installation in 1604, contributors and hymn counts, the Damdama recension, the shrine's history; Max Arthur Macauliffe, The Sikh Religion (1909), vols. 1 and 6: the janamsakhi narrative, the Japji and Kabir's hymns. - The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Punjabi University, Patiala), via thesikhencyclopedia.com: the Akal Takht, the Punjab history timeline. - Human Rights Watch, "India: No Justice for 1984 Anti-Sikh Bloodshed" (29 October 2014); Protecting the Killers: A Policy of Impunity in Punjab, India (17 October 2007). - Al Jazeera, "Canada investigating possible link between India, killing of Sikh activist" (18 September 2023). - Dates of the Gurus, the Khalsa, Banda Singh, Ranjit Singh, Jallianwala Bagh, the SGPC, partition, the insurgency, the inquiries and later convictions were cross-checked against standard reference summaries; where official and independent figures differ, both are given. Go deeper - 📘 The Jains — Paul Dundas (Routledge; the standard scholarly introduction to Jain history, sects, scriptures and practice) - 📘 The Jaina Path of Purification — Padmanabh S. Jaini (a classic account of Jain doctrine and ascetic practice by a scholar raised in the tradition) - 🌐 Jainpedia (an academic encyclopedia of Jainism, with manuscript images, festivals and biographies) - 📘 Sikhism: A Very Short Introduction — Eleanor Nesbitt (Oxford; clear, fair and compact, from the Gurus to the diaspora) - 📘 A History of the Sikhs — Khushwant Singh (two volumes; a readable narrative history from the Gurus to the 1980s by one of India's best-known writers) - 🌐 SGPC — Sri Guru Granth Sahib (the Sikh community's own account of how its scripture was compiled and what it contains) - 🌐 Human Rights Watch — India: No Justice for 1984 Anti-Sikh Bloodshed (a concise account of the November 1984 killings and the inquiries) - 🌐 Related pieces in this library: Kabir: The Weaver of the Heart; How the Sacred Texts Were Written; Pilgrimage: Why Humans Walk to Holy Places; If I Was Born in India; and the Religions long read on Hinduism Step 17. Christianity: From a Galilean Teacher to More Than Two Billion People ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Why: Christianity. A Jewish preacher executed by Rome around the year 30, a handful of followers who said he had risen, and two thousand years later the largest religion on Earth, now more African and Latin American than European. Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each and How the Sacred Texts Were Written. Companion pieces: the Most Influential Mystics pieces on Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich; the Religions long reads on Judaism, Islam and Religion in the Modern Age; and, in Spanish, El Auge Evangélico en América Latina. On a Sunday morning, somewhere around the world, the same short meal is being eaten in thousands of languages. In a cathedral in Lagos it comes with drums. In a Russian village church it is spooned to the faithful from a golden chalice after three hours of standing. In a Baptist chapel in Texas it is a cube of bread and a tiny cup of grape juice passed along the pews. In a Pentecostal warehouse church in São Paulo it may be skipped altogether in favour of an hour of singing, prayer for healing and speaking in tongues. All of these people would tell you they are doing what a Galilean teacher asked of his friends on the night before he died: "this do in remembrance of me" (Luke 22:19). That is the puzzle this long read tries to explain. How did a movement that began with a few dozen Jews in a corner of the Roman Empire, following a man the empire had crucified, become a faith of about 2.3 billion people, according to the Pew Research Center's 2025 count, spread across every continent and split into tens of thousands of churches? And how did it become, in the same two thousand years, both a source of hospitals, universities, abolitionism and some of humanity's greatest art, and an institution that blessed crusades, ran inquisitions, baptised conquest and hid the abuse of children? A note on approach: this piece describes what Christians believe in their own terms, and beside it what historians say, keeping the two clearly apart and treating both with respect. It does not try to prove or disprove the faith. Christians disagree with each other on almost every point below, and Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants and Pentecostals are each described as their own members would recognise. Bible quotations are from the King James Version (1611), which is in the public domain. In this long read Two ways to tell the story: the Jesus of faith and the Jesus of history Paul and the first communities (c. 30–150) From persecution to empire: Constantine, councils and creeds (150–451) How the Bible was assembled Monks, the medieval church and the split of East and West (500–1453) Crusades and inquisitions: what happened and what historians now say The Reformations (1517–1648) Missions and empire: harm and agency The Orthodox world Reason, criticism and the Bible (1650–1950) Slavery: Christian abolitionists and a complicit church The twentieth century: Pentecostal fire, the Global South and Vatican II What Christians actually do: sacraments, prayer and the year Christianity in 2026: abuse, the papacy and the numbers Part 1 — Two ways to tell the story: the Jesus of faith and the Jesus of history The Gospels' account The four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, tell a story that Christians read not as a biography but as good news (gospel comes from the Old English for "good tidings"). Jesus is born to Mary, a young Jewish woman, in the days of King Herod; Matthew and Luke say she conceived him without a human father. He grows up in Nazareth, a village in Galilee. As an adult he is baptised by a fiery prophet, John the Baptist, and begins to preach. Mark's Gospel sums up the message in one line: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel." — Mark 1:15 He gathers disciples, twelve of them chosen as an inner circle. He heals the sick, casts out demons, eats with tax collectors and prostitutes, and tells parables: the prodigal son welcomed home, the Samaritan who stops for a beaten stranger, the mustard seed that grows into a tree. In the Sermon on the Mount he blesses the poor in spirit and the meek and tells his hearers: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you" (Matthew 5:44). Asked which commandment is greatest, he joins two from the Hebrew Bible: love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and "love thy neighbour as thyself" (Mark 12:30–31). He goes up to Jerusalem for Passover, overturns the tables of the money-changers in the Temple, shares a last supper with his disciples, is betrayed by one of them, arrested, tried before the Jewish high priest and the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and crucified. On the third day, the Gospels say, women going to anoint his body find the tomb empty, and he appears to his followers alive. For Christians this is the centre of everything: the resurrection shows that Jesus is the Messiah (in Greek, Christos, "anointed one") and the Son of God, and that through his death and rising, sin and death have been defeated. John's Gospel opens with the boldest claim of all, that Jesus is God's own Word made human: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). What historians say Historians work differently. They cannot test a resurrection or a virgin birth, which are claims of faith, so they ask a narrower question: what can be said about Jesus of Nazareth using the ordinary methods applied to any ancient figure? The first answer is that he existed. Virtually all scholars of antiquity, Christian, Jewish and secular, accept that Jesus was a real person; the theory that he was invented is a fringe position. Beyond the Gospels and Paul's letters, the evidence includes two Roman writers. The historian Tacitus, writing around 115, explains that the emperor Nero blamed the great fire of Rome on a hated group "called Christians by the populace", and that their founder, Christus, "suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus" (Annals 15.44). Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia in what is now Turkey from about 111 to 113, wrote to the emperor Trajan that Christians met before dawn on a fixed day to sing "a hymn to Christ as to a god" (Letters 10.96). The Jewish historian Josephus also mentions Jesus, though the main passage was later expanded by Christian copyists and scholars argue over what he originally wrote. The second answer is that only a few events are close to certain. Almost all historians accept that Jesus was baptised by John and crucified on Pilate's orders, because these are things early Christians would hardly have invented: a sinless saviour submitting to a baptism of repentance, and a Messiah dying the death reserved for rebels and slaves. Pilate governed Judea from about 26 to 36 CE, and most scholars put the crucifixion around 30 or 33. Matthew dates the birth to the reign of Herod the Great, so most historians place it a few years "before Christ", around 6–4 BCE: the calendar that counts years from his birth was worked out centuries later and missed by a few years. Question What the tradition says What most historians conclude Did Jesus exist? Yes Yes; denial is a fringe view When? "In the days of Herod" Born c. 6–4 BCE; died c. 30 or 33 CE Baptised by John? Yes Almost certainly Crucified under Pilate? Yes Almost certainly What did he preach? The kingdom of God, and himself as its bearer The coming kingdom of God, in a Jewish setting; how much he spoke of himself is debated Miracles and resurrection? Real events Beyond what history can test; that his followers sincerely believed they saw him alive is widely accepted When were the Gospels written? By apostles or their companions Mark c. 70; Matthew and Luke c. 80–90; John c. 90–100 That dating comes from mainstream New Testament scholarship, as summarised, for example, by L. Michael White for the PBS series From Jesus to Christ: Mark first, around 70; Matthew and Luke a decade or two later, both using Mark and, many scholars think, a lost collection of sayings they call "Q"; John last, around 95. Some scholars, especially conservative ones, date them earlier; a few date them later. Three quests, and a Jewish Jesus Since the 18th century, scholars have made repeated "quests" for the historical Jesus. The first, ending with Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), found that each generation had painted a Jesus who looked like itself: a rational moralist for Enlightenment readers, a gentle romantic for the Victorians. Schweitzer's own Jesus was stranger: a prophet who expected the world to end soon. The most important change since the 1970s has been the recovery of Jesus the Jew. Scholars such as E. P. Sanders, Géza Vermes and Paula Fredriksen insist that he must be understood inside the Judaism of his time: a Galilean who kept the Sabbath, went to the Temple for the festivals, argued about the Law as other teachers did, and spoke of a kingdom God was about to bring. This matters because for most of Christian history the Gospels' conflict stories were read as "Jesus against the Jews", and that reading fed centuries of contempt (see Part 12 on what the Catholic Church said about this in 1965). The historian and the believer are not always asking the same question. One asks "what can the evidence show?"; the other, "who is this for me?" Both questions are honest, and neither answers the other. Many Christians hold that the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are the same person seen from two angles. Some scholars are believers, some are not, and the field includes both. What it does not support is either extreme: that nothing can be known, or that the Gospels can be read as a modern news report. Part 2 — Paul and the first communities (c. 30–150) The earliest Christian writings are not the Gospels but the letters of Paul, written roughly twenty years after the crucifixion. Paul, a Greek-speaking Jew and, by his own account, a Pharisee from Tarsus, had persecuted the new movement until, he says, the risen Christ was revealed to him; Acts describes "a light from heaven" on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3). He then spent his life founding small house churches around the eastern Mediterranean and writing to them. Of the thirteen letters that carry his name, scholars broadly agree that seven are his: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon, all usually dated to the 50s. The others are disputed; many scholars think followers wrote them in his name, a common practice in the ancient world, while others defend Paul's authorship. In 1 Corinthians Paul passes on a creed he says he himself had received, which takes us back very close to the beginning: "Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures." — 1 Corinthians 15:3–4 The great argument: did Gentiles have to become Jews? The first Christians were Jews who believed the Messiah had come. The explosive question was whether non-Jews who joined had to keep the Law of Moses: circumcision for men, the food laws, the Sabbath. Paul said no. A meeting in Jerusalem, usually dated around 48–50 and described in Acts 15 and Galatians 2, agreed, with some conditions, that Gentile converts need not be circumcised. Paul's letter to the Galatians gives his vision: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." — Galatians 3:28 That decision turned a Jewish renewal movement into something that could spread among any people. It also set Christianity on the path to separation from Judaism, a parting that happened slowly, unevenly and painfully over the following century, especially after the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in 70. What the first churches were like Acts paints an idealised picture of the Jerusalem community: "all that believed were together, and had all things common" (Acts 2:44). The letters show something messier: quarrels over leadership, over eating meat offered to idols, over the role of women, over whether the end was imminent. Followers were first "called Christians" in Antioch (Acts 11:26). They met in homes, shared a common meal that became the Eucharist, baptised converts, cared for widows and the poor, and expected Christ's return. How fast did they grow? Nobody knows. The sociologist Rodney Stark, in The Rise of Christianity (1996), argued that steady compound growth, through family and friendship networks and through Christians' care for the sick during epidemics, could explain the church's rise without any mass conversions. Historians debate his numbers, but his central point, that Christianity spread mostly person to person, is widely shared. Part 3 — From persecution to empire: Constantine, councils and creeds (150–451) Persecution For its first two and a half centuries Christianity was an illegal and suspect religion. Persecution was local and intermittent rather than constant: Nero's in Rome after the great fire of 64, Pliny's trials in Bithynia, outbreaks of mob violence in particular cities. Christians refused to sacrifice to the gods or to the emperor's spirit, which looked to Romans like atheism and disloyalty. Empire-wide campaigns came later, under Decius in the 250s and above all the "Great Persecution" launched by Diocletian in 303, when churches were destroyed and scriptures burned. The memory of the martyrs (the word means "witnesses") became central to Christian identity: their tombs became shrines, and their feast days filled the calendar. Constantine Then, within a decade, everything changed. In 311 the emperor Galerius issued an edict of toleration. In 312 Constantine, fighting for control of the western empire, defeated his rival Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome on 28 October, after, by the Christian accounts, seeing a sign of the cross and putting Christ's monogram on his soldiers' shields. In 313 he and his co-emperor Licinius agreed the policy known as the Edict of Milan, granting freedom of worship to Christians and everyone else and ordering confiscated church property returned. Constantine was baptised only on his deathbed in 337. Historians still argue about how sincere his conversion was and what it meant. What is clear is the result: bishops gained imperial favour, money and buildings; Sunday became a public day of rest; and the church, once persecuted, became tied to power. In 380 the emperor Theodosius I decreed that all his subjects should follow the faith "delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter" and branded dissenters heretics. Within a few years pagan sacrifice was banned. The persecuted had become the established. The councils and the creeds With imperial support came imperial pressure to settle disputes. The biggest was about who Jesus was. An Alexandrian priest named Arius taught that the Son was the first and greatest of God's creatures, but not eternal like the Father. His bishop, Alexander, disagreed, and the quarrel split the eastern church. Constantine called the bishops to Nicaea (now İznik in Turkey) in 325; tradition counts 318 of them. The council declared the Son "of one substance" (in Greek homoousios) with the Father and produced a creed. The Council of Constantinople in 381 affirmed the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and the expanded creed associated with it, the "Nicene Creed" said in churches every Sunday, is still the one statement of faith shared by Catholics, Orthodox and most Protestants. The next fight was over how Christ could be both God and man. The Council of Ephesus (431) rejected the teaching associated with Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, and approved calling Mary Theotokos, "God-bearer". The Council of Chalcedon (451) defined Christ as one person "in two natures", divine and human, united without confusion or change and without division or separation. Council Year Question Answer Nicaea I 325 Is the Son fully God? Yes, "of one substance" with the Father Constantinople I 381 Is the Holy Spirit God? Yes; the Nicene Creed in its familiar form Ephesus 431 Is Mary the mother of God? Yes, Theotokos; Nestorius condemned Chalcedon 451 How is Christ God and man? One person in two natures Chalcedon caused the first lasting split. Churches in Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria and Armenia rejected its "two natures" formula as a betrayal of the earlier teaching of Cyril of Alexandria, insisting on one united nature of the incarnate Word. Their opponents called them "Monophysites"; they call themselves the Oriental Orthodox churches (Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Armenian, Syriac and Malankara), and many of their theologians today say the dispute was largely about words. Further east, the Church of the East, rooted in Persia and later reaching China and India, followed a theology closer to Nestorius's. These are not breakaways from "real" Christianity but some of its oldest branches, older in their lands than the Christianity of most of Europe. Part 4 — How the Bible was assembled How the Sacred Texts Were Written, in this library, tells the general story; here are the Christian specifics. The first Christians' Bible was the Jewish scriptures, mostly read in Greek translation. Their own writings, letters and Gospels, circulated for decades before anyone asked which of them counted as scripture alongside the old. The question was forced by rivals. Around 144 a wealthy shipowner named Marcion founded a church in Rome that rejected the Jewish scriptures and the God they described, and accepted only an edited Gospel of Luke and ten of Paul's letters. Mainstream bishops answered by insisting on the old scriptures and on four Gospels, no more and no fewer; Irenaeus of Lyon, around 180, argued for exactly four. Other groups produced other gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings, some of which were rediscovered in Egypt in 1945. Stage Date What happened Paul's letters 50s Earliest Christian writings Gospels c. 70–100 Mark, Matthew, Luke, John Marcion's canon c. 144 Luke (edited) and ten Pauline letters Muratorian Fragment date debated (2nd or 4th century) Oldest surviving list of New Testament books Athanasius's Festal Letter 367 First list of exactly the 27 books now accepted Councils in North Africa late 4th century Local councils approve similar lists Council of Trent 1546 Catholic Church defines its full canon, in answer to the Reformers In his 39th Festal Letter of 367, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, listed the four Gospels, Acts, seven "catholic" letters, fourteen of Paul (counting Hebrews) and Revelation: the 27 books of today's New Testament. The process was not a single vote but a slow convergence on books that were old, linked to apostles, widely used in worship and consistent with the "rule of faith". Some books, such as Hebrews, James, 2 Peter and Revelation, were long disputed, and some churches, especially in the East, kept slightly different collections for centuries. The Old Testament differs too. Catholics and Orthodox include books such as Tobit, Judith and the Maccabees that were in the Greek Jewish scriptures; Protestants, following Luther, use only the books of the Hebrew Bible and call the rest the Apocrypha. Part 5 — Monks, the medieval church and the split of East and West (500–1453) Into the desert As Christianity became respectable, some Christians fled respectability. In Egypt, Anthony went into the desert to live in prayer and fasting; his biography by Athanasius made him famous across the empire, and by his death, which St Jerome put at 356–357, thousands had followed him. Pachomius organised monks into communities under a rule. In the West, Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–543) wrote a short Rule for his monastery at Monte Cassino that balanced prayer, work and study, and it became the pattern for Western monastic life. Its first word is "Listen". For the next thousand years monasteries were the West's libraries, schools, hospitals, farms and hostels. Monks copied the classical texts that survived the fall of Rome. Irish monks carried the faith and Latin learning back to a Europe that had half-forgotten both. Later, the friars, Franciscans and Dominicans, took the religious life out of the cloister and into the towns, and Dominican scholars such as Thomas Aquinas built the great intellectual systems of the medieval universities. The mystical tradition grew in this soil. The library's pieces on the Dominican Meister Eckhart, the anchoress Julian of Norwich, and, later, the Spanish Carmelites Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross show what it produced: maps of the soul's journey to union with God that still guide Christian contemplatives. Two churches drifting apart The Roman Empire split into a Latin-speaking West and a Greek-speaking East, and so, slowly, did the church. The West, after Rome fell, looked to the pope as the one stable authority. The East had an emperor in Constantinople and a tradition of governing the church through councils of bishops, with the pope honoured as first among the patriarchs but not as their ruler. They argued about whether the Western churches could add the word Filioque, "and the Son", to the Nicene Creed, so that the Spirit "proceeds from the Father and the Son"; about leavened or unleavened bread at the Eucharist; about clerical celibacy; and above all about papal authority. On 16 July 1054 the pope's legate, Cardinal Humbert, laid a bull excommunicating Patriarch Michael Cerularius on the altar of Hagia Sophia; the patriarch and his synod excommunicated the legates in return. At the time few thought this was final, and historians now see 1054 less as the moment of schism than as a symbol of a long estrangement. What made it permanent was violence: in 1204 the knights of the Fourth Crusade, diverted from the Holy Land, sacked Constantinople, Christian against Christian, and set up a Latin empire there. Attempts at reunion, notably at the Council of Florence in 1439, failed, and in 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. In 1965 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople issued a joint declaration lifting the excommunications of 1054 and committing them, in its words, "to oblivion". The churches remain separate, but they speak of each other as "sister churches". "They commit these excommunications to oblivion." — Joint Catholic-Orthodox Declaration of Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I, 7 December 1965 The medieval Western church At its height, the medieval Latin church was the most powerful institution in Europe. It was a great landowner, ran most of the schools, kept the records of birth, marriage and death, and claimed authority over kings. Popes such as Gregory VII (in the 11th century) and Innocent III (in the 13th) fought emperors over who appointed bishops. Ordinary life was shaped by the parish, the saints' days, pilgrimages (see Pilgrimage: Why Humans Walk to Holy Places) and the sacraments. The church also produced the cathedrals of Chartres and Cologne, the universities of Paris, Oxford and Bologna, the hospital as an institution, and much of the art and music Europe is still proud of. Part 6 — Crusades and inquisitions: what happened and what historians now say Few subjects are as wrapped in myth, from both directions, as these. Here is what happened, and how scholars have revised the popular picture. The Crusades In November 1095, at Clermont in France, Pope Urban II called on Western knights to go to the aid of the Byzantine Christians against the Seljuk Turks and to free Jerusalem, promising remission of sins to those who went. The response astonished everyone. Armies marched east; on the way, some bands massacred the Jewish communities of the Rhineland. In July 1099 the crusaders took Jerusalem and killed much of its population, Muslim and Jewish. They set up "crusader states" along the coast of the Levant, which lasted until the fall of Acre in 1291. Later crusades were aimed at Muslims in Spain, pagans around the Baltic, heretics in southern France, and the pope's political enemies; the Fourth sacked Christian Constantinople. How historians see it has shifted: Old picture What recent scholarship says Greedy younger sons seeking land Many crusaders sold property to go and came home poorer; religious motives (penance, pilgrimage) were real (Jonathan Riley-Smith) Unprovoked Western aggression A response to a Byzantine appeal and to Turkish conquests, but also part of a Latin expansion that included violence against Jews and Eastern Christians A "clash of civilisations" remembered by Muslims ever since Medieval Muslim writers saw the crusades as one episode among many; the idea of a continuous crusade grievance took shape largely in the 19th and 20th centuries (Carole Hillenbrand) Only the eastern expeditions count Many historians use a "pluralist" definition including crusades in Spain, the Baltic and Europe itself (Christopher Tyerman, God's War) None of these revisions makes the massacres less real. On 12 March 2000, in a "Day of Pardon" Mass, Pope John Paul II asked forgiveness for "the violence some have used in the service of the truth" and for hostility towards followers of other religions, without naming each case; Christians and others still debate whether that was enough. The inquisitions "The Inquisition" was not one thing. The medieval inquisition grew from the 1180s as bishops and then papally appointed judges, often Dominican or Franciscan friars, were charged with hunting heresy, especially the Cathars of southern France. Inquisitors could use torture (authorised by Pope Innocent IV in 1252) and hand the unrepentant to the secular authorities for burning. The Spanish Inquisition was different: a royal tribunal, set up with papal permission granted by Sixtus IV on 1 November 1478 at the request of Ferdinand and Isabella, and controlled by the crown. Its first targets were conversos, Jews who had converted to Christianity, often under pressure, and who were suspected of secretly keeping Jewish practices; later, moriscos (converted Muslims), Protestants, and people accused of blasphemy or sexual offences. It was suppressed and restored several times before its final abolition in the early 19th century. A 2021 study in PNAS assembled records of more than 67,000 of its trials between 1480 and 1820, and found that Spanish towns where it was most active have lower trust, schooling and income today. The Roman Inquisition, founded by Paul III in 1542 to fight Protestantism, is the body that tried Galileo in 1633. The revision here, led by historians such as Henry Kamen (The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision), is about scale and character, not innocence. The trial records show that most cases ended in penances, fines or reconciliation rather than death, and that executions were heaviest in the tribunal's first decades. Most scholarly estimates put the total executed by the Spanish Inquisition in the low thousands over three and a half centuries, not the hundreds of thousands of legend; the exact figure is disputed. At the same time, the institution terrorised Spain's converso and morisco families, encouraged denunciation by neighbours, made "purity of blood" a condition for many offices, and censored books for centuries. Both things are true. Revisionist history is not apologetics. Smaller numbers do not make a burning less of a burning; they make the past more accurate. In 1998 the Vatican convened historians for a symposium on the inquisitions. When the proceedings were published in 2004, John Paul II wrote that "before asking for forgiveness it is necessary to have exact knowledge of the facts." Part 7 — The Reformations (1517–1648) Luther By 1500 many Western Christians wanted reform: of corrupt and absent clergy, of a papacy behaving like an Italian principality, of the sale of indulgences, certificates said to reduce time in purgatory for oneself or a dead relative. On 31 October 1517, by long tradition, Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar and professor at Wittenberg in Saxony, posted 95 theses against indulgences on the door of the castle church (some historians doubt the posting; it is certain that he sent the theses to the archbishop of Mainz that day). The printing press spread them across Germany within weeks. At the root of Luther's protest was a spiritual discovery from Paul's letter to the Romans: "The just shall live by faith" (Romans 1:17). Salvation, he concluded, is a free gift of God's grace received through faith, not something earned by good works or bought from the church. Scripture, not popes or councils, is the final authority (sola scriptura), and every baptised Christian is a priest before God. Summoned before the emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521, Luther refused to recant. Hidden in the Wartburg castle by his prince, he translated the New Testament into German, published in 1522. Catholics answered with the Letter of James: "faith, if it hath not works, is dead" (James 2:17), a letter Luther ranked below the New Testament's chief books, placing it near the end of his 1522 translation. Calvin, the radicals and England The Reformation quickly became several reformations. The Reformed tradition. In Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli went further than Luther, treating the Lord's Supper as a memorial rather than a real presence of Christ's body. In Geneva, the French lawyer John Calvin (1509–1564) wrote the Institutes of the Christian Religion (first edition 1536, final Latin edition 1559), stressing God's sovereignty and predestination, and built a disciplined city church. Calvinism spread to Scotland (Presbyterians), the Netherlands, Hungary, France (the Huguenots) and, through the Puritans, New England. The Anabaptists ("re-baptisers") argued that baptism should be for believers who chose it, not infants, and that the church should be a voluntary community separate from the state. In Zurich in January 1525 a group around Conrad Grebel baptised each other, and in 1527 the Schleitheim Confession set out their principles, including refusal of oaths and of the sword. Catholics and Protestants alike drowned, burned and beheaded them by the thousands. A violent apocalyptic takeover of the city of Münster (1534–35) was used to tar the whole movement, though most Anabaptists were pacifists. Their heirs, the Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites, pioneered ideas, such as the separation of church and state and freedom of conscience, that later became mainstream. England. Henry VIII broke with Rome when the pope would not annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon; the Act of Supremacy made the king head of the Church of England. Under his son Edward VI the church became more Protestant, with Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer; under Mary I it returned to Rome, and hundreds of Protestants were burned; under Elizabeth I, from 1558, a settlement emerged that the Church of England describes as both "catholic and reformed", the ancestor of today's worldwide Anglican Communion. The Catholic Reformation Rome's response used to be called the "Counter-Reformation", as if it were only a reaction. Historians now prefer "Catholic Reformation", because reform movements inside the church were already under way. The Council of Trent (13 December 1545 to 4 December 1563) restated Catholic doctrine against the Protestants, on scripture and tradition together, the seven sacraments, the Mass as sacrifice and justification, and also cracked down on abuses, requiring seminaries to train priests and bishops to live in their dioceses. New orders brought fresh energy: the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), approved by Paul III on 27 September 1540, became the church's teachers and missionaries. Teresa of Ávila's reform of the Carmelites, described in this library, belongs to this moment too, as does the Roman Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden Books. Wars of religion The splits were not only theological. Princes chose churches for their territories; the Peace of Augsburg (1555) let each German ruler decide whether his lands were Lutheran or Catholic. Religious wars tore through France, the Netherlands and the German lands, ending with the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, after which European states largely stopped fighting each other over doctrine. The exhaustion of those wars is one root of the modern idea of religious toleration. Tradition Founder figure(s) Key idea Heirs today Lutheran Martin Luther Justification by faith alone Lutheran churches of Germany, Scandinavia, Tanzania, Ethiopia, the US Reformed Zwingli, Calvin God's sovereignty; scripture rules worship Presbyterian and Reformed churches Anabaptist Grebel, Menno Simons Believer's baptism; church separate from state Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites Anglican Henry VIII, Cranmer, Elizabeth I Reformed theology, catholic order Anglican Communion Catholic Reformation Council of Trent, Ignatius of Loyola Renewal within the Roman Church The Catholic Church Part 8 — Missions and empire: harm and agency From the 1490s Christianity travelled with European ships, and the story of how it spread across the Americas, Africa and Asia is both a story of conquest and a story of peoples who took the faith and made it their own. The harm In 1493, a year after Columbus's first voyage, Pope Alexander VI issued bulls dividing newly found lands between Spain and Portugal; jurists later built on such texts the so-called "doctrine of discovery", used to claim that Christian nations could take land from non-Christian peoples. Spanish conquistadors read out a demand, the Requerimiento, telling indigenous people to accept the pope and the king or face war and enslavement. Forced labour and imported disease killed a very large share of the native population of the Americas. Missionaries often supported colonial rule, destroyed sacred objects and suppressed languages, and in later centuries churches ran residential and boarding schools designed to separate indigenous children from their cultures. In Canada, more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children attended residential schools, most run by churches for the federal government; the first church-run school opened in 1831. Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which finished its work in 2015, documented abuse, neglect and thousands of deaths. In July 2022 Pope Francis travelled to Canada and apologised in person. In March 2023 the Vatican issued a statement saying that the "doctrine of discovery" "is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church", that the papal bulls "did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples", and that the church "repudiates" such concepts. The critics inside From the start, some missionaries were the conquest's fiercest critics. In 1511 the Dominican Antonio de Montesinos preached in Hispaniola that the colonists were in mortal sin for their cruelty. Bartolomé de las Casas, a former colonist turned Dominican friar, spent fifty years documenting atrocities in his Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies and arguing, at a famous debate in Valladolid in 1550–51 against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, that indigenous people were fully rational human beings with rights. The Jesuits built mission towns, the reducciones, in Paraguay that protected Guaraní communities from slavers (and also organised their lives on Jesuit terms). Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit who reached Beijing and died there in 1610, learned classical Chinese, dressed as a scholar and tried to present Christianity in Confucian terms. The agency of converts The other half of the story, emphasised by historians such as Lamin Sanneh and Andrew Walls, is that Christianity spread most of all through local people, often far from missionary control. Translation. Missionaries translated the Bible into hundreds of languages, and Sanneh argued in Translating the Message (1989) that this had an unintended effect: it dignified local languages and cultures, and gave converts the tools to judge missionaries by their own scriptures. African prophets. In 1913 William Wadé Harris, a Liberian Grebo, walked into the Ivory Coast preaching, dressed in white with a cross and a Bible, and more than 100,000 people were baptised within about eighteen months, before most had met a European missionary. In 1921, in the Belgian Congo, Simon Kimbangu, a Baptist catechist, began a healing and preaching mission that became a mass movement; the colonial authorities imprisoned him for the rest of his life, but the church that bears his name became one of the largest African-founded churches and later joined the World Council of Churches. African-initiated churches, from the Aladura churches of Nigeria to the Zion Christian Church in South Africa, blended Christian faith with African forms of prayer, healing and prophecy, and are now among the continent's largest denominations. Christianity arrived in much of the world on colonial ships. It stayed, and grew, after the ships left, because Africans, Asians and Latin Americans made it their own. The two stories do not cancel each other. A Kenyan or Filipino Christian today may hold both: grief at what colonial Christianity did, and conviction that the faith itself was a gift that their own people carried furthest. Part 9 — The Orthodox world For many Western readers, Christian history is Rome and the Reformation. For about 260 million Orthodox Christians, the Pew Research Center's 2017 estimate, it runs through Constantinople, Kyiv, Moscow, Alexandria and Addis Ababa. What the Orthodox believe. The Eastern Orthodox churches see themselves as the one church of the apostles, continuous and unchanged in faith, holding to the seven ecumenical councils from Nicaea (325) to Nicaea II (787). They are a family of self-governing ("autocephalous") churches, among them Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Russia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia and Greece, united in faith and worship rather than under one head; the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is honoured as first among equals. Orthodox theology stresses theosis, the transformation of human beings by grace into partakers of God's life; icons, defended at the Second Council of Nicaea as windows onto heaven, not idols; and the Divine Liturgy, often sung, long and largely unchanged since the time of St John Chrysostom. Kyiv and Moscow. In 988, by the traditional account, Prince Vladimir of Kyiv was baptised and had his people baptised, after envoys he had sent to inspect the religions of his neighbours came back overwhelmed by the beauty of the Greek liturgy in Constantinople's Hagia Sophia. After Constantinople fell in 1453, Russian churchmen spoke of Moscow as a "Third Rome". Under the Ottomans, Orthodox Christians in the Balkans and the Middle East lived for centuries as a protected but subordinate community. In the 20th century, the Soviet state closed most churches and killed or imprisoned many thousands of clergy; after 1991 the Russian Orthodox Church revived dramatically. Ukraine. In January 2019 the Ecumenical Patriarch granted independence (a tomos of autocephaly) to a new Orthodox Church of Ukraine; the Moscow Patriarchate, which had already broken communion with Constantinople over the plan in 2018, rejected it. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow's support for the war has deepened the divide, both within Ukraine and across world Orthodoxy. Supporters of the Moscow Patriarchate argue that it defends canonical order and the historic unity of the Rus' church; supporters of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine argue that an independent nation has a right to an independent church, free of a Moscow hierarchy that blesses the invasion. The dispute is live. Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, one of the Oriental Orthodox family, traces its Christianity to the 4th-century kingdom of Aksum. Pew's 2017 survey found Ethiopian Orthodox Christians among the most observant Christians in the world. Its estimated 36 million members make it the largest Orthodox population outside Eastern Europe, about 14 percent of all Orthodox Christians. Orthodoxy overall, Pew found, has shrunk as a share of Christians, from about 20 percent in 1910 to 12 percent, because other branches grew faster. Orthodox Christianity in numbers (Pew, 2017) Orthodox Christians worldwide nearly 260 million In Russia alone more than 100 million Ethiopian Orthodox about 36 million, 14% of all Orthodox Orthodox share of all Christians about 20% in 1910; about 12% today Part 10 — Reason, criticism and the Bible (1650–1950) The wars of religion left many Europeans wanting a faith that reason could referee. In the 17th and 18th centuries, philosophers such as Spinoza questioned whether Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible; English Deists argued for a reasonable God who made the world and left it to its laws; Voltaire attacked the church's power; and Thomas Jefferson later assembled his own version of the Gospels with the miracles left out. Others, such as John Locke, argued that Christianity itself was reasonable, and many leading scientists of the age, Newton among them, were devout. Reading the Bible as a historical book In the 19th century, German universities developed historical criticism: reading the Bible with the same tools as any ancient text. In 1835 David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus treated the Gospel miracles as myth, and cost him his career. Scholars proposed that the first five books of the Bible were woven together from several earlier sources (the "documentary hypothesis", in its classic form by Julius Wellhausen), that Mark was the first Gospel, and that the Gospels show the theology of their communities. In 1859 Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species offered a natural account of the variety of life that seemed to many to undercut Genesis. Christians responded in at least three ways, and all three are still present: Response Key idea Examples Liberal or modernist Accept criticism and evolution; locate faith in experience and ethics Friedrich Schleiermacher; the social gospel Conservative or fundamentalist Defend the Bible's inerrancy and miracles The Fundamentals (1910–15); the 1925 Scopes trial over teaching evolution in Tennessee Catholic authority, slowly opening First resist, then accept critical methods within church teaching Vatican I (1870); Pascendi (1907); later Dei Verbum (1965) The Catholic Church, battered by revolution and the loss of the Papal States, turned inward. The First Vatican Council defined papal infallibility in the constitution Pastor aeternus (18 July 1870): when the pope speaks ex cathedra to define a doctrine of faith or morals, Catholics hold that he is protected from error. In 1907 Pius X's encyclical Pascendi condemned "modernism", and suspected scholars were silenced. Then the tide turned: in 1943 Pius XII's Divino Afflante Spiritu encouraged Catholic scholars to study the Bible's original languages and literary forms, and the Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum (18 November 1965) taught that "God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion", so that readers must ask what the human writers really meant. The question every Christian tradition has had to answer since 1800 is not whether the Bible was written by human beings, but what follows if it was. Today most mainline Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox scholars use critical methods while holding to the creeds; many evangelicals accept much critical scholarship while defending the Bible's reliability; and a large share of Christians worldwide read the Bible in a more direct, literal way. Many Christian thinkers, from Augustine onwards, have also argued that faith and science answer different questions and need not compete. Part 11 — Slavery: Christian abolitionists and a complicit church Christianity's record on slavery is one of the clearest examples of a tradition arguing with itself, using the same Bible on both sides. Complicity For most of Christian history, churches accepted slavery as part of the social order. The New Testament tells slaves to obey their masters (Ephesians 6:5) and nowhere demands abolition. Papal bulls of the 15th century, such as Dum Diversas (1452), gave the Portuguese crown sweeping rights over the lands and persons of non-Christians, and Catholic and Protestant powers alike built the Atlantic slave trade, which carried some 12.5 million Africans across the ocean. (There were dissenting voices: in 1537, in the bull Sublimis Deus, Paul III declared that the peoples of the Americas were not to be deprived of their liberty, "nor should they be in any way enslaved", a ruling widely ignored.) Churches owned enslaved people directly. The Anglican missionary Society for the Propagation of the Gospel ran the Codrington plantations in Barbados, inherited in 1710. In 1838 the Maryland Jesuits, whose province ran Georgetown University, sold 272 enslaved people to two Louisiana planters; Georgetown, prompted by a 2019 student referendum, now funds projects with the descendants' communities. In the American South, preachers defended slavery from the Bible, and the Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 after a split over whether slaveholders could be missionaries. In 1995 the Convention formally apologised, acknowledging "the role that slavery played in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention". Abolition And yet the movement that ended the Atlantic slave trade was, to a striking degree, a Christian movement. Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, drafted one of the first written protests against slavery in the Americas in 1688, and Quakers were the backbone of the British campaign that formed in 1787. Evangelicals such as William Wilberforce and the "Clapham Sect" led the parliamentary fight that produced the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Former slaves who were Christians, such as Olaudah Equiano in Britain and Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman in the United States, gave the movement its moral force. Abolitionists appealed to the creation of all people in God's image, to the Exodus, and to Paul's "neither bond nor free". Black churches, founded because white churches excluded or segregated them, became the institutional heart of the later civil rights movement led by a Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr. Douglass, who had been enslaved by men who prayed, drew the line himself in the appendix to his Narrative (1845): "between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference" — Frederick Douglass Historians weigh the two sides differently. Some stress that Christianity supplied the arguments that finally made slavery unthinkable in societies where it had seemed natural; others stress that it took eighteen centuries, and that the institutions profited until the end. Both are telling true parts of the story. Part 12 — The twentieth century: Pentecostal fire, the Global South and Vatican II Pentecostalism In April 1906, at the Apostolic Faith Mission at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles, an African-American preacher named William J. Seymour led a revival in which Black and white, rich and poor worshipped together, and people spoke in tongues, prophesied and reported healings. Within eighteen months, the World Council of Churches notes, Azusa Street had sent evangelists across North America and missionaries to Europe, Africa and Asia. Independent Pentecostal churches arose in Chile (1910) and elsewhere in Latin America without North American missionaries, and the movement grew enormously across Africa and Asia; Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul is usually described as the largest single Pentecostal congregation in the world. Pentecostals believe that the gifts of the Holy Spirit described in the New Testament, speaking in tongues, healing, prophecy, are meant for Christians today, received in a "baptism in the Spirit" after conversion. Worship is emotional, participatory and often loud. Later in the century a "charismatic renewal" brought the same experiences into Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran churches. Counting is hard, but the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell estimates 644 million Pentecostal and charismatic Christians in 2020, about 26 percent of all Christians, a movement that barely existed in 1900. (The count includes charismatic Catholics and Protestants, so it overlaps the other branches.) Critics, including many Christians, worry about the "prosperity gospel" preached in some Pentecostal churches, the teaching that faith brings wealth and health, and about pastors who become wealthy celebrities. Defenders point to churches that give poor people dignity, community, sobriety and a voice, often led by women and the poor themselves. The sociologist Harvey Cox, in Fire from Heaven (1994), called it the reshaping of religion in the 21st century. The centre moves south In 1910, two-thirds of the world's Christians lived in Europe and about 1 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. By 2020, Pew found, sub-Saharan Africa held 31 percent of all Christians and Europe 22 percent; Latin America and the Caribbean held another 24 percent. Africa now has more Catholics than Europe: 288 million against 287 million at mid-2024, according to the Vatican's statistics. The historian Philip Jenkins called this The Next Christendom (2002). A typical Christian today is not a European but, as scholars often put it, a young woman in Nigeria, Brazil or the Philippines. Where Christians live 1910 2020 Europe about two-thirds 22% Sub-Saharan Africa about 1% 31% Latin America and the Caribbean 24% Catholics, Africa vs Europe (mid-2024) 288 million vs 287 million Pentecostal and charismatic Christians 644 million, 26% of Christians (CSGC) Sources: Pew Research Center (2025); Fides/Vatican statistics (2026); Center for the Study of Global Christianity. That shift is changing the faith itself. Southern Christianity tends to be more conservative on sexual ethics, more open to miracles and spiritual warfare, more Pentecostal in style, and more likely to be lived as a minority among Muslims or followers of other religions. It is also why the global Anglican Communion has been strained almost to breaking point over same-sex marriage, with conservative provinces, many of them African, organised in the Gafcon movement, which calls itself a fellowship of "authentic Anglicans". Vatican II The Catholic Church's biggest modern event was the Second Vatican Council, opened by Pope John XXIII on 11 October 1962 and closed under Paul VI on 8 December 1965. Bishops from every continent produced sixteen documents. Among the most important: Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963) allowed the "mother tongue" in the liturgy, so that within a few years Catholics worldwide heard Mass in their own languages rather than Latin. Lumen Gentium (1964) described the church as the "people of God", stressing the role of lay people and the shared authority of bishops with the pope. Nostra Aetate (28 October 1965) said the church "rejects nothing that is true and holy" in other religions and rejected the charge that the Jewish people as a whole were guilty of Jesus's death, deploring antisemitism. It transformed Catholic-Jewish relations. Dignitatis Humanae (7 December 1965) affirmed religious freedom as a human right. Gaudium et Spes (7 December 1965) turned the church towards "the joys and hopes" of the modern world. The council's meaning is still fought over. Progressive Catholics see it as a beginning whose promise (on the role of women, or of local churches) was never fully kept. Traditionalists think it went too far, especially in the liturgy; Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's Society of St Pius X broke with Rome over it, and in 2021 Pope Francis restricted the old Latin Mass with Traditionis Custodes. Most Catholics live somewhere in between. Part 13 — What Christians actually do: sacraments, prayer and the year An ordinary day and week Christian practice varies enormously, but some things are close to universal. Many Christians pray daily, often using the prayer Jesus taught, the Lord's Prayer ("Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name", Matthew 6:9). Many read the Bible, alone or in groups. Catholics may pray the rosary; Orthodox Christians may repeat the Jesus Prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me") and pray before icons at a home corner; monks and nuns and many lay people pray the "hours" at fixed times of day. Evangelicals often speak of a daily "quiet time" with scripture. Sunday, the day of the resurrection, is the day of worship. The heart of Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran worship is the Eucharist (also called Mass, Divine Liturgy, Holy Communion or the Lord's Supper): readings from scripture, a sermon, prayers, and the sharing of bread and wine. Many Protestant services centre on preaching and song, with communion monthly or quarterly. In the United States, Pew's 2026 surveys found 34 percent of adults saying they had attended religious services in person in the past month, and 45 percent in person or online. The sacraments A sacrament, in the classic definition, is a visible sign of an invisible grace. Christians disagree on how many there are and what they do. Catholic Orthodox Lutheran / Anglican Reformed, Baptist, Pentecostal How many? Seven Seven "mysteries" (number not strictly fixed) Two "dominical" sacraments; Anglicans also value the other five rites Two "ordinances" (baptism, Lord's Supper); some add foot-washing Baptism Infants; by pouring Infants; by triple immersion, with chrismation and first communion at once Infants Usually believers only, by immersion (Baptists, most Pentecostals); infants in Reformed churches Eucharist The bread and wine become Christ's body and blood (transubstantiation) Real change, a mystery not defined philosophically Christ truly present (Lutherans: "in, with and under" the bread); Anglicans vary Mostly a memorial or spiritual presence Confession Private confession to a priest Confession before a priest, often before an icon Optional, general confession in worship Directly to God Ordination Male priests; celibate in the Latin rite Male priests may marry before ordination; bishops are celibate monks Many ordain women Many ordain women; Pentecostals often have women preachers Authority Scripture and tradition, interpreted by the pope and bishops Scripture and holy tradition, councils, the Fathers Scripture first, with creeds and tradition Scripture alone; the Spirit's guidance The other Catholic and Orthodox sacraments are confirmation (chrismation), confession (reconciliation), anointing of the sick, marriage and ordination. The year Most churches follow a liturgical year that retells the life of Christ: Season When What it marks Advent Four weeks before Christmas Waiting for Christ's coming Christmas 25 December (7 January for churches using the Julian calendar) The birth of Jesus Epiphany 6 January The revelation of Christ to the nations; in the East, his baptism Lent Forty days before Easter, from Ash Wednesday in the West Fasting, prayer, almsgiving Holy Week The week before Easter The Last Supper (Maundy Thursday), crucifixion (Good Friday) Easter A Sunday in spring, set by the moon The resurrection; the greatest feast Pentecost Fifty days after Easter The Spirit's coming on the apostles; the church's birthday Western and Orthodox churches usually celebrate Easter on different dates, because they calculate it with different calendars, and church leaders on both sides have long talked about agreeing a common date. In November 2025 Pope Leo XIV made a pilgrimage to İznik, the ancient Nicaea, to mark the council's 1700th anniversary. Part 14 — Christianity in 2026: abuse, the papacy and the numbers The abuse crises The gravest crisis of modern Christianity has been the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults by clergy, and its cover-up by church leaders. It has been documented most fully in the Catholic Church, the largest and most centralised church, but it is not only a Catholic story. Year Where What was found 2002 Boston, United States Boston Globe investigation exposes cover-up by the archdiocese; the crisis becomes national 2004 United States John Jay College report for the bishops: 4,392 priests accused by 10,667 people, 1950–2002, about 4 percent of priests in the period 2009 Ireland Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (the "Ryan report") on church-run institutions 2017 Australia Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse publishes its final report (15 December), covering many churches and secular bodies 2019 Vatican Pope Francis's Vos estis lux mundi (7 May) makes reporting of abuse and cover-up mandatory for clergy and religious 2021 France Independent commission (CIASE) estimates about 216,000 victims of clergy and religious since 1950, about 330,000 including lay church workers 2024 England The Makin review finds the Church of England's response to abuse by John Smyth, a leader of evangelical holiday camps, "amounted to a coverup"; Archbishop Justin Welby resigns The pattern repeated across countries: abusers moved between parishes instead of being reported to police; bishops protected the institution's reputation; victims were disbelieved or silenced with payments. Researchers and church commissions have pointed to clericalism (treating clergy as above question), secrecy, poor training and a culture of deference, rather than to celibacy alone, since abuse has also been found in churches with married clergy. Survivors' groups argue that reforms have been slow and uneven, and that bishops are still too rarely held to account. The Vatican and many national churches point to new safeguarding rules, independent reporting and a Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. Both can be true at once: much has changed since 2002, and much has not. The papacy as of 2026 Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas, died on Easter Monday, 21 April 2025, aged 88. On 8 May 2025 the cardinals elected Robert Francis Prevost, who took the name Leo XIV. Born in Chicago in 1955, he is the first pope from the United States and the first from the Augustinian order. He studied mathematics at Villanova before becoming a friar and canon lawyer, spent most of his ministry in Peru (he became a Peruvian citizen in 2015 and was bishop of Chiclayo), led the worldwide Augustinians for twelve years, and from 2023 ran the Vatican office that advises the pope on choosing bishops. His first major document, the apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te (4 October 2025), on the church's love for the poor, completed a text Francis had been preparing. His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026), is about artificial intelligence and human dignity, published on the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, the founding text of Catholic social teaching that his chosen name recalls. In 2026 he has travelled to Algeria, Cameroon, Angola and Equatorial Guinea (April), Spain (June), and France and UNESCO (September), and in November he is visiting Uruguay, Argentina and Peru. How he will handle the questions Francis left open, such as the role of women, the blessing of same-sex couples, the old Latin Mass and the church's finances, is what Catholics are watching. In the Church of England, mother church of the Anglican Communion, Sarah Mullally became the first woman to serve as Archbishop of Canterbury after Welby's resignation. How many Christians? Measure Figure Source and date Christians worldwide 2.3 billion, 28.8% of humanity (2020) Pew Research Center, June 2025 Change 2010–2020 +122 million, but share down 1.8 points Pew, 2025 Where they live Sub-Saharan Africa 31%, Latin America 24%, Europe 22%, North America 10% Pew, 2025 Catholics 1.422 billion, 17.8% of humanity (June 2024) Vatican statistics via Fides, October 2026 Orthodox about 260 million (2017) Pew, 2017 Pentecostal and charismatic about 644 million (2020) Gordon-Conwell CSGC Denominations about 45,000 (2019, counted country by country) Gordon-Conwell CSGC United States 62% of adults Christian (2023–24), stable since 2019 Pew Religious Landscape Study, February 2025 Figures differ by method. The Gordon-Conwell center, which also counts church membership records, gives higher totals than Pew, which relies mainly on censuses and surveys of self-identification. Either way, the title of this piece rounds down. Christianity is still the world's largest religion, but its share is falling. Pew found that for every person who joined Christianity in the 117 countries it studied, about 3.1 people raised Christian had left, mostly to no religion. Christians are now less than half the population of the United Kingdom (49%), Australia (47%) and France (46%). Growth comes from births and conversions in Africa; decline from people leaving in Europe, the Americas and Oceania. Open questions Who speaks for Christianity? A Nigerian Anglican bishop, a Brazilian Pentecostal, a German Lutheran and a Russian Orthodox priest may disagree about nearly everything except the creed. Sex and gender. Same-sex marriage, women's ordination and the place of LGBT Christians divide churches internally more than any doctrinal question. Power and politics. From Russian Orthodoxy's support for the war in Ukraine to Christian nationalism in the United States and Christian democracy in Europe, Christians disagree about how close faith should stand to the state (see Religion in the Modern Age). Can it recover trust? After the abuse crises, whether churches can be trusted with children, money and power is, for many people, the first question, not the last. Unity. The ecumenical movement, embodied in the World Council of Churches, a fellowship of 356 churches representing over 580 million Christians (the Catholic Church is not a member but works with it), has made real progress since 1948. Full communion between Rome, Constantinople and the Protestant churches is not in sight. The takeaway Christianity began with a Jewish teacher from Galilee whom Rome crucified around the year 30, and with followers who proclaimed that he had risen and was the Son of God. Historians can confirm far less than believers affirm, but they agree he lived, was baptised by John and was crucified under Pilate. Paul opened the movement to non-Jews; Constantine brought it to power; councils at Nicaea and Chalcedon defined its creeds; monks preserved learning; East and West divided; the Reformation broke the West into many churches; colonial empires spread it, with great harm, while local converts made it their own. It inspired abolition and justified slavery, built hospitals and hid abusers. Today it is about 2.3 billion people, more African and Latin American than European, increasingly Pentecostal in style, and still arguing, as it always has, about what its founder meant. Try this: read one Gospel straight through in a single sitting. Mark is the shortest, about the length of a long magazine article, and most scholars think it is the earliest. Read it once as a believer might, asking what it claims about who Jesus is, and once as a historian might, noticing what it assumes its readers already know. Then notice which reading you found easier, and why. Sources & Further Reading Sources - Pew Research Center, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020 (9 June 2025) and its chapter "Christian population change"; Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off (Religious Landscape Study, 26 February 2025); Religion Remains Stable in the U.S., With Mixed Signals for Young Adults (28 October 2026); Orthodox Christianity in the 21st Century (8 November 2017); Religion in Latin America (13 November 2014); Spirit and Power (2006). - Fides News Agency, Catholic Church Statistics 2026 (October 2026), from the Vatican's Statistical Yearbook of the Church (data to 30 June / 31 December 2024). - Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary: "Quick Facts About Global Christianity" and "Global Pentecostalism" pages. - Tacitus, Annals 15.44 (Church and Brodribb translation, MIT Internet Classics Archive); Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96 (Internet History Sourcebooks, Fordham University); Lactantius on the edicts of 311 and 313 and the Theodosian Code XVI.1.2 (Fordham sourcebooks); Council of Chalcedon acts (NPNF, Fordham); Athanasius, Festal Letter 39 (NPNF via New Advent); Urban II at Clermont (Fordham). - L. Michael White and Paula Fredriksen, interviews for From Jesus to Christ (PBS Frontline, 1998), on Gospel dating; Dale B. Martin, Introduction to the New Testament, lecture 1 (Yale Open Courses). - The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–1913, via New Advent): articles on the councils of Nicaea, Constantinople and Ephesus, the Muratorian Canon, Marcionites, St Anthony, St Benedict, Constantine, Theodosius, the Eastern Schism, the Crusades, the Inquisition, Luther, Calvin, Trent, the Society of Jesus, St Vladimir and Matteo Ricci (used for dates; its century-old judgements are not followed). - Vatican: joint Catholic-Orthodox declaration of 7 December 1965; Vatican II documents (vatican.va archive, with dates); Pastor aeternus (1870); Pascendi (1907); John Paul II, homily for the Day of Pardon (12 March 2000) and letter on the Inquisition symposium (15 June 2004); Vos estis lux mundi (2019); Joint Statement on the "Doctrine of Discovery" (30 March 2023); Leo XIV's official biography, Dilexi Te, Magnifica Humanitas, and travel pages; Vatican News on the death of Pope Francis (21 April 2025). - M. Drelichman, J. Vidal-Robert and H.-J. Voth, "The long-run effects of religious persecution: Evidence from the Spanish Inquisition", PNAS 118 (2021). - Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (Yale University Press, 4th ed. 2014), publisher's description. - Church of England, "History of the Church of England"; press release on the Makin review (November 2024); archbishopofcanterbury.org (October 2026). - National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (Canada), residential school history and TRC pages. - Dictionary of African Christian Biography: entries on William Wadé Harris and Simon Kimbangu. - Southern Baptist Convention, "Resolution on Racial Reconciliation on the 150th Anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention" (1995); Georgetown University, Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation. - Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), appendix (Project Gutenberg). - John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950–2002 (2004); Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (Ireland); CIASE, Summary of the Final Report (5 October 2021). - World Council of Churches, "About the WCC" and "Pentecostal churches" pages. - King James Version (1611) via Project Gutenberg, for all Bible quotations. - Wikipedia articles on the historical Jesus, Pontius Pilate, the Pauline epistles, the Council of Jerusalem, the Diocletianic persecution, the Spanish Inquisition and others were consulted as leads only. Go deeper - 📘 A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years — Diarmaid MacCulloch (the best single-volume history: fair to every branch, strong on the Orthodox and the global story, and very readable) - 📘 The Historical Figure of Jesus — E. P. Sanders (a careful, non-polemical account of what historians can know, from one of the scholars who put Jesus back into Judaism) - 📘 The Orthodox Church — Timothy (Kallistos) Ware (the classic introduction by an English convert who became an Orthodox bishop; how Orthodoxy sees itself) - 📘 The Next Christendom — Philip Jenkins (why the typical Christian is now African or Latin American, and what that means) - 📘 God's War: A New History of the Crusades — Christopher Tyerman (the crusades in full, without myth in either direction) - 📘 Translating the Message — Lamin Sanneh (a Gambian-born historian's argument that missions empowered the cultures they entered) - ▶️ From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians — PBS Frontline (four hours of leading scholars on the first century; the companion website is still online) - 🌐 Companion pieces in this library: How the Sacred Texts Were Written, Mysticism 101, the Mystics pieces on Eckhart, Teresa, John of the Cross and Julian, and the Religions long reads on Judaism, Islam and Religion in the Modern Age Step 18. Islam: From Mecca to Two Billion People ------------------------------------------------ Why: Islam. A merchant's revelation in a mountain cave, a book carried in memory, a community that split over who should lead it, empires from Spain to Bengal, and two billion people today, most of whom live nowhere near Arabia. Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each and How the Sacred Texts Were Written. Companion pieces: Pilgrimage: Why Humans Walk to Holy Places (the Hajj), Mysticism 101, Rumi and Ibn Arabi in Most Influential Mystics, and If I Was Born in Saudi Arabia. In 2013 a doctoral student named Alba Fedeli was studying a few pages of an old Qur'an in the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham. They had been bound in with leaves from a different, later manuscript. When the two leaves were separated and their parchment was sent to a laboratory in Oxford, the result came back in 2015: the animal whose skin they were written on had died, with 95.4 percent probability, between 568 and 645 CE. The man who brought the Qur'an to the world is generally thought to have lived from about 570 to 632. Many Muslims heard confirmation of what they already believed: the Qur'an in their hands is the text the Prophet recited. Some historians were more cautious: radiocarbon dates the skin, not the ink. Both were looking at the same two pages of Suras 18 to 20, in a script an Arabic reader can still follow. That double vision runs through this piece. Islam has its own account of its origins, told for fourteen centuries in its scripture, its biographies of the Prophet and the collections of his words. Historians ask in another way, using manuscripts, coins, inscriptions and outsiders' writings. This long read tells both, side by side, and labels which is which. A note on names and courtesy. Muslims usually follow the Prophet's name with a blessing, ṣallā Allāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam, "God bless him and grant him peace", often written ﷺ or "PBUH" in English. Many say "peace be upon him" after other prophets' names too. This piece follows reference-work practice and writes simply "Muhammad"; no disrespect is meant. Allah is simply the Arabic word for God, used by Arab Christians as well. Scripture is quoted from the public-domain English translations of Marmaduke Pickthall (1930) and Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1934), cited by sura and verse (so 2:256 means Sura 2, verse 256). In this long read Arabia before Islam (to 610) Muhammad's life as Muslims tell it (c. 570–632) Muhammad as historians reconstruct him The Qur'an: revelation, recitation, compilation Hadith: the Prophet's words, and how scholars weighed them What Muslims believe and do: a day, a week, a year Who should lead? The succession, Karbala and the Sunni–Shia divide (632–680 and after) Caliphs, conquest and the slow pace of conversion (632–1258) Law, theology and philosophy: sharia, fiqh, kalam and falsafa Sufism and the three great empires (1250–1800) Colonialism, reform and the end of the caliphate (1750–1924) Political Islam and jihadism (1928 to today) Islam today: two billion people How to understand Islam today Part 1 — Arabia before Islam (to 610) Picture the Arabian Peninsula around the year 600. It is not an empty desert at the edge of history. To the north, two superpowers, the Christian Roman (Byzantine) Empire and the Zoroastrian Sasanian Empire of Persia, have been fighting each other on and off for centuries, and both pay Arab tribes as buffers and allies: the Christian Ghassanids for Rome, the Lakhmids of al-Hira for Persia. To the south, Yemen has been home to kingdoms with dams, terraced fields and their own script for more than a thousand years. Religion in this world was mixed. Most Arabs were polytheists, honouring gods and goddesses at shrines, sacred stones and trees. The Qur'an itself names three goddesses whom Meccans revered: "Have ye thought upon Al-Lat and Al-'Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other?" (53:19–20, Pickthall). But Judaism and Christianity were also part of the landscape. In the late fourth century the ruling elite of Himyar in Yemen adopted Judaism. In the 520s a Himyarite king, Dhu Nuwas, massacred Christians at Najran, and the Christian kingdom of Aksum in Ethiopia invaded and took over Yemen in response. Jewish tribes farmed the oases of the Hejaz, including Yathrib, the town that would become Medina. Mecca itself sat in a barren valley in the Hejaz, the western strip of the peninsula. Its importance came from a cube-shaped shrine, the Kaaba, which Muslim tradition says Abraham and his son Ishmael built for the worship of the one God, and which by the sixth century was surrounded by idols (later Muslim writers put their number at 360, with Hubal as the chief). Tribes came on pilgrimage in sacred months when fighting was forbidden. The dominant tribe of Mecca, the Quraysh, were guardians of the shrine and traders. A short sura remembers their caravans "in winter and summer" (106:2, Pickthall). Neighbour or group Religion Role in Arabia around 600 Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire Christian Rival superpower to the north-west; allied with the Ghassanid Arabs Sasanian Empire Zoroastrian Rival superpower to the north-east; allied with the Lakhmid Arabs; controlled Yemen from about 570 Aksum (Ethiopia) Christian Ruled Yemen after the 520s; its general Abraha campaigned in Arabia Himyar (Yemen) Elite adopted Judaism; later Christian rule Ancient southern kingdom, collapsed in the sixth century Jewish tribes of the Hejaz Jewish Farmers and traders in oases such as Yathrib and Khaybar Quraysh of Mecca Polytheist, with the Kaaba as their shrine Traders and keepers of the sanctuary Muslim tradition calls this period the Jahiliyya, usually translated "the age of ignorance": not a lack of intelligence but a time before revelation, marked, in the tradition's telling, by idol worship, tribal feuding, drinking, gambling and the burying alive of unwanted infant daughters, which the Qur'an condemns (81:8–9). Historians add a different texture. Inscriptions from northwestern Arabia, studied by scholars such as Ahmad Al-Jallad and Hythem Sidky, show older divine names like al-Lat and al-'Uzza giving way in the sixth century to prayers addressed to Allah or al-Ilah, "the God". They read this as Arabia being drawn into the monotheism of the late antique world around it, without a wholesale conversion to Judaism or Christianity. Arabic, too, was changing: the script that would carry the Qur'an was developing out of Nabataean writing in these same centuries. In other words, the world Muhammad was born into already knew about prophets, scripture, angels and a final judgment. That does not decide anything about where his message came from. It does mean his first listeners understood its vocabulary. Muslims see pre-Islamic Arabia as a world waiting for a prophet. Historians see a world already full of talk about one God. Both pictures help explain how fast the new message travelled. Part 2 — Muhammad's life as Muslims tell it (c. 570–632) What follows is the story as the Muslim tradition tells it, drawn from the Qur'an, the early biographies (sira) and the hadith. Part 3 looks at how historians weigh these sources. Orphan and merchant. Muhammad ibn Abdullah was born in Mecca around 570, by tradition in the "Year of the Elephant", when the Ethiopian general Abraha is said to have marched on Mecca with war elephants and been turned back. He belonged to the Banu Hashim, a respected but not wealthy clan of the Quraysh. His father died before he was born and his mother when he was about six; he was raised by his grandfather and then his uncle Abu Talib. He worked in the caravan trade and was nicknamed al-Amin, "the trustworthy". Around 595 he married Khadija, an older, widowed merchant who had employed him; she was his only wife until her death and is honoured as the first person to believe in his message. The cave. In his late thirties Muhammad took to retreating to a cave on Mount Hira, outside Mecca, to pray and reflect. Tradition dates the first revelation to 610, in the month of Ramadan. A report from his later wife Aisha, preserved in the hadith collection of al-Bukhari (no. 3), describes an angel seizing him and commanding him to "read" or "recite". He protested, "I do not know how to read," and the angel pressed him three times before giving him the first words, now the opening of Sura 96: "Read: In the name of thy Lord Who createth, createth man from a clot. Read: And thy Lord is the Most Bounteous, Who teacheth by the pen, teacheth man that which he knew not." (96:1–5, Pickthall) He went home shaking to Khadija, who comforted him; her Christian cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal recognised the visitor as the angel who had come to Moses, Gabriel (Jibril). Revelations continued for the rest of Muhammad's life, about 23 years. Preaching in Mecca (610–622). The early message was simple and urgent: God is one; the idols are nothing; a day of judgment is coming when every soul will answer for how it treated the poor, the orphan and the weak. The first believers included Khadija, his young cousin Ali, his freed slave Zayd, and his friend Abu Bakr. Quraysh leaders saw a threat to their gods, their pilgrimage trade and their authority. Converts without tribal protection were tortured: tradition remembers the Ethiopian slave Bilal, later the first to give the call to prayer, pinned under a hot boulder and repeating "One, One". Around 615 a group of Muslims took refuge with the Christian king of Aksum. The Quraysh imposed a boycott on Muhammad's clan. In 619, the "year of sorrow", both Khadija and Abu Talib, his protector, died. Around 620, tradition places the Night Journey and Ascension (al-Isra' wa-l-Mi'raj): Muhammad was carried by night to Jerusalem and from there up through the heavens, meeting earlier prophets and receiving the command of daily prayer, which was set at five times a day. The hijra (622). Two feuding Arab tribes of Yathrib, the Aws and the Khazraj, invited Muhammad to come as an arbiter. His followers slipped away in small groups; learning of a plot to kill him, he left with Abu Bakr, hiding three days in a cave on Mount Thawr while Ali slept in his bed as a decoy. This migration, the hijra, is so central that the Muslim calendar counts its years from it: year 1 of the Hijri era began on 16 July 622 in the Julian calendar. Yathrib became Madinat al-Nabi, "the city of the Prophet", or simply Medina. Medina (622–632). In Medina the community became a polity. A document known as the Constitution of Medina set out the duties of the emigrants, the Medinan helpers (Ansar) and the town's Jewish tribes as one community for defence. The direction of prayer, which had been toward Jerusalem, was changed to the Kaaba in Mecca (2:144). Fasting in Ramadan and the giving of alms were prescribed. Then came war with Mecca: Year (CE) Event, as tradition records it c. 570 Birth in Mecca c. 595 Marriage to Khadija 610 First revelation on Mount Hira c. 615 Some Muslims take refuge in Ethiopia 619 "Year of sorrow": deaths of Khadija and Abu Talib c. 620 Night Journey and Ascension 622 Hijra to Medina; year 1 of the Islamic calendar 624 Battle of Badr: an outnumbered Muslim force defeats the Meccans 625 Battle of Uhud: a Muslim setback 627 Battle of the Trench: Meccan siege of Medina fails 628 Treaty of al-Hudaybiyya, a ten-year truce with Mecca 630 Mecca surrenders almost without a fight; the idols of the Kaaba are destroyed 632 Farewell Pilgrimage; death in Medina, 8 June The relationship with Medina's Jewish tribes ended badly, and it is one of the most debated parts of the story. The sources describe two tribes, the Qaynuqa' and the Nadir, being expelled after disputes. After the siege of 627, the third, the Qurayza, accused of conspiring with the besieging Meccans, surrendered; an arbiter from their former allies sentenced the men to death and the women and children to captivity. The later sources put the number executed at several hundred, with figures up to about 900. Muslim tradition presents it as a wartime judgment for treason; critics, medieval and modern, call it a massacre; and some historians doubt the scale described in sources written more than a century later. All three views have serious defenders. When Mecca surrendered in 630, Muhammad pardoned most of his former enemies, and tribes across Arabia sent delegations to submit. In 632 he led the pilgrimage that set the rites of the Hajj, with a sermon remembered for its words on equality: an Arab has no merit over a non-Arab except in piety. A few months later he fell ill and died in Medina, at about 62, and was buried where he died, in Aisha's house, now under the green dome of the Prophet's Mosque. For Muslims, Muhammad is not divine and is not worshipped. He is a human being, the final messenger in a line that includes Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus: "the messenger of Allah and the Seal of the Prophets" (33:40, Pickthall). He is also the model of a whole life: husband, father, merchant, judge, statesman and man of prayer, whose example, the sunna, Muslims try to follow in matters as large as justice and as small as how to greet a guest. Part 3 — Muhammad as historians reconstruct him Historians approach the same life with one basic question: how close in time is each source to the events it describes? Source Date What it is The Qur'an Recited 610–632 (Muslim belief); manuscripts from the 7th century The earliest Islamic source, but not a biography: it rarely names people or places Christian sources (e.g. the Doctrina Jacobi, Thomas the Presbyter) From the 630s Outsiders' brief notices of the Arab conquests and a prophet Papyri, coins, inscriptions From the 640s Documents and objects from the new state Ibn Ishaq's Life of the Messenger of God Written c. 767 The earliest full biography; survives mainly in Ibn Hisham's edition (d. 833) Al-Waqidi, Ibn Sa'd Early 9th century Histories of the campaigns; biographical dictionaries The great hadith collections (al-Bukhari, Muslim and others) Mid to late 9th century Reports of the Prophet's words and deeds, each with a chain of transmitters The outside witnesses. A Greek Christian text called the Doctrina Jacobi, generally dated to 634 or soon after, mentions a prophet who has appeared among the Saracens. A Syriac chronicle attributed to Thomas the Presbyter, from about 640, records a battle in February 634 "between the Romans and the Arabs of Muhammad" near Gaza. That is one of the earliest datable mentions of Muhammad by name, written by people who did not believe in him. A bilingual Greek–Arabic tax receipt from Egypt, known as PERF 558, is dated "year 22", that is, 643 CE: the Hijri calendar was already in official use. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, completed in 691–692 under the caliph Abd al-Malik, carries the earliest surviving monumental inscriptions proclaiming Islam and Muhammad as God's messenger, including Qur'anic verses about Jesus. The problem of the gap. The detailed narrative of Muhammad's life, with its dialogues and dates, comes mostly from works written down 130 to 250 years after his death. Muslim scholars have always known this and built a whole science (Part 5) to sort reliable reports from unreliable ones. Western scholars have argued for more than a century about how much the system could filter out. Ibn Hisham himself says in his preface that he left out material that might "distress" people. The scholarly positions fall roughly into three groups: The traditional view. The sources, critically handled, preserve a broadly accurate history. Most Muslim scholars hold this, as do many Western historians, such as W. Montgomery Watt in his biographies of the 1950s. The sceptical or "revisionist" view. In the 1970s John Wansbrough argued that the Qur'an took its final shape over a long period, and Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, in Hagarism (1977), tried to reconstruct early Islam from non-Muslim sources alone, arriving at a very different picture. Most scholars came to regard Hagarism's specific thesis as too speculative and too dependent on hostile sources, but the questions it raised about source criticism remain. The current middle ground. Many historians today, such as Fred Donner (Muhammad and the Believers, 2010), accept that Muhammad lived and led a movement in western Arabia in the early seventh century, that the Qur'an goes back to that movement, and that the main outline of the story (Mecca, the hijra, Medina, war and victory, death in 632) is sound. They are more cautious about specific episodes, dialogues and numbers. Donner suggests the early movement saw itself as a community of "Believers", open at first to pious Jews and Christians, before it defined itself sharply as "Islam". New evidence keeps arriving, and most of it has pushed toward an early date for the Qur'an (Part 4). The oldest manuscripts, datable papyri and inscriptions fit a movement that existed and had a scripture within decades of 632, which is consistent with the tradition's basic outline. Historians can tell you that the Arabs of Muhammad fought near Gaza in 634. They cannot tell you whether an angel spoke in a cave. Those are different kinds of question, and honest scholarship knows the difference. Two points matter for fairness. Scepticism about sources is not hostility to Islam: the sceptics were mostly applying methods first used on the Bible. And Muslim scholars such as Jonathan A. C. Brown have engaged this scholarship in detail, arguing that it often underrates the rigour of the classical Muslim critics. Part 4 — The Qur'an: revelation, recitation, compilation What it is, in Muslims' own terms. For Muslims the Qur'an is not a book about God; it is God's own speech, revealed in Arabic to Muhammad through Gabriel, word for word. The word Qur'an means "recitation". Translations are treated as interpretations of its meaning, not the Qur'an itself, which is why bilingual editions keep the Arabic beside the English. Muslims believe the text is divinely protected: "Lo! We, even We, reveal the Reminder, and lo! We verily are its Guardian" (15:9, Pickthall). Its beauty is itself held to be a miracle (i'jaz, "inimitability"); one verse challenges doubters to "produce a surah of the like thereof" (2:23, Pickthall). How it is built. The Qur'an has 114 suras (chapters) and 6,236 verses (ayat, "signs") in the most common count, which does not number the opening formula. The suras are not arranged in the order they were revealed. After the short opening prayer, al-Fatiha, they run roughly from longest to shortest, so a newcomer who starts at the front meets the long, legal Medinan suras first. The short, rhythmic, early Meccan suras, about God, creation and judgment, are mostly at the back. For reading through in a month, the text is divided into 30 equal parts (juz'), which is why many Muslims finish one juz' a night in Ramadan. Its themes. God's oneness (tawhid) is the centre. The briefest statement is Sura 112, which many Muslims know by heart: "Say: He is Allah, the One! Allah, the eternally Besought of all! He begetteth not nor was begotten. And there is none comparable unto Him" (112:1–4, Pickthall). Around that centre: the signs of God in nature, the stories of earlier prophets (Moses is named about 136 times, more than anyone else, while Muhammad is named only four times; Mary, the only woman named in the Qur'an, has a sura named after her), the day of judgment, paradise and hell, God's mercy (every sura but one opens "In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful"), and, mostly in the Medinan suras, rules for a community: prayer, fasting, marriage, inheritance, trade, war and peace. How it is recited. The Qur'an was oral before it was written and it still lives mainly as sound. Recitation follows detailed rules called tajwid, which govern pronunciation, lengthening of vowels and pauses. Great reciters are famous, and memorising the whole text makes one a hafiz (for a woman, hafiza). There are several canonical "readings" (qira'at), transmitted from early teachers with small differences in vowels and wording. Today most printed copies follow the reading of Hafs from 'Asim of Kufa, used in the influential Cairo edition of 1924; the reading of Warsh is common in North and West Africa. How the book was gathered: the tradition's account According to Sunni tradition, preserved in al-Bukhari's collection (nos. 4986 and 4987), the revelations were memorised by many companions and written on whatever was to hand. After the battle of Yamama in 632–633 killed many men who knew the Qur'an by heart, the caliph Abu Bakr, urged by Umar, asked Muhammad's scribe Zayd ibn Thabit to collect it. Zayd described searching for it "from palm stalks, thin white stones and also from the men who knew it by heart", and said moving a mountain would have been lighter. The resulting sheets passed to Umar's daughter Hafsa, one of the Prophet's widows. Around 650 the third caliph, Uthman, was told that soldiers from Syria and Iraq were quarrelling over different ways of reciting. He had Zayd and three others prepare master copies from Hafsa's sheets, sent one to each main province, and ordered other written copies destroyed. This is the Uthmanic codex, the consonantal skeleton (rasm) of every Qur'an today. Tradition also remembers that some companions, notably Ibn Mas'ud, had their own copies with a different order of suras and some variant readings. Shia Muslims recite the same text, though Shia tradition holds that Ali also compiled a copy and gives less weight to Uthman's role. Some Shia writers, early and later, claimed that verses about Ali had been suppressed, but the mainstream Shia position, from the Imams onward in Shia belief, has been that the Qur'an is complete and unaltered. What the manuscripts show Manuscript Where Dating Why it matters Birmingham Qur'an (Mingana 1572a), 2 leaves University of Birmingham Parchment radiocarbon-dated 568–645 CE (95.4%), announced 2015 Among the oldest known; parts of Suras 18–20, text close to today's Sana'a palimpsest (Ṣan'ā' 1) Found in the Great Mosque of Sana'a, Yemen, 1972 One leaf radiocarbon-dated to the 7th century (about 578–669 at 95%) Its erased lower text is non-Uthmanic; the upper text is Uthmanic The Sana'a palimpsest is the most important find for scholars of the text. In 1972 workers restoring the roof of the Great Mosque of Sana'a found a cache of old manuscript fragments. One codex, identified as a palimpsest in 1981, had been scraped clean and rewritten. Ultraviolet and X-ray imaging later recovered the lower text. Behnam Sadeghi and his co-authors, publishing in 2010 and 2012, argued that the lower text is a companion-era codex outside the Uthmanic line: its variants are mostly small (word order, extra or missing words and phrases, spelling), and its suras sometimes run in a different order, yet it rarely changes the meaning. In their reading, the evidence fits the traditional picture of an early standardisation under Uthman, while showing that other versions did circulate before it. Other scholars, such as Asma Hilali, who published the legible folios in 2017, read the palimpsest differently, arguing that both layers look like scribal school exercises rather than a rival edition of the Qur'an; the debate continues. The Birmingham leaves were the headline of 2015, and the debate about them is worth knowing. Scholars have since recognised that they belong to the same manuscript as sixteen leaves in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (BnF Arabe 328c). The university's own scholars said they could take us "back to within a few years of the actual founding of Islam", and noted that blank parchment could be stored, so the writing might date from the Uthmanic copying of about 650. Some Saudi specialists argued the opposite way, that features such as chapter separators and verse markings looked too developed for the Prophet's lifetime. A few Western writers, such as the popular historian Tom Holland, suggested the date might unsettle the traditional story. Most specialists read it more modestly: radiocarbon ranges are wide, and a seventh-century copy matching the standard text is what the tradition would lead you to expect. The most surprising thing about the earliest Qur'an manuscripts is how unsurprising their text is. The arguments are about decades, not centuries. Part 5 — Hadith: the Prophet's words, and how scholars weighed them The Qur'an tells Muslims to pray, but not exactly how. It commands alms, but does not give the rate. To fill in the details, Muslims turn to the sunna, the example of the Prophet, known through hadith: reports of what he said, did, or approved. Many of Islam's most familiar teachings come from hadith rather than the Qur'an, including the list of five pillars (al-Bukhari no. 8) and the famous opening of al-Bukhari's collection: "The reward of deeds depends upon the intentions" (no. 1). Every hadith has two parts. The isnad is the chain of transmitters: "A told me that B told him that C heard the Prophet say…". The matn is the text itself. From the eighth century onward, Muslim scholars built a vast discipline to test the chains. They compiled biographical dictionaries of thousands of transmitters, recording when each lived, whom they could have met, how good their memory was, and whether they were honest or partisan. On that basis they graded reports: Grade Meaning What follows Sahih (sound) Unbroken chain of upright, accurate transmitters, with no hidden defect Can be used for law and doctrine Hasan (good) Like sahih, but a transmitter's precision is slightly weaker Generally accepted for law Da'if (weak) A gap in the chain, or a transmitter judged unreliable Not used for law; some allow it for encouraging good deeds Mawdu' (fabricated) Judged invented Rejected Grading is not a museum exercise. Take a famous line, "Seeking knowledge is a duty upon every Muslim". It is quoted everywhere, but the full version in the collection of Ibn Majah (no. 224), which goes on to compare teaching the undeserving to hanging jewels on swine, is graded weak or very weak by modern editors such as al-Albani. By contrast, "The best of you are those who are best to your women" in al-Tirmidhi's collection (no. 1162) is graded hasan sahih. Ordinary Muslims today can look up a hadith's grade on their phones, and arguments about Islam often turn on exactly such grades. The canonical collections. In the ninth century, six collections came to be regarded by Sunnis as the most authoritative: those of al-Bukhari (d. 870) and Muslim (d. 875), called the two Sahihs ("sound"), and the Sunan of Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasa'i and Ibn Majah. Al-Bukhari's has about 7,500 reports, or around 2,600 without repetitions; tradition says he selected them from hundreds of thousands. Shia Muslims rely on their own collections, which pass through the Prophet's family and the Imams, above all the "Four Books", the first and most important being al-Kafi of al-Kulayni (d. 941). Shia collections are not held to be infallible: Shia scholars grade them too. The modern debate. In 1890 the Hungarian scholar Ignaz Goldziher argued that many hadith reflect the disputes of the first two Islamic centuries more than the Prophet's own time, and in 1950 Joseph Schacht argued that most legal hadith were put into circulation later, with chains "improved" backward. Muslim scholars such as M. M. Azami replied in detail, and later Western scholars such as Harald Motzki showed that some material can be traced to the late seventh or early eighth century. Today the field is less polarised: few scholars think the hadith are wholly reliable as a record of Muhammad's words, few think they are wholly invented, and the classical Muslim critics are widely respected for having asked many of the same questions first. Muslims did not wait for modern historians to worry about fake quotations. They spent a thousand years building tools to catch them. Part 6 — What Muslims believe and do: a day, a week, a year A hadith recorded by both al-Bukhari (no. 50) and Muslim (Book of Faith, no. 1) tells of a stranger in brilliant white clothes who sat knee to knee with the Prophet and asked: what is islam, what is iman, what is ihsan? Afterwards the Prophet told his companions it had been Gabriel, "who came to teach the people their religion". The three answers are still the standard map of the faith. Iman (faith): the six articles. In Muslim's version, faith is to believe in God, His angels, His books, His messengers, the Last Day, and in God's decree (qadar), its good and its bad. The books include the Torah given to Moses, the Psalms to David and the Gospel to Jesus; Muslims believe these were genuine revelations whose texts were later altered, with the Qur'an as the final and preserved one. Shia theology frames the core a little differently, as five "roots of religion": God's oneness, God's justice, prophethood, the imamate, and the resurrection. Islam (submission): the five pillars. Islam means "submission" or "surrender" to God, and a Muslim is "one who submits". Pillar What it involves How widely it is practised Shahada, the witness "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God." Said sincerely, it makes a person Muslim Belief in God and Muhammad is nearly universal among Muslims (Pew, 2012) Salat, prayer Five set prayers a day, facing Mecca, after ritual washing Varies widely: in Southeast Asia at least three-quarters pray more than once a day; in Kazakhstan 4% (Pew, 2012) Zakat, alms An annual payment, customarily 2.5% of savings above a threshold, for the poor and other listed recipients Medians of 93% in Southeast Asia and 79% in the Middle East and North Africa say they give (Pew, 2012) Sawm, fasting No food, drink or sex from dawn to sunset in Ramadan, for healthy adults Medians of 94–99% in four major regions say they fast (Pew, 2012) Hajj, pilgrimage Once in a lifetime to Mecca, for those physically and financially able 1,707,301 pilgrims in 2026 (Saudi statistics authority) The fast is meant to teach self-restraint: "Fasting is prescribed to you as it was prescribed to those before you, that ye may (learn) self-restraint" (2:183, Yusuf Ali). The sick, travellers, pregnant and nursing women and others may postpone or be excused. Ihsan (excellence). The third answer: "To worship Allah as if you see Him, and if you cannot achieve this state of devotion then you must consider that He is looking at you" (al-Bukhari no. 50). This is the root that Sufism (Part 10) grows from. An ordinary day Imagine a teacher in Kuala Lumpur, a taxi driver in Cairo or a nurse in Birmingham. The day is framed by five prayers: Fajr before dawn, Dhuhr after midday, Asr in the afternoon, Maghrib just after sunset, Isha at night. Before each comes wudu, washing hands, mouth, nose, face, arms, head and feet. The prayer itself is a sequence of standing, bowing, prostrating with the forehead on the ground, and sitting, with recitation in Arabic, beginning always with the Fatiha: "Thee (alone) we worship; Thee (alone) we ask for help. Show us the straight path" (1:5–6, Pickthall). It takes five to ten minutes; many pray at work on a small mat, with a phone app showing the direction of Mecca. Small formulas run through the day: bismillah ("in the name of God") before eating, alhamdulillah ("praise be to God") for good news, insha'Allah ("if God wills") about the future. Food is halal ("permitted"): no pork, no alcohol, and meat from animals slaughtered in God's name. An ordinary week Friday (Jum'a) is the day of congregational prayer at midday, with a sermon (khutba). It is obligatory for adult men; women may attend, and practice varies greatly by country (Pew found that in parts of Central and South Asia most women never attend mosque, while women are about as likely as men to read the Qur'an daily). Friday is not a sabbath: work may resume afterwards, although many Muslim-majority countries make Friday part of the weekend. The mosque (masjid, "place of prostration") is a simple idea: a clean space facing Mecca. A niche (mihrab) marks the direction, a pulpit (minbar) is used for the sermon, and a minaret, where there is one, carries the call to prayer (adhan). There are no priests and no sacraments: an imam is simply whoever leads the prayer, usually someone learned. Mosques are also schools, community centres and places to break the fast in Ramadan. An ordinary year The Islamic calendar is lunar: twelve months of 29 or 30 days, 354 or 355 days a year. So Ramadan moves about eleven days earlier each solar year and travels through every season over roughly 33 years. Months traditionally begin with the sighting of the new crescent, so dates can differ by a day between countries. Year 1448 AH began around 16 June 2026. Ramadan 1447 ran from about 18 February to 19 March 2026, and Ramadan 1448 is expected to begin around 8 February 2027. Month or date Observance 1 Muharram New Year (quiet in most places) 10 Muharram, Ashura For Shia Muslims, mourning for Husayn's death at Karbala; for many Sunnis, a recommended fast remembering Moses' deliverance 12 (Sunni) or 17 (Shia) Rabi' al-Awwal Mawlid, the Prophet's birthday, widely celebrated; some Salafis regard celebrating it as an innovation 27 Rajab Commemoration of the Night Journey (in many places) Ramadan The month of fasting; nightly extra prayers; Laylat al-Qadr, the "Night of Power" when the first revelation came, sought in the last ten nights 1 Shawwal, Eid al-Fitr Festival of breaking the fast: new clothes, prayers, visits, gifts and charity for the poor 8–13 Dhu al-Hijja The Hajj; on the 10th, Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice, remembering Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son, with meat shared with the poor Life's passages have their rites too: marriage is a contract with a gift (mahr) from groom to bride, and the dead are buried quickly, wrapped in white cloth, facing Mecca. Part 7 — Who should lead? The succession, Karbala and the Sunni–Shia divide (632–680 and after) Muhammad died without a son, and, in the view of the majority, without naming a successor. Within hours of his death, leaders of the Medinan Ansar met at a meeting hall, the Saqifa, to choose a leader. Abu Bakr, Umar and others hurried there, and after a heated debate Abu Bakr was acclaimed as khalifat rasul Allah, "successor of the Messenger of God", from which English gets caliph. Meanwhile Ali, Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, married to his daughter Fatima, was preparing the Prophet's body for burial. Here the community's memory divides, and it is worth giving both accounts in the words their holders would use. The Sunni account. The Prophet left the choice to the community. The companions chose the most senior and trusted among them, Abu Bakr, his closest friend and the father of his wife Aisha, who had led the prayers during his last illness. Then came Umar (r. 634–644), Uthman (r. 644–656) and Ali (r. 656–661). All four are honoured as the Rashidun, "the rightly guided caliphs", and the companions as a whole are regarded as upright transmitters of the faith. Sunnis take their name from ahl al-sunna wa-l-jama'a, "the people of the Prophet's way and of the community": authority rests in the Qur'an, the sunna and the consensus of the community and its scholars. They love and revere Ali and the Prophet's family too. The Shia account. The Prophet did name a successor. On the way back from his farewell pilgrimage, at a pool called Ghadir Khumm, he took Ali's hand before the gathered pilgrims and said, "For whomever I am his mawla (master, patron), Ali is his mawla." For Shia Muslims this was a clear appointment, and passing over Ali was a grave wrong. Leadership belongs to the Imams, divinely guided and protected from sin, descended from Muhammad through Ali and Fatima. The name Shia comes from shi'at Ali, "the party of Ali". (Sunnis accept that Muhammad praised Ali at Ghadir Khumm, but read mawla as "friend" and the words as an endorsement, not an appointment.) The tensions turned violent in the generation after. Uthman was killed by rebels in 656. Ali became caliph, but faced the First Fitna (civil war): the Battle of the Camel against a party including Aisha, and the Battle of Siffin (657) against Mu'awiya, Uthman's kinsman and governor of Syria. When Ali agreed to arbitration at Siffin, a group of his own soldiers rejected it ("judgment belongs to God alone") and broke away; they became known as the Kharijites, "those who went out". One of them assassinated Ali in 661. Mu'awiya founded the Umayyad dynasty. Karbala. In 680 Mu'awiya died and his son Yazid succeeded him, the first dynastic succession in Islam, which many Muslims of every later school considered illegitimate. Ali's younger son Husayn, the Prophet's grandson, refused to pledge allegiance and set out from Mecca toward Kufa in Iraq, whose people had invited him. On the plain of Karbala, he and a small band of family and followers, with women and children, were surrounded by a far larger Umayyad army, cut off from the river, and on the 10th of Muharram, 61 AH (10 October 680), killed. Husayn's head was carried to Yazid in Damascus. For Shia Muslims, Karbala is not just a battle: it is the pattern of history, the righteous few standing against tyranny and paying with their lives. Sunnis mourn Husayn as well; he is a revered member of the Prophet's family, and Sunni scholars have long condemned his killing. But for Shia Muslims, Karbala became the heart of religious life. Each year during the first ten days of Muharram, they gather in mourning assemblies to hear the story retold, recite elegies, and process in the streets. Forty days after Ashura, the Arbaeen pilgrimage draws vast crowds, many walking for days, to Husayn's shrine at Karbala. The themes of martyrdom, injustice and redemptive suffering run deep in Shia piety and, in modern times, in Shia politics. The branches today Pew Research Center estimated in 2009 that Shia Muslims are 10–13% of all Muslims, with most of the rest Sunni. It noted that its sectarian figures are less precise than its overall counts. Most Shia live in four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq. Shia are majorities in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Bahrain, and large communities in Lebanon, Yemen and the Gulf. Branch Origin of the split Where today Distinctive features Sunni Majority who accepted the first caliphs Most of the Muslim world Four legal schools; authority of scholars and consensus Twelver (Ithna 'Ashari) Shia Recognise twelve Imams; the twelfth, Muhammad al-Mahdi, entered "occultation" in 874 and fully in 941, and will return Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Lebanon, Pakistan, India Living senior scholars (marja', "source of emulation") whom believers follow; the largest Shia branch Ismaili Shia Followed Isma'il, son of the sixth Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq (d. 765), and his line South and Central Asia, East Africa, Syria, and worldwide diaspora The Nizari Ismailis follow a living Imam, the Aga Khan; the Fatimid caliphs (909–1171), who founded Cairo, were Ismaili; the Bohras are a separate Ismaili branch Zaydi Shia Followed Zayd ibn Ali, who led a revolt in 740 North-western Yemen Closest to Sunnis in law; any qualified descendant of Ali and Fatima who rises against injustice may be Imam; Zaydi imams ruled parts of Yemen until 1962 Ibadi Grew out of the early movement that rejected Ali's arbitration, but rejected its violent wing Oman (where it is the dominant tradition), Mzab in Algeria, Djerba in Tunisia, Zanzibar Elected, merit-based leadership; most Ibadis reject being called Kharijites The Nizari Ismailis were led for 67 years by Karim Aga Khan IV, the 49th Imam, who died in 2025; his son succeeded him as Aga Khan V. The Alevis of Turkey and the Alawites of Syria are often counted as Shia-derived, though their practice differs greatly from Twelver Shi'ism. The Ahmadiyya movement, founded in British India in 1889, regards itself as Muslim; most Sunni and Shia authorities do not, and Pakistan's 1974 constitutional amendment declaring Ahmadis non-Muslims has been followed by legal discrimination and violence. How deep is the division today? It depends where you look. Pew's 2012 survey found that in most Middle Eastern countries surveyed, at least 40% of Sunnis did not accept Shia as fellow Muslims, a view shaped by modern politics as much as theology; but in Lebanon and Iraq, where the two live side by side, large majorities did. In Indonesia only 26% called themselves Sunni and 56% "just a Muslim". In 2005 about 200 scholars meeting in Amman, later endorsed by hundreds more, formally recognised the eight schools of Sunni, Shia and Ibadi law as valid Islam (Part 12). Part 8 — Caliphs, conquest and the slow pace of conversion (632–1258) Within a century of Muhammad's death, rulers who called themselves his successors governed from the Atlantic to the borders of China. This is one of the fastest expansions in history, and it is often misunderstood in two opposite ways: as a holy war that converted peoples at sword-point, or as a peaceful spread of faith. The evidence supports neither. Dynasty Dates Capital Highlights Rashidun caliphs 632–661 Medina, then Kufa Conquest of Syria, Iraq, Egypt and most of Iran; Jerusalem surrenders to Umar (c. 638) Umayyad caliphate 661–750 Damascus Expansion to Spain (711) and Sindh; Arabic becomes the language of government; Dome of the Rock (691–692) Abbasid caliphate 750–1258 Baghdad (founded 762) Translation movement, law, theology and science; political fragmentation after the 900s; Baghdad sacked by the Mongols, 1258 Umayyads of Córdoba 756–1031 (caliphs from 929) Córdoba A rival Umayyad state in al-Andalus Fatimid caliphate (Ismaili Shia) 909–1171 Cairo (founded 969) A Shia rival caliphate in North Africa and Egypt Conquest. The Arab armies struck two empires exhausted by a generation of war with each other and by plague. The Byzantines lost Syria after the battle of Yarmuk (636) and Egypt by 642. The Sasanian Empire collapsed entirely; its last king was killed in 651. Under the Umayyads, armies crossed into Spain in 711 and into Sindh (in modern Pakistan) at about the same time, and reached Central Asia. These were real wars of conquest, with sieges, battles and captives, and rulers justified them in religious terms. A Frankish victory near Tours in 732 and the failure of the Arab sieges of Constantinople marked the limits in the west. Conversion. But conquest did not mean conversion, at least not quickly. The conquerors at first lived apart in garrison towns such as Kufa, Basra and Fustat (Old Cairo); non-Muslims paid a poll tax, so rulers had little fiscal reason to seek converts, and under the Umayyads converts were often treated as second-class "clients". The historian Richard Bulliet (Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period, 1979) used the spread of Muslim names in family trees to estimate a "conversion curve": perhaps a tenth of Iran's population was Muslim by the end of the Umayyad era, with the great surge in the ninth and tenth centuries. Other estimates put a Muslim majority in Egypt only around the tenth century, and parts of Syria may have stayed mostly Christian until the 1200s. The figures are debated; the direction is not. The Middle East became mostly Muslim over three to six centuries, through trade, intermarriage, social advantage, the appeal of the faith and, at times, pressure. Beyond the reach of armies, Islam spread mostly by trade and preaching: across the Sahara into West Africa, down the East African coast, and along the sea routes to India, Malaysia and Indonesia, where today's largest Muslim populations live (Part 13). Dhimmi status: protection and inequality. Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and others living under Muslim rule were known as dhimmis, "protected people". The status rests in part on the Qur'an (9:29), which commands fighting certain People of the Book "until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued" (Yusuf Ali). It meant two things at once, and a fair account must keep both: Protection. Dhimmis kept their lives, property and places of worship, and their communities ran their own religious and family law under their own leaders. They were not forced to convert. Christians and Jews served as physicians, scribes, bankers and officials, and many of the translators of Greek works into Arabic were Christians. For much of history, this was more tolerance than minorities received in Christian Europe. Inequality. Dhimmis paid the jizya poll tax, could not usually bear arms or testify against Muslims in some matters, and could face rules (codified in documents attributed to Umar, probably written later) on distinctive dress, not building new churches, and not riding horses. Enforcement varied hugely by ruler and era, from relaxed to harsh, with outbreaks of persecution. Medieval al-Andalus is a good test case for the two caricatures. It produced a real culture of shared learning, with Jewish poets writing in Hebrew on Arabic models and scholars like the Jewish philosopher Maimonides writing in Arabic. It also saw episodes of persecution, such as under the Almohads in the twelfth century, which drove Maimonides' family into exile. "Golden age of tolerance" and "dark age of oppression" are both too simple. The Abbasid revolution. In 750 a movement drawing on Persian converts' resentment and loyalty to the Prophet's family overthrew the Umayyads. The Abbasids, descended from Muhammad's uncle al-Abbas, founded Baghdad in 762, one of the largest cities in the world, and under them being Muslim mattered more than being Arab. From the 900s real power passed to regional dynasties and commanders, while the caliph kept a symbolic authority. The Mongols sacked Baghdad and killed the caliph in 1258; "shadow caliphs" lived on in Cairo until the Ottoman conquest of 1517. Part 9 — Law, theology and philosophy: sharia, fiqh, kalam and falsafa Sharia and fiqh Few words are as misunderstood in English as sharia. Literally "the path to the watering place", it means God's guidance for the whole of life, as Muslims believe it to be: worship, ethics, family, trade, crime and government. Fiqh ("understanding") is the human effort to work out what that guidance requires. Pew's definition is a good one: sharia refers to the ethical principles in the Qur'an and the sunna, and fiqh to the jurisprudence that comes from humans interpreting them. Muslim scholars still debate where the boundary lies. The distinction matters: sharia is believed to be perfect and divine; fiqh is human, plural and fallible, which is why for many centuries several legal schools, with different rulings, have all been considered valid. Classical Sunni jurisprudence used four main sources, in rough order: the Qur'an, the sunna, the consensus (ijma') of qualified scholars, and analogical reasoning (qiyas) from known cases to new ones. Most of fiqh is not criminal law at all. It is about how to pray, fast, marry, divorce, inherit, buy and sell. Rulings are graded on a five-part scale: obligatory, recommended, permitted, discouraged and forbidden. Most of life falls in "permitted". School Founder Where it predominates today Hanafi Abu Hanifa (d. 767), Kufa Turkey, the Balkans, Central Asia, South Asia; the official school of the Ottomans Maliki Malik ibn Anas (d. 795), Medina North and West Africa Shafi'i Muhammad al-Shafi'i (d. 820) Egypt (alongside Hanafi), East Africa, Yemen, Southeast Asia Hanbali Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855), Baghdad Saudi Arabia and Qatar Ja'fari (Twelver Shia) Named for the Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq (d. 765) Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Shia communities elsewhere Ijtihad is independent legal reasoning by a qualified scholar. Western scholars once claimed that from about the tenth century Sunnis declared "the gate of ijtihad closed", so that law froze. The legal historian Wael Hallaq showed in a famous 1984 article, "Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?", that this was largely a myth: jurists kept reasoning and issuing new rulings in every century, even while many debated how much independence was allowed. Twelver Shia law, in its dominant Usuli school, gives living senior scholars, the mujtahids, an especially strong role, and ordinary believers follow (taqlid) one of them. How much of this law do states apply today? It varies enormously. A few countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, claim to base their legal systems on sharia; many apply Islamic law mainly to family matters such as marriage and inheritance; others, like Turkey, abolished sharia courts in the 1920s. Pew's 2013 survey found support for making sharia official law ranged from 99% of Muslims in Afghanistan to 8% in Azerbaijan, and that most supporters thought it should apply only to Muslims. Severe criminal punishments drew less support than religious courts for family disputes. Kalam: arguing about God Muslims also argued, intensely, about theology. The discipline was called kalam ("speech" or "discussion"). The Mu'tazila, flourishing in eighth- and ninth-century Basra and Baghdad, put reason and God's justice first. Because God is just, humans must be truly free to choose, or punishment would be unfair. Because God is one, His attributes cannot be separate eternal beings, and so the Qur'an, God's speech, must be created in time rather than eternal. In 833 the caliph al-Ma'mun made the createdness of the Qur'an official doctrine and had scholars interrogated in an inquisition known as the mihna. Ahmad ibn Hanbal refused to agree, was flogged and imprisoned, and became a hero. The policy was abandoned around 848–851, and with it the caliphs' claim to decide doctrine. Religious authority passed to the scholars. Al-Ash'ari (d. 935/6), a former Mu'tazili, founded the school that became the main Sunni theology, using reason to defend positions closer to the hadith scholars: the Qur'an is God's uncreated speech; God's will is all-powerful, so that even the link between cause and effect is His continuing act; the Qur'an's descriptions of God are accepted "without asking how". The Maturidi school (al-Maturidi, d. 944), dominant among Hanafis in Central Asia and Turkey, gives more room to human reason and choice. A third current, the Athari or traditionalist, distrusted kalam altogether; it is the forerunner of much modern Salafi theology. Twelver Shia theology absorbed much Mu'tazili thinking about God's justice and human freedom, and the Zaydis even more. Falsafa and the translation movement Between the mid-eighth and the late tenth century, under Abbasid patronage, a translation movement rendered much of Greek philosophy, medicine, mathematics and astronomy into Arabic, often via Syriac, along with Persian and Indian works. Many translators were Christians, such as the physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq (d. 873). A caution: the famous House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma) in Baghdad was a palace library, not the grand state academy of popular history; as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, it "cannot be viewed as an institutional center for the translations". A wide circle of patrons, physicians, officials and scholars drove the movement. Out of this came falsafa, philosophy in the Greek tradition, written in Arabic: Thinker Dates Known for al-Kindi c. 800–870 "The philosopher of the Arabs"; argued that philosophy and revelation agree al-Farabi c. 870–950/951 "The Second Teacher" after Aristotle; logic, politics and the ideal state Ibn Sina (Avicenna) c. 970/980–1037 The great system-builder: being and essence, the soul; his Canon of Medicine was taught in European universities into the 17th century al-Ghazali c. 1056–1111 Theologian and jurist; in The Incoherence of the Philosophers rejected three of Ibn Sina's teachings as unbelief; later turned to Sufism Ibn Rushd (Averroes) 1126–1198 Judge in Córdoba; defended philosophy in The Incoherence of the Incoherence; "the Commentator" on Aristotle for Latin Europe Al-Ghazali's attack was precise. Of twenty philosophical positions he examined, he judged three to be not just wrong but incompatible with Islam: that the world has no beginning in time, that God knows only universals and not individual things, and that souls do not return to bodies at the resurrection. In 1095, at the height of his fame as a professor in Baghdad, he had a personal crisis, gave up his post, and became a wandering seeker; his Revival of the Religious Sciences made Sufism respectable in mainstream Sunni learning. Science, without the hype. Muslim-ruled lands were for several centuries the world's leading centres of science. Al-Khwarizmi's book on "completion and balancing" (al-jabr), in the early ninth century, gave algebra its name, and his own name gave us "algorithm". Ibn al-Haytham (d. c. 1040) in Cairo wrote a Book of Optics built on careful experiment. Physicians wrote encyclopedias of medicine; astronomers built observatories, such as the one at Maragha in Iran (founded 1259). Two cautions apply. First, these scholars built openly on Greek, Persian and Indian work, as they themselves said, and Christians, Jews and others took part. Second, the old story that Islamic science "declined" after al-Ghazali or after 1258 is now widely questioned: important astronomy continued at Maragha, Damascus and Samarkand into the fifteenth century. Claims that Muslims "invented" everything are as wrong as claims that they merely kept the Greeks on ice. The scholars of Baghdad, Cairo and Córdoba did not hold the Greeks in storage for Europe. They argued with them, corrected them and went on. Part 10 — Sufism and the three great empires (1250–1800) Sufism Sufism (tasawwuf) is the inward, mystical dimension of Islam: the practice of ihsan, worshipping God as if you see Him. This library already has pieces on two of its giants, Rumi and Ibn Arabi, and Mysticism 101 places Sufism among the world's mystical traditions, so here is only the outline. Early ascetics and mystics, such as the woman saint Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya of Basra (d. 801), taught love of God for His own sake, not for fear of hell or hope of paradise. Junayd of Baghdad (d. 910) taught a "sober" Sufism rooted in the law; al-Hallaj, who cried "I am the Truth", was executed in Baghdad in 922. After al-Ghazali, Sufism became part of mainstream Sunni life. From the twelfth century, Sufis organised into orders (tariqas), each tracing a chain of teachers back to the Prophet: the Qadiriyya, the Naqshbandiyya, the Chishtiyya of South Asia, the Shadhiliyya of North Africa, Rumi's Mevlevis and many more. Their central practice is dhikr, remembrance of God through the repetition of His names or short phrases, alone or in groups, sometimes with music and movement. "Verily in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest!" (13:28, Pickthall). Sufi lodges, and the tombs of their saints, became centres of devotion, and Sufi teachers were central to the spread of Islam in South Asia, Central Asia, Africa and Southeast Asia. Sufism has always had critics inside Islam. The fourteenth-century Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyya attacked practices such as asking saints for intercession at their tombs. Modern Salafis go further, and in recent decades militants in several countries have destroyed Sufi shrines. Pew's 2012 survey found Sufis widely accepted as Muslims in South Asia but less known or accepted elsewhere. Sunni, Shia and Sufi: what each emphasises Sufism is not a third sect. There are Sunni Sufis (the large majority) and Shia mystics, and many Muslims who belong to no order still read Rumi. The table compares emphases, not exclusive boxes: Sunni Shia Sufi What it is The majority tradition The second-largest tradition, 10–13% of Muslims A mystical path within either Core question How do we follow the Prophet's way with the whole community? Who are the rightful, God-guided leaders after the Prophet? How does the heart come to know God directly? Authority Qur'an, sunna, consensus of scholars Qur'an, sunna as transmitted by the Prophet's family, the Imams, and today senior scholars (marja') Qur'an and sunna, plus the living teacher (shaykh) in a chain going back to the Prophet Key early figures The four rightly guided caliphs and the companions Ali, Fatima, Hasan and Husayn, and the Imams Rabi'a, Junayd, al-Ghazali, Rumi, Ibn Arabi Distinctive practice Four legal schools; mosque-centred communal life; love for the companions and the Prophet's family alike Muharram mourning, pilgrimage to the Imams' shrines (Karbala, Najaf, Mashhad) Dhikr, the master-disciple bond, visits to saints' tombs, poetry and music Sacred places Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem The same, plus the shrines of the Imams The same, plus saints' tombs, such as Ajmer in India and Konya in Turkey Criticism it faces Shia critics: it legitimised rulers who wronged the Prophet's family Sunni critics: it reveres the Imams too highly and judges some companions harshly Salafi critics: its saint veneration and music are innovations The three empires From the 1300s to the 1700s, three great Muslim empires dominated much of the Old World. Historians sometimes call them "gunpowder empires", because cannon and muskets helped them build large centralised states. The Ottomans (c. 1300–1922), a Turkish dynasty from north-western Anatolia, conquered Constantinople in 1453, ending the Byzantine Empire, and made it their capital, Istanbul. Selim I took Syria, Egypt and the guardianship of Mecca and Medina in 1516–17, and the Ottoman sultans increasingly styled themselves caliphs. Under Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520–1566) the empire reached from Hungary to Yemen and Algeria. Its official law was Hanafi, its religious scholars were organised in a state hierarchy, and Christian and Jewish communities were governed through their own religious leaders in the so-called millet system. The Safavids (1501–1736, with real power ending in the 1720s) began as a Sufi order in north-western Iran. Shah Ismail I, taking power in 1501, made Twelver Shi'ism the state religion of a then mostly Sunni country and invited Shia scholars from Jabal Amil in Lebanon. The conversion that followed over two centuries is why Iran is the Shia heartland today. Isfahan, under Shah Abbas I (r. 1588–1629), became one of the world's most beautiful cities, and Ottoman–Safavid wars gave the Sunni–Shia divide a geopolitical edge. The Mughals (1526–1857), descendants of Timur and Genghis Khan, ruled most of the Indian subcontinent over a mostly Hindu population. Akbar (r. 1556–1605) abolished the jizya and hosted debates among Muslim, Hindu, Jain, Zoroastrian and Christian scholars; Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) ruled more strictly by Hanafi law and reimposed the jizya in 1679. They left the Taj Mahal and a Persianate culture that shaped Urdu. The British deposed the last emperor after the rebellion of 1857. Beyond these empires, Islam kept spreading mainly through traders, scholars and Sufis: in the Sahel, where Mali's ruler Mansa Musa made a famously lavish pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 and Timbuktu became a centre of learning; along the Swahili coast; and across the Malay world, where coastal rulers converted from the 1200s onward. Part 11 — Colonialism, reform and the end of the caliphate (1750–1924) By 1900 most Muslims lived under European rule or influence: the British in India, Egypt, Malaya and much of Africa; the French in North and West Africa; the Dutch in Indonesia; the Russians in Central Asia and the Caucasus. The question many Muslims asked was urgent and painful: how had a civilisation that once led the world come to this, and what should be done? There were several answers, and they still shape Islam today. Revival by purification: Wahhabism and Salafism. In central Arabia, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792) preached a return to strict monotheism and condemned practices he saw as compromising it: venerating saints and tombs, seeking intercession from the dead. In 1744 he made a pact with a local ruler, Muhammad ibn Saud, joining religious reform to political power. The alliance founded the first Saudi state and, after collapses and revivals, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. Its followers usually reject the name "Wahhabi" and call themselves muwahhidun (monotheists) or Salafis. Critics, Sunni and Shia, point to its early wars against other Muslims, including the sack of Karbala in 1802, and to its destruction of shrines. Supporters see it as a necessary return to the faith of the first generations. Salafism more broadly takes its name from the salaf, "the pious predecessors", the first three generations of Muslims, whose understanding is treated as the standard. Modern Salafism is diverse: most Salafis are quietist, focused on correct belief and practice and avoiding politics; some are political activists; a small minority, discussed in Part 12, are jihadists. Reform by reason: the modernists. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838/39–1897), a restless activist, urged Muslims to unite against European imperialism and to embrace reason and science, which he insisted were not foreign to Islam. His student Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), later Grand Mufti of Egypt, argued that true Islam was rational, that blind imitation of past jurists (taqlid) must give way to fresh ijtihad, and that education must be reformed. In India, Sayyid Ahmad Khan founded the college at Aligarh (1875), and the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) called for a "reconstruction of religious thought in Islam". Confusingly, Abduh's circle also called its return to the early sources "salafi", in a modernising spirit; his student Rashid Rida later moved in a more conservative direction. Reform by the state. Ottoman reformers in the nineteenth century reorganised law, schools and the army on European lines. After the empire's defeat in the First World War, the new Turkish republic of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) went much further: it abolished the sultanate in 1922, and on 3 March 1924 the Turkish Grand National Assembly abolished the caliphate itself. The last caliph, Abdulmejid II, was sent into exile. In India, Muslims had campaigned to defend the caliphate in the Khilafat movement; its abolition left a symbolic gap that many Muslims felt deeply and that some movements, very differently, have tried to fill ever since. In 1924, for the first time since 632, there was no one whom most Sunni Muslims could point to as caliph. Movements as different as the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS were, in part, answers to that absence. Part 12 — Political Islam and jihadism (1928 to today) Political Islam In 1928, four years after the caliphate's end, a schoolteacher named Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Ismailia, Egypt, teaching that Islam is "a complete way of life" and that society should be renewed from below, through preaching, schools, clinics and charity, and eventually an Islamic state. It became a mass movement across the Arab world. Al-Banna was assassinated in 1949. Under Nasser the Brotherhood was banned; its thinker Sayyid Qutb wrote in prison that Muslim societies had fallen back into jahiliyya and needed a vanguard to restore God's sovereignty. He was executed in 1966, and his Milestones (1964) later inspired radicals. In South Asia, Abul A'la Mawdudi founded the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941 with a similar vision. Political Islam, or "Islamism", is a broad family. At one end are parties that compete in elections, such as the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, Tunisia's Ennahda and various Brotherhood parties; in Egypt the Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi won the presidency in 2012 and was overthrown by the army in 2013. Supporters say these movements bring Islamic ethics, social welfare and accountable government to societies long ruled by secular dictators. Critics, including many Muslims, worry about religious coercion, the treatment of women and minorities, and whether such parties accept losing power. The Iranian Revolution (1979) brought a Shia version to power. Mass protests, many organised around Shia mourning rituals, toppled the Shah in February 1979, and a referendum that spring made Iran an Islamic Republic. Its constitution was built around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's doctrine of velayat-e faqih, "guardianship of the jurist": in the Twelfth Imam's absence, a senior jurist should hold supreme authority. Many senior Shia scholars, notably in Najaf, Iraq, have not accepted this theory, which shows that it is one Shia position, not the Shia position. Jihadism Jihad means "striving" or "struggle". In Muslim tradition it covers the inner struggle against one's own ego (which many Sufis call the greater jihad) as well as armed warfare, which classical law regulated: it had to be declared by legitimate authority, and forbade killing women, children, the elderly and non-combatants. The Qur'an speaks of fighting those who fight you, "but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors" (2:190, Pickthall). Jihadism in the modern sense is the belief of small armed groups that violence, including against civilians and against other Muslims they declare apostates, is a religious duty. Its main organisations: Al-Qaeda, founded in 1988 by Osama bin Laden and others out of the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, carried out the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States, which killed nearly 3,000 people, and many attacks elsewhere. The Islamic State (ISIS), an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq, seized large parts of Iraq and Syria and on 29 June 2014 declared a "caliphate". It committed massacres and enslavement, notably of the Yazidis, before losing its last territory at Baghuz in Syria in March 2019. Its affiliates remain active: the Global Terrorism Index, published by the Institute for Economics and Peace in 2026, ranked IS and its affiliates as the deadliest terrorist organisation in 2025, while recording that terrorism deaths worldwide fell 28% to 5,582, the lowest since 2007. These groups are a very small minority, and they are condemned by the great majority of Muslims and their scholars. The evidence for that comes in several forms: Opinion surveys. Pew's 2013 survey of 39 countries found that in most countries roughly three-quarters or more of Muslims rejected suicide bombing and other violence against civilians. It also found substantial minorities who thought such violence could sometimes be justified in a few places, such as the Palestinian territories (40%) and Afghanistan (39%), and a fair account should not hide that. In 2015 Pew found that in no country surveyed did more than 15% view ISIS favourably; in Lebanon, 99% of those surveyed were very unfavourable. Scholarly condemnation. In September 2014 more than a hundred Muslim scholars from around the world published an Open Letter to al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader, refuting his theology point by point in classical Arabic legal terms: killing emissaries and innocents, forced conversion, enslavement and declaring a caliphate without the consent of Muslims are all forbidden. Al-Azhar, the most prestigious Sunni university, and senior Shia authorities such as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Najaf condemned ISIS too. The Amman Message (2004–2006) forbade declaring other Muslims apostates, the very move jihadists rely on. The victims. Most of the people killed by jihadist groups are Muslims. The Global Terrorism Index for 2025 found the Sahel region of Africa accounted for over half of all terrorism deaths, and Pakistan was the most affected single country, places where most victims are Muslim. "Whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind." (5:32, Pickthall). Muslims quote this verse more than almost any other when condemning terrorism. Part 13 — Islam today: two billion people How many, and where? Pew Research Center's 2025 report, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020, counted about 2.0 billion Muslims in 2020, 25.6% of humanity, up from 1.7 billion in 2010. Muslims grew by 347 million in that decade, more than all other religions combined, and were the fastest-growing major religious group. Pew attributes this mainly to Muslims' young age structure (in 2020, 33% of Muslims were under 15) and relatively high fertility, not to conversion: religious switching into and out of Islam is relatively uncommon and roughly balances out. Most Muslims are not Arabs. In 2020, 59% of the world's Muslims lived in the Asia-Pacific region and 18% in sub-Saharan Africa. The Middle East and North Africa, where Muslims are 94% of the population, held about 414 million, roughly one Muslim in five, and that region also includes Iranians, Turks, Kurds and Berbers, who are not Arabs either. Country Muslims in 2020 (Pew estimate) Share of country Indonesia about 240 million (12% of all Muslims) 87% Pakistan about 227 million 96.5% India 213 million 15% Bangladesh about 152 million 91% Nigeria about 120 million 56% Egypt about 104 million 95% Iran about 88 million 99.8% Turkey about 84 million 97% (Computed from Pew's 2025 country table; country totals are rounded.) In 2020 Muslims were the majority in 53 countries and territories. India, where they are a minority, has one of the three largest Muslim populations on Earth. Europe's Muslims were about 6% of its population, and North America's, 5.9 million, grew fastest of any region in percentage terms. The future. Pew's 2015 projections, made before the 2025 revision, estimated that if trends continued, Muslims (2.8 billion) and Christians (2.9 billion) would be at near parity by 2050, and Muslims would become the largest group around 2070. Projections are not prophecies; they depend on fertility rates, which are falling quickly in many Muslim-majority countries. Indonesia. The largest Muslim country is a useful corrective to stereotypes. Its two great Muslim organisations are among the biggest in the world: Nahdlatul Ulama (founded 1926), traditionalist and rooted in rural boarding schools and Sufi-influenced piety, and Muhammadiyah (founded 1912), reformist and famous for its schools, universities and hospitals. Indonesia is a democracy whose state officially recognises six religions, and Islam there has long mixed with Javanese and Malay culture. Diversity of practice. Pew's 2012 survey of 39 countries found Muslims united on the core and divided on much else. Belief in God and the Prophet was nearly universal and fasting widespread, but praying several times a day ranged from most Muslims in Southeast Asia to fewer than one in ten in Albania and Kazakhstan, places shaped by communist secularism. A Muslim in Dakar, one in Istanbul and one in Jakarta may keep the same prayers and the same Ramadan and still live very different religious lives. Women in Islam: many voices No subject about Islam is more argued over, and Muslim women themselves take every position in the argument. The texts that frame the debate. The Qur'an addresses men and women as spiritual equals: "Lo! men who surrender unto Allah, and women who surrender, and men who believe and women who believe… Allah hath prepared for them forgiveness and a vast reward" (33:35, Pickthall). It gave women rights to inheritance, to own property and to consent in marriage, which many historians see as gains over pre-Islamic custom. It also gives daughters half a son's inheritance (4:11), allows men up to four wives under conditions (4:3), and contains a verse on marital authority, 4:34, whose meaning is one of the most debated passages in the whole text. Traditionalist and conservative women argue that Islam gives men and women different but complementary roles, with rights and duties balanced across the family, and that modest dress, including the headscarf (hijab), is an act of worship freely chosen. The anthropologist Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety (2005) studied women's mosque movements in Cairo whose members sought, through study and discipline, to become more devout, and argued that Western feminism often fails to understand such women on their own terms. Reformist and feminist Muslim scholars, such as the American scholar Amina Wadud (Qur'an and Woman, 1992 and 1999), the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi (The Veil and the Male Elite), and the Egyptian-American historian Leila Ahmed (Women and Gender in Islam), argue that the Qur'an's egalitarian principles were narrowed by male interpreters in patriarchal societies, and that re-reading the sources can restore them. In 2005 Wadud led a mixed congregation of about 100 men and women in Friday prayer in New York, which many Muslim scholars condemned and others defended. Groups such as Musawah work for equality in Muslim family law. Secular Muslim women in many countries argue that religion and law should be kept apart altogether. Surveys show the same range. Pew's 2013 survey found majorities in most regions saying a woman should decide for herself whether to wear a veil, while large majorities also said a wife should always obey her husband, with sharp disagreement over divorce and equal inheritance. In practice, the lives of Muslim women vary enormously by country, class and law, from Saudi Arabia, where women could not legally drive until 2018, to Pakistan, which in 1988 elected Benazir Bhutto, the first woman head of government in a Muslim-majority country, followed by women leaders in Turkey, Bangladesh and Indonesia. In the 2026 Hajj, 813,905 of the 1.7 million pilgrims were women. Islamophobia, converts and diaspora Islamophobia, a term made widely known by a 1997 report of the British Runnymede Trust, means prejudice, hostility and discrimination against Muslims. The term itself is debated: some critics argue it can be used to shut down legitimate criticism of religious ideas, and supporters reply that hostility toward people, not debate about ideas, is the point. The evidence of discrimination is substantial. The European Union's Fundamental Rights Agency found in its 2024 report Being Muslim in the EU, based on almost 10,000 Muslims in 13 countries surveyed in 2022, that 47% had experienced racial discrimination in the previous five years, up from 39% in 2016. In 2022 the UN General Assembly designated 15 March as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia, and in 2025 the UN appointed its first Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia. Converts. Among US Muslims, Pew found in 2017 that 21% were converts, most formerly Christian, and that two-thirds of American-born Black Muslims were converts, heirs to a long African American Muslim history that runs from enslaved West African Muslims through the Nation of Islam to Malcolm X, who left it for Sunni Islam in 1964 and made the pilgrimage to Mecca that year. Diaspora. Migration since the 1950s has created large Muslim communities in Western Europe, North America and Australia: Turks in Germany, North Africans in France, South Asians in Britain. Their children are building new forms of Muslim life and debating what a European or American Islam should look like. Part 14 — How to understand Islam today Key dates Date Event c. 570 Muhammad born in Mecca 610 First revelation on Mount Hira (tradition) 622 Hijra to Medina; year 1 of the Islamic calendar 632 Death of Muhammad; Abu Bakr becomes first caliph c. 650 Uthman sends out standard copies of the Qur'an 656–661 First civil war; assassination of Ali (661) 680 Killing of Husayn at Karbala 711 Muslim armies enter Spain and Sindh 750 Abbasid revolution 833–c. 851 The mihna (inquisition) over the createdness of the Qur'an 1095 Al-Ghazali leaves Baghdad for the Sufi path 1258 Mongols sack Baghdad; end of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad 1453 Ottomans take Constantinople 1501 Safavid Shah Ismail makes Twelver Shi'ism Iran's state religion 1744 Pact of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad ibn Saud 1924 Ottoman caliphate abolished (3 March) 1928 Muslim Brotherhood founded 1979 Iranian Revolution 2001 Al-Qaeda's attacks of 11 September 2014–2019 ISIS "caliphate" in Iraq and Syria 2020 About 2.0 billion Muslims, a quarter of humanity (Pew, 2025) Who's who Person Dates Why they matter Muhammad c. 570–632 The Prophet of Islam, final messenger in Muslim belief Khadija d. 619 His first wife and first believer Abu Bakr d. 634 Closest companion; first caliph; ordered the first collection of the Qur'an (Sunni tradition) Umar r. 634–644 Second caliph; the great conquests; began the Hijri calendar Uthman r. 644–656 Third caliph; standard text of the Qur'an Ali d. 661 Cousin and son-in-law; fourth caliph for Sunnis, first Imam for Shia Aisha d. 678 Wife of Muhammad and a major source of hadith Fatima d. 632 Muhammad's daughter, wife of Ali, revered by all Muslims and especially by Shia Husayn 626–680 Grandson of Muhammad, killed at Karbala Abu Hanifa, Malik, al-Shafi'i, Ibn Hanbal 8th–9th c. Founders of the four Sunni legal schools al-Bukhari d. 870 Compiler of the most respected Sunni hadith collection al-Ash'ari d. 935/6 Founder of the main Sunni school of theology al-Ghazali d. 1111 Theologian who reconciled law and Sufism Ibn Taymiyya d. 1328 Hanbali scholar; inspiration to later Salafis Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab 1703–1792 Founder of the Wahhabi movement Hasan al-Banna 1906–1949 Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Ruhollah Khomeini 1902–1989 Leader of the Iranian Revolution Five debates alive inside Islam today Who speaks for Islam? Islam has no pope. Authority lies with scholars, schools and institutions such as al-Azhar or the seminaries of Najaf and Qom, but anyone with a phone can now issue an opinion. Many Muslims worry that the collapse of traditional learning has opened the door to both extremists and self-taught literalists. Tradition and reform. Should Muslims follow the established schools of law (taqlid), return directly to the Qur'an and sunna (the Salafi answer), or reinterpret the sources in the light of modern ethics (the reformist answer)? Each side accuses the others of distorting Islam. Religion and the state. Should a Muslim-majority state enforce Islamic law, be religiously neutral, or something in between? The answers range from Saudi Arabia and Iran to Turkey's and Indonesia's very different arrangements and the many Muslim minorities living in secular democracies. Women, family and sexuality. Debates over family law, dress, mosque leadership and gender roles (Part 13) are among the most heated, and they run between Muslims, not just between Muslims and outsiders. Sunni and Shia. Sectarian hostility, sharpened by rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia and by the wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, coexists with millions of mixed families and scholars working for mutual recognition, as in the Amman Message. Two billion people do not agree about everything. What unites them is a book, a prophet, a direction of prayer, and a month of fasting they keep together. The takeaway Islam began in the early seventh century with Muhammad, a Meccan merchant who, in Muslim belief, received God's final revelation, the Qur'an, over 23 years. Muslims and historians tell the story differently: the tradition through the Qur'an, the sira and the hadith, the historians through manuscripts, papyri, inscriptions and outsiders' notices, which on the whole support an early origin for the Qur'an and the main outline of the traditional account. A dispute over who should lead after 632, sealed in blood at Karbala in 680, produced the Sunni and Shia traditions. Caliphs and empires spread Muslim rule from Spain to India, but most conquered peoples converted slowly, over centuries, and much of the faith's spread came through traders and Sufis. Muslims built rich traditions of law, theology, philosophy, science and mysticism, debated among themselves across a dozen schools. Colonialism, the end of the caliphate in 1924 and modern states produced revivalists, reformers, Islamist movements and a small but deadly jihadist fringe that mainstream scholars condemn. Today about two billion people, mostly in Asia and Africa, keep the same prayers and the same Ramadan and argue about almost everything else. Try this: read Sura 1, al-Fatiha (seven short verses), and Sura 112 (four verses) in a bilingual edition, and listen to each recited aloud by a reciter; quran.com has both side by side. Then, if there is a mosque near you, look at its website: many hold open days, and in Ramadan many welcome guests to break the fast at sunset. Go, sit, and eat a date with the people there. Ask someone what Ramadan means to them. Sources & Further Reading Sources - Pew Research Center, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020 (9 June 2025): main report, chapter 3 on Muslims and chapter 12 on the Middle East and North Africa; country figures computed from its Appendix B table. Also Pew's Mapping the Global Muslim Population (2009; Shia 10–13%), The Future of World Religions (2015; projections), The World's Muslims surveys (2012, 2013), its 2015 report on views of ISIS, and U.S. Muslims Concerned About Their Place in Society (2017). - Qur'an: Pickthall (1930) and Yusuf Ali (1934) translations, via quran.com. Hadith: Sahih al-Bukhari nos. 1, 3, 8, 50, 4986, 4987; Sahih Muslim, Book of Faith no. 1; Ibn Majah no. 224 and al-Tirmidhi no. 1162 with modern gradings, from sunnah.com's English editions. - University of Birmingham press release on its Qur'an manuscript (22 July 2015); B. Sadeghi and U. Bergmann, Arabica 57 (2010); B. Sadeghi and M. Goudarzi, "Ṣan'ā' 1 and the Origins of the Qur'ān", Der Islam 87 (2012); A. Hilali, The Sanaa Palimpsest (2017). - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, al-Ghazali, and "Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy". - R. G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It (1997), for the early non-Muslim sources; R. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period (1979); W. Hallaq, "Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?" (1984); F. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers (2010). - Reference entries via encyclopedia.com (Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, Encyclopaedia Judaica, New Catholic Encyclopedia), World History Encyclopedia and BBC Religion, for dates of persons, dynasties and events; Wikipedia for leads only. - Saudi General Authority for Statistics, Hajj 2026 figures (May 2026); ammanmessage.com; Open Letter to al-Baghdadi (September 2014); Institute for Economics and Peace, Global Terrorism Index key findings (2025, 2026); EU Fundamental Rights Agency, Being Muslim in the EU (2024); United Nations, International Day to Combat Islamophobia. Go deeper - 📘 The Qur'an: A New Translation — M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford World's Classics; clear modern English, the best place for a newcomer to start reading) - 📘 The Study Quran — Seyyed Hossein Nasr (ed.) (translation with verse-by-verse commentary from the classical Sunni and Shia traditions; for readers who want to know how Muslims have read each verse) - 📘 Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources — Martin Lings (the traditional biography, beautifully told from the sira, as many Muslims love it) - 📘 Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam — Fred M. Donner (a respected historian's reconstruction; the best short guide to the scholarly debate) - 📘 Hadith: Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World — Jonathan A. C. Brown (how hadith criticism works, from a Muslim scholar who knows the Western debate) - 📘 Women and Gender in Islam — Leila Ahmed (a history of the debate, from the Middle East's ancient past to the present) - 🌐 Quran.com (the Arabic text with many translations and recitations, verse by verse) - 🌐 Pew Research Center: Muslim population change, 2010–2020 (the current numbers, with charts by country and region) Step 19. China and Japan: Confucianism, Daoism and Shinto --------------------------------------------------------- Why: China and Japan: Confucianism, Daoism, Shinto. Two civilisations where most people say they have no religion, and then visit the ancestors' graves, burn incense for a goddess of the sea, buy a charm for exams and bring their newborn to the shrine. How that makes sense, from oracle bones to the Yasukuni question. Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each, Laozi: The Way of the Dao and the Art of Wu Wei and Indigenous and Folk Religions: The Oldest Faiths on Earth Ask a hundred adults in mainland China whether they belong to a religion and, by the best survey evidence, about ten will say yes. Ask the same hundred whether they visited a family grave in the last year and about seventy-five will say yes. A third believe in the Buddha or bodhisattvas. Almost half believe in feng shui. Across the sea in Japan, the government's own religious yearbook adds up the members that shrines, temples, churches and other groups report and arrives at about 175 million believers, in a country of about 124 million people. Yet when the Pew Research Center asks individuals, more than half say they have no religion at all. Both sets of numbers are honest. They reveal the single most important thing to understand about religion in East Asia: it is mostly not about belonging to one faith and believing its creed. It is about what you do, for whom, and on what occasion. A Japanese family can bring a baby to a Shinto shrine, hold a wedding in a chapel and bury a grandparent with Buddhist rites without feeling inconsistent. A Chinese family can follow Confucian ethics, seek a Daoist priest's blessing for a new business and chant a Buddhist sutra for the dead. This long read untangles the traditions that make that possible: Confucianism, Daoism and Chinese folk religion in China; Shinto, and its long marriage with Buddhism, in Japan. (Buddhism itself has its own long read in this series.) For each, the tradition's own account and the historians' account are kept apart and both treated with respect. In this long read Religion without membership Heaven and the ancestors: China's oldest religion Confucius and the Analects Mencius, Xunzi and two thousand years of Confucian China Is Confucianism a religion? Laozi and Zhuangzi: the classics of the Way Religious Daoism: Celestial Masters, alchemy and immortals The three teachings and Chinese folk religion today Religion in the People's Republic Kami and the ancient chronicles of Japan At the shrine: how Shinto is practised Kami and buddhas together, and the separation of 1868 State Shinto and its end Yasukuni: the shrine that will not stop being argued about How Japanese people "do" religion Japan's new religions Part 1 — Religion without membership Western ideas of religion grew up around faiths that ask you to choose: to be baptised or not, to say the creed or not, to belong to one church and not another. Survey questions often carry that assumption. "What is your religion?" expects a single answer. East Asian religious life has usually been organised differently. In 1961 the sociologist C. K. Yang, in Religion in Chinese Society, distinguished "institutional" religion, with its own clergy, scriptures and organisation (Buddhist monasteries, Daoist temples), from "diffused" religion, woven into family, village, guild and state: ancestor rites at home, the earth god at the end of the lane, the city god's festival, the emperor's sacrifices to Heaven. Most Chinese religious life was diffused. People did not "join" it; they lived inside it. Japan shows the same pattern in a different form. Most families have historically been registered both as parishioners of a local shrine and as patrons of a Buddhist temple, and religious organisations count everyone on their rolls. That is why Japan's official figures add up to far more than the population. China Japan Adults who identify with a religion About 10% (Chinese General Social Survey, 2018, analysed by Pew) About 43% (Pew estimate for 2020: 57% unaffiliated) What institutions report "Nearly 200 million believers" (PRC government, 2018) 175 million adherents (Agency for Cultural Affairs, end of 2024) Practices without the label About three-quarters visited a family grave in the past year; a third believe in the Buddha or bodhisattvas; 47% believe in feng shui Shrine visits at New Year, life-cycle rituals, charms, Buddhist funerals and memorial rites In East Asia the useful question is often not "what do you believe?" but "what do you do, and for whom?" This does not mean belief is absent or unimportant. Many Chinese and Japanese people are devout members of one tradition, and the region has produced some of the world's most profound theology and philosophy. But it explains why the old Chinese saying that the "three teachings" are one makes sense to millions, and why scholars still argue over what to count. Part 2 — Heaven and the ancestors: China's oldest religion The oldest Chinese writing we have is religious. In the Late Shang dynasty (c. 1250–1050 BCE), kings put questions to their ancestors and to spirits by cracking ox shoulder-blades and turtle shells with heat and reading the cracks. The questions, and sometimes the answers, were carved on the bones. Will it rain? Will the harvest be good? Is the queen's childbirth auspicious? Which ancestor is causing the king's toothache, and what sacrifice will satisfy him? These oracle bones show a religion centred on the royal ancestors, who could intercede with a high god, Di or Shangdi, and on offerings of food, wine and animals, sometimes humans, to keep the relationship in good order. The dead were not gone. They were senior members of the family with power over its fortunes. Heaven and its Mandate When the Zhou overthrew the Shang in the 11th century BCE, they needed to explain why. Their answer became one of the most durable political ideas in history: Tian, Heaven, grants a Mandate to rule (tianming) to the virtuous, and withdraws it from rulers who become cruel or corrupt. The Shang had lost the Mandate by misrule; the Zhou had received it by virtue. Every later dynasty claimed the same, and every rebellion claimed that the Mandate had passed. Heaven in early Zhou texts is something like a supreme moral power, sometimes personal, sometimes closer to the order of the cosmos. Over the following centuries, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, Heaven's role was increasingly "naturalised." The emperor, the "Son of Heaven," offered sacrifices to Heaven at the winter solstice for two thousand years; the great Temple of Heaven in Beijing, built in the 15th century, is the most famous setting of that rite. The ancestors Underneath the state religion lay the family's. Ancestor veneration is the most widespread and long-lasting Chinese religious practice. Its core: Tablets with the names of the dead, kept on a family altar or in a lineage hall. Offerings of food, incense and, later, "spirit money" and paper goods burnt for the dead to use. Rites at the grave, above all at the Qingming festival in spring, when families sweep the tombs, make offerings and share a meal. Continuity: the dead depend on the living for offerings, and the living depend on the dead for blessing. To die without descendants to remember you was a terrible fate. The ethic behind this is filial piety (xiao): the reverent care children owe their parents in life and after death. It is the thread that ties Chinese religion to Confucian morality, and it is where Confucius begins. Part 3 — Confucius and the Analects The life Kong Qiu, known as Kongzi or "Master Kong" and in the West as Confucius, is traditionally dated 551–479 BCE. He was born near the small state of Lu, in today's Shandong. He held offices in Lu (the sources disagree on which), spent years travelling among rival states looking for a ruler who would put his ideas into practice, never found one, and in later life turned to teaching. The historian Sima Qian, writing around 100 BCE, credits him with 77 direct disciples and some 3,000 students. His world was the late Zhou, when the old order was falling apart into warring states. His answer was not a new revelation but a recovery: the ritual and moral order of the early Zhou, as he understood it, renewed through education and personal virtue. "I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge," he says in the Analects; "I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there" (7.19, Legge). The text The Analects (Lunyu, "collected sayings") is a collection of short exchanges between Confucius and his disciples. The historian Ban Gu (39–92 CE) described it as compiled by his early disciples, and tradition treats it as the most direct record of his teaching. Modern scholars are less sure. Some argue it took shape much later; excavated copies from tombs dated 59 and 55 BCE show it circulating widely by the mid-1st century BCE. Its chapters probably come from different hands and different generations. The ideas Term Rough meaning In the Analects Ren Humaneness, benevolence, caring for others The highest virtue; rooted in family love Li Ritual, propriety, the forms of respectful conduct From sacrifices to table manners; shapes character Xiao Filial piety The root of humaneness Junzi The "gentleman" or exemplary person Defined by virtue, not birth Yi Rightness, doing what is fitting The junzi's guide, as profit is the petty person's Tian Heaven Source of moral order and of his mission Confucius describes his own path in one of the most famous passages in Chinese literature: "At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven. At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right" (2.4, Legge). His golden rule is stated negatively. Asked for one word to live by, he says: "Is not RECIPROCITY such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others" (15.23). Confucius and the spirits What did Confucius think about gods, spirits and the dead? The Analects gives a careful, almost deliberately balanced picture. "He sacrificed to the dead, as if they were present. He sacrificed to the spirits, as if the spirits were present." — Analects 3.12, trans. James Legge (1861) He took ritual deeply seriously. But, the disciples record, "The subjects on which the Master did not talk, were — extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings" (7.20). When a disciple asked about serving the spirits of the dead, he replied: "While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their spirits?" And about death: "While you do not know life, how can you know about death?" (11.11). Wisdom, he says elsewhere, is "to give one's self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them" (6.20). Yet he also speaks of Heaven as personal and purposeful, as having given him his mission. Asked why he would not speak more, he answered with a question: "Does Heaven speak? The four seasons pursue their courses, and all things are continually being produced, but does Heaven say anything?" (17.19). Some readers see an agnostic humanist here; others see a deeply religious man for whom reverence was shown in ritual rather than doctrine. The text supports both, which is one reason the question in Part 5 has never been settled. On ritual, he insisted on the heart behind it. Even filial piety means nothing without reverence. People think it means supporting one's parents, he said, "But dogs and horses likewise are able to do something in the way of support; without reverence, what is there to distinguish the one support given from the other?" (2.7). Part 4 — Mencius, Xunzi and two thousand years of Confucian China Two followers, two views of human nature The two great Confucian thinkers after the master disagreed about the most basic question there is. Mencius (Mengzi), born about a century after Confucius died and active in the 4th century BCE, argued that human nature is good. Everyone has "sprouts" of the four virtues: benevolence, righteousness, propriety and wisdom. His famous proof (Mencius 2A6): anyone who suddenly saw a small child about to fall into a well would feel alarm and compassion, not because they wanted the parents' gratitude or the neighbours' praise, but spontaneously. Goodness is in us; it has to be cultivated like a sprout, not imposed. Xunzi (born around 310 BCE, alive in 238 BCE) argued the opposite. "Human nature is evil; what is good is artifice," his chapter 23 begins. Left to themselves, our inborn desires lead to conflict. Goodness comes from deliberate effort, wei, through teachers and the rituals of the sage kings, which reshape desire as a carpenter straightens wood. Xunzi also wrote the most "naturalistic" account of Heaven in early Chinese thought. Heaven, he said, is constant and does not intervene in human affairs; strange events like shooting stars are only shifts in nature, not omens. And he asked a famous question about the rain dance. If people perform the sacrifice for rain and it rains, what does that mean? Nothing, he answered: it would have rained anyway. The gentleman treats the ceremony as "embellishment," a beautiful human form; common people treat it as "spiritual." To treat it as embellishment is auspicious; to treat it as spiritual is inauspicious (17.8). Mencius Xunzi Human nature Good: we have sprouts of virtue Bad: virtue is learned artifice Role of ritual Expresses and nurtures inborn feeling Reshapes raw desire Heaven Moral and purposeful Natural regularity; does not respond to prayer Later standing Became orthodox Influential, later sidelined Confucianism and the state Confucianism did not win at once. The first unified empire, the Qin (221–206 BCE), favoured the harsh Legalist school. Under the Han, Confucian scholars and the Five Classics gained official standing, and Confucian learning became the training of the scholar-officials who ran the empire. From 605 CE, under the Sui, China began selecting officials by imperial examination, a system expanded under the Tang and Song that lasted, with interruptions, for some 1,300 years until its abolition in 1905. Candidates studied the classics for years and wrote essays on them, and success could lift a family into the elite. The examinations made Confucian texts the shared curriculum of China's ruling class and, through imitation, of Korea and Vietnam. The Song philosopher Zhu Xi (1130–1200) gave this curriculum its final shape. He grouped the Analects, the Mencius and two chapters of the Book of Rites as the "Four Books," and wrote commentaries on them that became the standard reading. His Neo-Confucianism answered Buddhism and Daoism on their own ground, with a full metaphysics of li (principle) and qi (vital stuff), and a programme of self-cultivation including "quiet sitting," a meditation practice. It was the orthodoxy of late imperial China, Joseon Korea and, through the Tokugawa shogunate's favour, Japan. For two thousand years, if you wanted to govern China, you had to know Confucius by heart. Part 5 — Is Confucianism a religion? This is one of the oldest debates in comparative religion, and it is still live. Here are the main positions in their own best terms. "Not a religion": a civil ethic and philosophy Confucius did not claim revelation, founded no church, ordained no priests and said little about the afterlife. The Analects is about how to be a good son, friend, official and ruler. Its rituals honour ancestors and teachers; they do not worship a god. On this view Confucianism is an ethical, social and political philosophy, the moral grammar of Chinese civilisation, compatible with any religion or none. Many Chinese intellectuals in the 20th century took this view, as does the People's Republic today: Confucianism is not one of its five officially recognised religions. "A religion, but a different kind" Others answer that the question assumes a Western definition. Confucianism has sacred texts, rituals, temples (every county once had a Confucian temple, with sacrifices to the master), a cosmic order (Heaven) and a path of self-transformation toward sagehood. The philosopher Herbert Fingarette called his 1972 book Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, arguing that for Confucius ritual itself is where the holy appears: in the bow, the gift, the courteous gesture that makes human life sacred. Scholars such as Tu Weiming have described Confucianism's "religiousness" as a faith in the transformative power of human relationships rooted in Heaven. And C. K. Yang's idea of "diffused religion" places it within the wider Chinese religious system rather than outside it. The Christian dispute that made it famous The question first became urgent for Catholic missionaries. In the late 16th century the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, working in China, argued that the honours Chinese paid to Confucius and to ancestors were civil and social, not idolatry, so converts could continue them. Some Jesuit writers even presented Confucius as a teacher of natural theology, a sage who had reached knowledge of God by reason. Dominican and Franciscan missionaries disagreed. The "Rites Controversy" ran for more than a century. In 1715 Pope Clement XI condemned the rites; in response the Kangxi emperor restricted Christian missions. Only in 1939 did the Vatican, under Pius XII, allow Catholics to take part in ceremonies honouring Confucius and to bow before the dead. Confucianism today Confucian ethics remain deeply rooted in family life across East Asia, and since the 1990s there has been a revival in mainland China: classical study for children, ceremonies at Confucius temples, and official promotion of Confucian values as part of "traditional culture." Its supporters see a recovery of China's moral heritage after a century of attacks. Its critics, including some Chinese liberals and feminists, worry about its use to justify hierarchy and obedience. Whether it is a religion has become less a question of definition than a question of who gets to speak for it. Argument "Philosophy / ethic" "Religion of its own kind" Revelation and god None claimed Heaven as moral source Ritual Social courtesy, civil honours Where the sacred is enacted Afterlife Confucius declined to speculate Ancestor rites assume relationship continues Institutions No clergy State and lineage temples, sacrifices to Confucius Official status (PRC) Not a recognised religion Promoted as "traditional culture" Part 6 — Laozi and Zhuangzi: the classics of the Way The library's Laozi piece tells the classic story: an archivist at the Zhou court, weary of decline, riding west, stopped at the border pass by a guard who asks him to write down his wisdom, leaving behind a book of five thousand characters. That is the tradition's account, and it is a beautiful one. Here is what the historians add. Who was Laozi? The story comes from the historian Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BCE), who gives Laozi's name as Li Er, makes him an archivist who met Confucius, and records the guard Yin Xi and the five thousand characters. But Sima Qian himself was uncertain and recorded alternative identifications. Few scholars outside China now accept his account as it stands. Some think it combines several legends; some think Laozi is entirely legendary; others accept a teacher behind the name. How old is the book? The Daodejing (Tao Te Ching, "Classic of the Way and its Power") probably grew over time. The SEP summarises a common view: its sayings were committed to writing from the second half of the 5th century BCE, consolidated in the 4th and reached a fairly stable form by the mid-3rd century BCE. Archaeology has transformed the debate. Find When found Date of the text What it shows Guodian bamboo slips, Hubei 1993 Tomb of about 300 BCE About 2,000 characters matching the Laozi: the oldest known version, partial Mawangdui silk manuscripts, Hunan 1973 Tomb sealed 168 BCE Two near-complete copies, with the two halves in reverse order Received text (Wang Bi, 226–249 CE) Transmitted 3rd century CE The basis of most modern translations What the book says The Daodejing's 81 short chapters describe the Dao, the Way, the source and pattern of all things, which cannot be grasped in words: "The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name" (ch. 1, Legge). It praises softness, yielding and emptiness. "The highest excellence is like (that of) water," which benefits all things and settles in "the low place which all men dislike" (ch. 8). And it teaches wu wei, non-forcing action: "The Tao in its regular course does nothing (for the sake of doing it), and so there is nothing which it does not do" (ch. 37). It is also, often, a book about government, advising rulers to rule lightly. And it is pointedly critical of Confucian virtue-talk: "When the Great Tao ceased to be observed, benevolence and righteousness came into vogue" (ch. 18). Zhuangzi The second Daoist classic is named for Zhuang Zhou (c. 370–300 BCE). The Zhuangzi originally had 52 chapters, reduced to 33 by the editor Guo Xiang in the 3rd century CE; the first seven, the "Inner Chapters," are generally considered closest to Zhuangzi himself. Where the Daodejing is terse and oracular, the Zhuangzi is funny, strange and full of stories: a cook who carves an ox without ever dulling his knife because he follows its natural joints; a giant fish that becomes a bird; a skull that refuses to be brought back to life. The most famous story, from chapter 2, in Herbert Giles' 1889 translation: "Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzŭ, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly." Waking, he no longer knew "whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man." And when Zhuangzi's wife died, a friend found him singing and drumming on a bowl. He had grieved at first, he explained, but then remembered that she had once not existed, had been given form and life, and was now changing again, "passing from one phase to another like the sequence of spring, summer, autumn, and winter" (ch. 18). To wail would be to show that he did not understand. Confucius asked how to live well with others. Laozi and Zhuangzi asked how to stop getting in the way of the Way. Part 7 — Religious Daoism: Celestial Masters, alchemy and immortals For a long time Western scholars, following translators such as James Legge, divided Daoism into a pure early "philosophy" (daojia, "the school of the Way") and a later "religion" (daojiao, "the teaching of the Way") that they saw as a decline into magic and superstition. Since the late 1970s scholars have rejected that picture. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the split "more revealing of the Western frame of reference we use than of Daoism itself." Religious Daoism is not a corruption of the classics; it is the living tradition that has kept them, chanted them and built an entire world of practice around them. The Celestial Masters The first organised Daoist religion began, according to its own tradition, around 142 CE, when Zhang Daoling received revelations from Laozi, who by then was revered as a deity, the personification of the Dao. Zhang founded the Way of the Celestial Masters (Tianshi Dao) in Sichuan. Its communities were run by "libationers" who served as both priests and administrators; members confessed their sins, paid a tithe of rice (hence the early nickname, "Five Pecks of Rice"), and sought healing through confession and ritual rather than medicine. An early commentary on the Daodejing linked to the movement, the Xiang'er, survives in part in a manuscript from Dunhuang. At about the same time, another movement inspired by the Classic of Great Peace (Taiping jing) rose in the Yellow Turban rebellion of 184 CE, which helped bring down the Han dynasty. Daoist millenarian hopes, of a coming age of great peace under a true ruler, ran through Chinese history. Alchemy and the search for immortality A central Daoist aim was to become a xian, an immortal or "transcendent," who has refined the body and spirit beyond death. Ge Hong (283–343), in his Master Who Embraces Simplicity (Baopuzi), argued that immortality was attainable and described the "outer alchemy" (waidan) of elixirs made from minerals such as cinnabar, a form of mercury. Some elixirs were poisonous, and Chinese history records emperors who died, it is widely believed, from the medicines meant to make them live forever. Over time the emphasis shifted to "inner alchemy" (neidan): using breath, visualisation and meditation to refine the body's own energies, qi and its subtler forms, into an immortal embryo within. From 360 to 370 CE a young man named Yang Xi received revelations from celestial beings on Mount Mao that founded the Highest Clarity (Shangqing) school, centred on visualisation and ascent to the heavens. A generation later the Numinous Treasure (Lingbao) scriptures appeared, rich in ritual and heavily influenced by Buddhism. The great age and after The Tang emperors (618–907) claimed descent from Laozi, whose surname they shared, and venerated him by decree. In the 12th century Wang Zhe (1113–1170) founded the Complete Perfection (Quanzhen) school, which introduced celibate monastic life on Buddhist lines; its headquarters is still the White Cloud Temple in Beijing. The Ming emperors sponsored the first complete Daoist Canon (Daozang), finished in 1445, which holds some 1,120 titles. Today the two great orders are Quanzhen, monastic, and the Orthodox Unity (Zhengyi) order descended from the Celestial Masters, whose priests marry and serve local communities. Strand Founded Character Celestial Masters / Zhengyi c. 142 CE (tradition) Married priests; community rituals, exorcism, healing Shangqing (Highest Clarity) 360s CE revelations Meditation, visualisation, ascent Lingbao (Numinous Treasure) c. 400 CE Liturgy and ritual; Buddhist influence Quanzhen (Complete Perfection) 12th century Celibate monasteries; inner alchemy What Daoist priests actually do Most Daoist practice is ritual, performed by priests for communities and families: the great jiao rites of cosmic renewal held for a temple or village, funerals to guide the dead, exorcisms, blessings for new homes and businesses, and petitions written in formal bureaucratic language to the gods of the heavenly administration. Practices that grew out of the inner-alchemy tradition, such as tai chi and qigong, have become popular worldwide, often without their religious frame. Part 8 — The three teachings and Chinese folk religion today "The three teachings are one" By the Song dynasty, Daoism was taught alongside Confucianism and Buddhism as the three teachings (sanjiao). A common saying held that they were one: Confucianism to order society, Daoism to nourish the body, Buddhism to cultivate the mind. Temples were built to all three founders together, and many people moved among them as needed. Elites argued fiercely about which was superior. Ordinary people mostly used all three. The folk religion Beneath and around the three teachings sits the vast, uncentred practice that scholars call Chinese folk religion or popular religion. Pew counts it in the "other religions" category, which makes up only about 3 percent of mainland China's self-identified population but, because China is so large, a quarter of all the world's "other religions" adherents. In Taiwan, Pew notes, Daoists and practitioners of folk religion together make up the majority. Its main features: A celestial bureaucracy. The gods are often imagined as officials: the Jade Emperor at the top, city gods as heavenly magistrates, local earth gods (Tudi Gong) as the village headmen of the spirit world. The Kitchen God watches each family and reports on it at New Year. Deified humans. Many gods were once people: generals, healers, virtuous women. Guan Yu, a general of the 3rd century, is worshipped as a god of loyalty, war and wealth, his red-faced statue found in police stations and restaurants alike. Ghosts and ancestors. The seventh lunar month is Ghost Month; on its fifteenth night (the Ghost Festival, or Pudu in Taiwan), offerings are made for wandering spirits who have no descendants to feed them. Divination and feng shui. Casting moon blocks or drawing fortune sticks at a temple; choosing dates and sites by astrological and geomantic rules. Mazu The best-loved goddess of southern China and Taiwan is Mazu, protector of seafarers. According to UNESCO, which inscribed "Mazu belief and customs" on its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009, she is believed to have lived in the 10th century on Meizhou Island, off Fujian, helping her neighbours, and to have died trying to rescue shipwreck survivors; local people built a temple to her, and UNESCO counts some 5,000 Mazu temples around the world. Tradition names her Lin Moniang. In Taiwan, the annual Dajia Mazu pilgrimage carries her statue in a litter on foot for nine days between temples, followed by huge crowds. Qingming and the year The religious year follows the lunar calendar: Lunar New Year, when families honour ancestors and welcome the gods back from heaven; Qingming in early April, the tomb-sweeping festival; the Dragon Boat Festival; the Ghost Festival; the Mid-Autumn Festival. In 2018, roughly three-quarters of Chinese adults told the Chinese General Social Survey they had visited a family member's grave in the past year. Practice (mainland China) Share of adults Survey Identify with any religion 10% CGSS 2018 Identify as Buddhist 4% CGSS 2018 Believe in Buddha and/or a bodhisattva 33% China Family Panel Studies 2018 Believe in feng shui 47% CFPS 2018 Burn incense at least a few times a year 26% CFPS 2016 Visited a family grave in the past year About 75% CGSS 2018 All figures from Pew Research Center, "Measuring Religion in China" (August 2023), which cautions that people in China may be reluctant to declare religious identity to surveyors. In the folk religion, the gods are like officials and the dead are like relatives: you visit them, you bring gifts, you ask for help, and you keep the relationship going. Part 9 — Religion in the People's Republic The People's Republic of China, founded in 1949, is governed by a Communist Party whose members are required to be atheists. Its relationship with religion has passed through distinct phases, and its present policy is described very differently by the government and by its critics. Both are set out here. Destruction and recovery During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Red Guards attacked the "Four Olds" (old ideas, culture, customs and habits). Temples, churches and mosques were closed, destroyed or turned to other uses, and clergy were persecuted. The IEP records that Beijing's roughly 300 Daoist sites were reduced to a handful. After Mao's death, the reform era restored a limited freedom of religious practice, and temples, churches and mosques reopened and multiplied. The system China officially recognises five religions: Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism. Each is organised through a state-approved national association and supervised by the government's religious affairs authorities. Confucianism and folk religion are not on the list; folk temples are often registered as Daoist or managed as cultural heritage. In its 2018 white paper, China's Policies and Practices on Protecting Freedom of Religious Belief, the State Council Information Office described the system in its own terms: "nearly 200 million" religious believers, more than 380,000 clergy and about 144,000 registered places of worship; some 222,000 Buddhist and more than 40,000 Daoist clergy, with 33,500 Buddhist and 9,000 Daoist temples (the paper says Buddhist and Daoist believers are hard to count); about 6 million Catholics and 38 million Protestants; the principle that "religious groups and religious affairs are not subject to control by foreign countries"; and a policy of "actively guiding religions in adapting to the socialist society." The government's case is that this framework protects freedom of belief while preventing foreign interference, extremism and "evil cults" (xiejiao), and that it has supported the restoration of temples and religious life on a large scale. The restrictions Critics, including UN human rights bodies, human rights organisations and many religious believers, describe a system of control that has tightened since the mid-2010s under the policy known as the "sinicisation" of religion. According to Pew's 2023 report, proselytising and organised religious education for children are banned, and Falun Gong, a spiritual movement founded in the 1990s, has been completely banned since 1999. Human Rights Watch's World Report 2026 records, among other things, that in October and November 2025 nearly 30 people linked to Zion Church, one of the largest unregistered Protestant churches, were detained in seven cities and 18 formally arrested, including its founder, Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri; that new rules in September 2025 banned unauthorised religious content online; and that after the Dalai Lama's 90th birthday restrictions tightened at Tibetan monasteries. The sharpest criticism concerns Xinjiang. In its assessment of 31 August 2022, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights concluded that the extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim groups "may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity," and noted reports of the destruction of mosques and shrines. China rejects these accusations and describes its policies as counter-terrorism and de-radicalisation. The Catholic Church's position illustrates the balancing act. In 2018 the Holy See and the People's Republic signed a provisional agreement on the appointment of bishops, and in October 2024 they extended it for four years. Supporters see it as healing a decades-old division between "official" and "underground" Catholics; critics argue it concedes too much to the state. The government's account Critics' account Overall policy Freedom of religious belief protected by law Freedom exists only within Party-defined limits "Sinicisation" Religions adapting to Chinese culture and socialist society Political control of doctrine, clergy and buildings Unregistered groups Illegal; some are "evil cults" Peaceful believers punished for refusing state control Xinjiang Counter-terrorism and vocational training Mass arbitrary detention; possible crimes against humanity (OHCHR, 2022) Tibet Development and protection of Tibetan Buddhism Restrictions on monasteries; control of reincarnation Folk religion, by contrast, has seen something of a revival, sometimes tolerated as local culture, sometimes promoted as intangible heritage. Ancestor rites, temple festivals and Qingming tomb-sweeping are practised on a vast scale. Part 10 — Kami and the ancient chronicles of Japan What a kami is Shinto, "the way of the kami," centres on kami: sacred beings or powers. The word is usually translated "gods" or "spirits," but neither fits well. Kami can be the great deities of the myths, such as the sun goddess Amaterasu; the spirits of particular mountains, waterfalls, rocks and ancient trees; the guardian deities of clans and places; and certain human beings, such as emperors, heroes and, in modern times, the war dead. The Japanese scholar Basil Hall Chamberlain, translating the Kojiki in 1882, noted that the word properly signifies "superior," and warned that "god" put more into it than it held. Shinto has no founder and no single sacred book. Its central acts are not doctrines but rites: purification, offering, prayer and festival, at shrines dedicated to particular kami. Many scholars think of it as Japan's indigenous religion, continuous with prehistoric practice; others, such as John Breen and Mark Teeuwen in A New History of Shinto (2010), stress how much of what is now called "Shinto" was shaped by Buddhism and by the modern Japanese state. Both views are represented among Japanese scholars and priests. The chronicles The oldest Japanese books are two court chronicles from the 8th century. The Kojiki ("Records of Ancient Matters") was completed in 712. Its preface says the empress ordered the courtier Ō no Yasumaro to write down the old traditions that a court attendant, Hieda no Are, had learnt by heart. The Nihon Shoki ("Chronicles of Japan"), completed in 720, is longer, written in a more Chinese style, and gives variant versions of many myths. For centuries the Nihon Shoki was the more studied of the two. The Kojiki became a Shinto classic mainly through the scholar Motoori Norinaga, whose 44-volume commentary, the Kojikiden, was completed in 1798. The myths The Kojiki opens with deities who "were born in the Plain of High Heaven when the Heaven and Earth began," while the young earth drifted "like unto floating oil." Two of them, the male Izanagi and the female Izanami, stand on the floating bridge of heaven, stir the ocean with a jewelled spear and create the islands of Japan, then give birth to many kami. Izanami dies giving birth to the fire god. Izanagi follows her to the land of the dead, sees her decaying body, and flees. Back in the world, he says: "I have come to a hideous and polluted land, — I have! So I will perform the purification of my august person" (Kojiki Sect. X, trans. Chamberlain). As he washes in a river, kami are born from his clothes and his body; from his left eye comes Amaterasu, the Heaven-Shining-Great-August-Deity, from his right eye the moon god, and from his nose the storm god Susanoo. He gives Amaterasu the rule of the Plain of High Heaven. Susanoo runs riot in heaven. Terrified, Amaterasu "closed [behind her] the door of the Heavenly Rock-Dwelling... Then the whole Plain of High Heaven was obscured and all the Central Land of Reed-Plains darkened. Owing to this, eternal night prevailed" (Sect. XVI). The eight hundred myriad kami gather, hang a mirror and jewels on a sacred tree, and a goddess dances so wildly that the gods roar with laughter. Curious, Amaterasu peeps out, sees her reflection in the mirror, and is drawn back into the world, and light returns. Two themes run through these stories and into Shinto practice: purification, the washing away of pollution (kegare), especially of death; and descent, for the chronicles go on to trace the imperial line from Amaterasu's grandson, sent down to rule the islands, through the legendary first emperor Jinmu. What historians say The chronicles were compiled at a court building a centralised state on the Chinese model, and they served to legitimate the imperial house. The historian Tsuda Sōkichi argued in 1913 and 1919 that the early emperors were not historical and that the age-of-the-gods accounts were shaped in the 6th century to explain the imperial house's origins; in 1940 his books were banned and he was charged with insulting the imperial house. Today his critical approach is mainstream: scholars read the myths as a mix of older regional traditions and political composition, and the early "emperors" as legendary. For Shinto practitioners, the myths remain sacred narratives whose meaning does not depend on that historical question. Shinto has no creed to recite. What it has is a mirror, a river to wash in and a set of stories about why washing matters. Part 11 — At the shrine: how Shinto is practised Japan has, by the Agency for Cultural Affairs' count, more than 84,000 Shinto religious corporations, most of them local shrines, from tiny roadside structures to great complexes. A visit follows a pattern that almost every Japanese person knows. A shrine visit, step by step The torii. You pass under a gate, often red, marking the boundary of sacred space. Many people bow before passing through. Purification. At a stone water basin, you take a wooden ladle and rinse your left hand, then your right, then your mouth, a miniature of Izanagi's washing. The offering. At the hall of worship, you drop a coin into the offering box and may ring a bell to call the kami's attention. The prayer. The most common pattern is two bows, two claps, a moment of silent prayer and one more bow. Charms and fortunes. Many visitors buy an omamori, an amulet for safe driving, health or exam success; draw an omikuji, a paper fortune, tying bad ones to a rack to leave the luck behind; or write a wish on a wooden ema plaque. The kami itself is believed to reside in a sacred object, the shintai, often a mirror, sword or stone, kept hidden in the inner sanctuary. Priests (kannushi) and shrine maidens (miko) perform the daily offerings of rice, salt, water and sake, and recite norito, formal prayers in classical Japanese. Festivals The great communal events are matsuri, festivals, in which the kami is carried through the streets of its district in a portable shrine (mikoshi), with music, dancing, food stalls and a great deal of drinking. Many follow the farming year, from planting to harvest. Kokugakuin University's Encyclopedia of Shinto notes that, with fewer than one Japanese in ten now working in farming, festivals tied to rice-growing have tended to become civic pageants, but remain among the most significant features of Shinto and of Japanese culture. Ise: rebuilding the sacred every twenty years The holiest shrine in Japan is Ise Jingū, dedicated to Amaterasu. Every twenty years its main sanctuaries are rebuilt from new cypress wood on an adjacent site, with all their furnishings and sacred treasures remade, and the kami is transferred to the new shrine in a night-time ritual. This Shikinen Sengū was, by Ise's tradition, first performed in 690 for the Inner Shrine and has continued for some 1,300 years. The 61st took place in 1993 and the 62nd in 2013. Preparations for the 63rd are already under way: the first rituals were held on 2 May 2025, the traditional timber-hauling began in spring 2026, and the transfer of the kami is scheduled for October 2033. Ise is a shrine that is always 1,300 years old and never more than twenty. Part 12 — Kami and buddhas together, and the separation of 1868 A thousand years of combination When Buddhism arrived in Japan in the 6th century, it did not replace the kami. It combined with them. Kokugakuin University's Encyclopedia of Shinto describes a system of shinbutsu shūgō, the "combination of kami and buddhas," with roots in the Nara period (710–794). Temples were built inside shrine compounds; monks read sutras before kami; kami were called bodhisattvas; and, apart from Ise and a few others, most shrines came under Buddhist control. By the 10th century this was given a theory: honji suijaku, "original ground and manifest traces." The buddhas and bodhisattvas were the original, true forms; the kami were their local manifestations, appearing in Japan in order to save its people. A kami could be titled gongen, "avatar." The great shrine of Hachiman, for example, honoured a kami who was also a "Great Bodhisattva." For most of Japanese history, ordinary people did not distinguish Shinto and Buddhism as two religions at all. In the Edo period (1603–1868), the system was tightened by the state. To root out Christianity, which the shogunate had banned, every household was required to register with a Buddhist temple that certified it was not Christian. The temple-parish (danka) system tied families to temples, which handled their funerals. At the same time, scholars of "National Learning" (kokugaku), such as Motoori Norinaga, began to argue that the pure ancient Way of the kami had been buried under foreign Buddhism and Confucianism. The separation The Meiji government that took power in 1868 proclaimed a "restoration of imperial rule" and a return to the age of the first emperor. On the 17th day of the third month of that year it issued the first of a series of "separation edicts" (shinbutsu bunri). Buddhist priests serving at shrines were defrocked or ordered out; Buddhist terms such as gongen were banned for kami; Buddhist statues could no longer serve as a shrine's sacred object; Hachiman stopped being a bodhisattva. Many local officials, shrine priests and nativists read the edicts as a licence to destroy Buddhism. The movement called haibutsu kishaku, "abolish Buddhism, destroy Shakyamuni," wrecked temples and burned statues and scriptures across the country, despite central instructions that the aim was separation, not destruction. In some domains, such as Satsuma, Buddhist temples disappeared almost entirely. The separation created the distinction most Japanese now take for granted: shrines with torii and kami on one side, temples with buddhas and graves on the other. It is a modern line drawn across an old landscape. Era Relationship of kami and buddhas 6th–8th centuries Buddhism arrives; kami and buddhas begin to combine 10th century onward Honji suijaku: kami as manifestations of buddhas; most shrines under Buddhist control Edo period Temple registration for every household; nativist critique of Buddhism 1868 Separation edicts; haibutsu kishaku destroys many temples Today Distinct institutions; most families use both Part 13 — State Shinto and its end Shrines as "ritual fundaments of the state" Having separated shrines from Buddhism, the Meiji state made them its own. In 1871 shrines were declared the "ritual fundaments of the state," hereditary priesthoods were abolished and a national ranking of shrines created. A short-lived campaign to make Shinto a national creed failed. The government then hit upon a different formula: shrines are not religious. In 1882 priests of the national shrines were barred from preaching and from conducting funerals, and in 1900 a separate Shrine Bureau took over shrine administration from the bureau handling religions. Shrine rites, the government argued, were patriotic ceremonies honouring the nation's ancestors, which every citizen could perform whatever his religion. This let the state require participation in shrine rites while claiming to respect freedom of religion, which Article 28 of the Meiji Constitution (1889) granted, as the Encyclopedia of Shinto puts it, "after a fashion." Schoolchildren bowed before portraits of the emperor; shrines were built across Japan's empire in Taiwan, Korea, Sakhalin, Manchuria and the Pacific; and a nationwide programme of shrine mergers, from the end of Meiji into the Taishō period, closed about half of the country's roughly 200,000 shrines. In 1937 the Ministry of Education published Kokutai no hongi ("Fundamentals of Our National Polity"), centred on the divine descent of the emperor. Scholars do not agree on what "State Shinto" was. The Encyclopedia of Shinto notes that the term only came into common use with the occupation authorities' Shinto Directive of 1945, that the system grew from a series of separate laws without any overall legal framework, and that it was, as a system, "extremely unstable." Some historians see State Shinto as effectively Japan's state religion from 1868 to 1945, the ideological core of militarism. Others, including many Shinto scholars, argue that the shrines themselves were a fairly small and underfunded part of the state, and that the real engine of wartime ideology was the emperor cult promoted through schools and the army. 1945: the end After Japan's defeat, the Allied occupation issued the Shinto Directive on 15 December 1945, ordering the separation of shrines from the state, which it held had been linked to "ultra-nationalism and militarism." On 1 January 1946 the emperor issued a rescript, commonly called the "Humanity Declaration," rejecting the idea that he was a living god. On 3 February 1946 the shrines organised themselves as a private religious body, the Association of Shinto Shrines (Jinja Honchō), which today includes the vast majority of Japan's shrines and regards Ise as its spiritual centre. The 1947 Constitution made the separation law. Article 20 says that "No religious organization shall receive any privileges from the state, nor exercise any political authority" and that "The state and its organs shall refrain from religious education or any other religious activity"; Article 89 bars public money for religious institutions. The boundary is still argued over in court. In 1977 the Supreme Court ruled that the city of Tsu could pay for a Shinto groundbreaking ceremony before building a gymnasium, on the grounds that it was a secular custom; in 1993 it upheld a city's support for a memorial rite for the war dead. Supporters of such rulings see shrine rites as part of Japanese culture shared by all; critics, including many Christians, Buddhists and liberals, see a slow return of the prewar formula that Shinto is "not a religion" and so exempt from separation. Part 14 — Yasukuni: the shrine that will not stop being argued about What it is Yasukuni Shrine, in central Tokyo, was established on 29 June 1869, by the will of the Emperor Meiji, as the Tokyo Shōkonsha, a shrine "to invite the spirits" of those who had died fighting for the emperor in the civil war that brought him to power. It took the name Yasukuni, "peaceful country," in 1879. No remains are buried there. Instead, the names of the dead are enshrined as kami. By its own account, the shrine now enshrines "more than 2,466,000 divinities": soldiers who died in Japan's wars from the 1850s to 1945, together with civilian workers, nurses, schoolgirls involved in relief operations, students mobilised to work in factories, people who died in Soviet labour camps, "Taiwanese and Korean people who died as Japanese," and those "labeled war criminals and executed after being tried by the Allies." In the shrine's view, all who sacrificed their lives for the nation are to be honoured equally. Its museum, the Yūshūkan, presents Japan's modern wars from that perspective. The turning points Date Event 1869 Tokyo Shōkonsha founded; renamed Yasukuni in 1879 15 Dec 1945 Shinto Directive; in 1946 Yasukuni becomes a private religious corporation 1951 Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru and his cabinet visit at the autumn festival 1959 The shrine begins enshrining Class B and C war criminals 1975 Last of Emperor Shōwa's eight postwar visits; no emperor has visited since, an absence generally attributed to his displeasure at the Class A enshrinement 17 Oct 1978 The shrine enshrines 14 men convicted as Class A war criminals by the Tokyo Tribunal, including wartime prime minister Tōjō Hideki, calling them the "Shōwa martyrs"; it is made public in 1979 15 Aug 1985 Prime Minister Nakasone visits in an official capacity with his cabinet; China issues its first formal protest the day before 2001–2006 Prime Minister Koizumi visits six times, including 15 August 2006 26 Dec 2013 Prime Minister Abe visits; strong criticism from China and South Korea Oct 2026 Prime Minister Takaichi does not visit the autumn festival but sends a ritual offering; three cabinet ministers and about 70 lawmakers visit Sources: Yasukuni Shrine; nippon.com, "Yasukuni Shrine: the Basics" (2014); Jiji Press via nippon.com (19 October 2026). The positions The controversy has at least four sides, and each deserves its strongest statement. The shrine and its supporters, including many bereaved families and conservatives, say Yasukuni is where the war dead were promised they would be honoured, and where their families have mourned them for generations. Every nation honours its fallen; a prime minister paying respects to those who died for the country is no more glorifying war than a president laying a wreath at a national cemetery. In Shinto, they add, the dead are purified by death, and judging which of them to honour is not for the living. The shrine has refused requests to remove the Class A enshrinements, saying enshrined spirits cannot be separated. Visits by Japanese leaders, on this view, are a domestic matter. China and South Korea, and many others in Asia, see the enshrinement of the Class A war criminals and the Yūshūkan's narrative as evidence that Japan has not faced up to its wars of aggression and colonial rule, in which millions of their people died. Visits by Japanese leaders are therefore read as endorsing that view of history. In 2005 large anti-Japanese demonstrations in China included protests against the visits. Constitutional critics within Japan argue that official visits breach the separation of religion and state in Article 20. As early as 1955 the government itself said ministers should not visit in an official capacity because there was "an undeniable possibility" that it would be unconstitutional. Visits have continued in both "official" and "private" capacities, and the argument has gone through the courts. Some families of the dead, including some Christian, Buddhist, Taiwanese and Korean families, object that their relatives were enshrined without their consent, as kami of a religion they did not share, and in a shrine they associate with the empire that conscripted them. Proposals to defuse the issue, such as removing the Class A enshrinements or building a secular national memorial, have repeatedly failed. A government panel recommended a non-religious memorial in 2002; it was never built. The Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery nearby holds the remains of unidentified war dead, but it is not a substitute in the eyes of those who honour Yasukuni. To one Japanese family, Yasukuni is where they go to talk to a grandfather. To a family in Nanjing or Seoul, it is where Japan honours the men who planned the war that killed theirs. Both experiences are real. Part 15 — How Japanese people "do" religion The life cycle A saying often quoted, half-jokingly, sums up Japanese religious life: born Shinto, married Christian, die Buddhist. It is a simplification, but it captures something true about how different traditions serve different moments. Moment Typical practice Tradition About a month after birth Hatsumiyamōde, the baby's first shrine visit, often on the 32nd day for a boy and the 33rd for a girl Shinto Ages 3, 5 and 7 Shichigosan, 15 November: dressed-up children taken to the shrine to give thanks for their health Shinto Exams, new car, new house Prayers and charms at shrines and temples; a Shinto groundbreaking rite (jichinsai) Shinto and Buddhist Wedding Chapel-style ceremony most common; Shinto ceremony or civil-style "in front of the guests" Christian-style, Shinto or none New Year Hatsumōde, first shrine or temple visit of the year Shinto and Buddhist Midsummer Obon: the ancestors return; family graves cleaned Buddhist Death and after Buddhist funeral, posthumous name, memorial rites over years Buddhist Birth and childhood belong to the shrines. Kokugakuin University's Encyclopedia of Shinto describes the baby's first visit as a prayer for the child's growth and, originally, a way of acknowledging the child as a new parishioner of the local kami. Shichigosan grew more elaborate from the Taishō period, and in Tokyo many families go to Meiji Jingū. New Year is the busiest time at shrines. Many people visit at midnight, hearing temple bells ring out the old year and then praying at a shrine. Meiji Jingū in Tokyo, Fushimi Inari in Kyoto and Sumiyoshi Taisha in Osaka draw some of the largest crowds. Weddings show how flexible Japanese religion is. Shinto weddings in their modern form only began in the Meiji period, influenced by Christian ceremonies, and spread after the wedding of the Crown Prince in 1900. In recent decades the "chapel wedding," often in a hotel or wedding hall, with a hired officiant, has been the single most popular style, though most couples are not Christian; the 1.9 million Christian adherents the yearbook counts make up under 2 percent of the population. In Recruit's Zexy wedding survey of couples who married between April 2023 and March 2024, an estimated 46.9 percent nationally held a Christian-style ceremony. Death is mainly the territory of Buddhism. The Edo-period temple registration system tied every household to a temple, and that link survives in the family grave, the Buddhist altar (butsudan) in the home, and the cycle of memorial services. Critics within and outside Buddhism speak of "funeral Buddhism," temples that live from rites for the dead rather than teaching. Defenders reply that care for the dead and comfort for the bereaved is the most human thing a religion can do. Belonging versus believing Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs publishes an annual count of what religious organisations report. Its survey for the end of 2024 found: Tradition (Religious Statistics Survey, 31 Dec 2024) Reported adherents Shinto-line organisations 86.4 million Buddhist-line organisations 80.5 million Christian organisations 1.9 million Other 6.4 million Total 175.1 million Japan's population that year was about 124 million. The agency notes that each organisation defines and counts its members in its own way. Individual surveys tell a different story: Pew estimated that 57 percent of Japanese were religiously unaffiliated in 2020, up from a decade before. Both views are fair. Many Japanese who say they have "no religion" (mushūkyō) mean that they do not belong to a religious organisation or hold a creed, while still visiting shrines, keeping a Buddhist altar for their parents and buying a charm before an exam. To them these are customs, not religion. To scholars of religion, customs like these are exactly what religion often is. Asked "Are you religious?", many Japanese say no. Asked "Will you visit the shrine at New Year?", many of the same people say of course. Part 16 — Japan's new religions Since the end of the Edo period, Japan has produced hundreds of "new religions" (shinshūkyō). The Encyclopedia of Shinto notes that a standard dictionary of them lists over 300, about half derived from Shinto and many others from Buddhism. Most began with a charismatic founder, often a woman or a farmer, who received revelations from a kami or spirit; most offered healing, practical benefits and a clear ethic to people uprooted by modernisation. Tenrikyō, founded by Nakayama Miki (1798–1887), a farm woman whom the movement holds was possessed by God the Parent and became the deity's living shrine, was Japan's largest new religion from the Meiji era until 1945. Watched closely and attacked in the press as a pernicious cult, it was forced to fit its rituals within State Shinto, became an independent religion in 1908, and after the war returned to its founder's original teachings. It left the federation of sect Shinto in 1970. Its headquarters city, Tenri in Nara Prefecture, is built around its sanctuary. Sōka Gakkai, founded in 1930, is a lay Buddhist movement based on the teachings of the 13th-century monk Nichiren and centred on chanting Nam-myōhō-renge-kyō, the title of the Lotus Sutra. It grew enormously after the war, and the political party Kōmeitō, which it backs, was founded in 1964. Risshō Kōsei Kai (1938), another Lotus Sutra movement, is known for its interfaith work. When new religions turn dangerous Two cases have shaped how Japan thinks about religion. Aum Shinrikyō, founded by Asahara Shōkō as a yoga group in 1984 and renamed in 1987, blended Buddhist, Hindu and apocalyptic Christian ideas. In June 1994 its members released sarin nerve gas in Matsumoto, killing eight people. On 20 March 1995 they released sarin on five Tokyo subway trains, killing 13 people and injuring some 6,000. Asahara was arrested in May 1995 and sentenced to death; 13 members received death sentences, and Asahara and six others were executed on 6 July 2018. The Unification Church, a Korean-founded movement now formally called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, came under intense scrutiny after former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō was shot dead in July 2022. His killer, Yamagami Tetsuya, said he blamed the church for his family's ruin after his mother made large donations to it, and believed Abe was linked to it. In 2022 Japan passed a law against unjust solicitation of donations by religious groups. In March 2025 the Tokyo District Court ordered the church dissolved as a religious corporation; on 21 January 2026 the Nara District Court sentenced Yamagami to life imprisonment; and on 4 March 2026 the Tokyo High Court upheld the dissolution order, stripping the church of its legal status as a religious corporation in Japan and starting the liquidation of its assets. The church disputes the rulings and says its members are being persecuted for their faith. These cases revived an old Japanese question in a new form. The Meiji state once decided which religions were legitimate and which were "pernicious," and the postwar constitution was written to stop the state from doing so. How far should a democratic state go in policing religious groups that harm their members? Some, including victims' advocates, argue Japan has done too little, too late; others, including some scholars of religion and religious organisations, warn that the dissolution sets a precedent that could be turned against other minority faiths. The takeaway China's oldest religion was a relationship with ancestors and with Heaven, which granted a Mandate to the virtuous. Confucius turned that inheritance into an ethic of humaneness, ritual and filial piety, so restrained about the spirits that scholars still argue whether Confucianism is a religion. Laozi and Zhuangzi taught the Way of yielding and spontaneity, and from the 2nd century CE religious Daoism built on them a world of priests, rituals, alchemy and immortals. Over centuries these "three teachings" and Buddhism blended into a folk religion of ancestors, local gods and goddesses like Mazu, practised by hundreds of millions who rarely call themselves religious, under a Chinese state that recognises five religions and tightly controls them. In Japan, the kami of the ancient chronicles and the buddhas lived together for a thousand years until the Meiji state separated them in 1868 and made shrines "non-religious" instruments of the nation, a system dismantled in 1945 but argued over still, above all at Yasukuni. Today most Japanese, like most Chinese, live their religion through rites at the right moments: a shrine at birth, a chapel at marriage, a temple at death. Try this: next time you see a family photograph from East Asia, a shrine visit, a grave-sweeping, a wedding, try asking not "which religion is this?" but "who is being honoured, and what relationship is being kept up?" Then think of one ritual in your own life, a birthday, a toast, a visit to a grave, that you do without calling it religion, and ask the same question. Sources & Further Reading Sources - Pew Research Center, "Measuring Religion in China" (30 August 2023): CGSS 2018, CFPS 2016 and 2018 figures, the five recognised religions, bans on proselytising and on Falun Gong. Pew, "How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020" and "Other Religions" chapter (9 June 2025): China 90% and Japan 57% unaffiliated; folk religion, Daoism and Mazu in "other religions"; Taiwan. - State Council Information Office of the PRC, China's Policies and Practices on Protecting Freedom of Religious Belief (April 2018). - Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026, China chapter; OHCHR, Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (31 August 2022); Holy See Press Office communiqué on the extension of the provisional agreement (22 October 2024). - James Legge (trans.), Confucian Analects (1861; Project Gutenberg #3330): 2.4, 2.7, 3.12, 6.20, 7.19, 7.20, 11.11, 15.23, 17.19. Legge (trans.), The Tao Teh King (1891; Gutenberg #216): chs. 1, 8, 18, 37. Herbert A. Giles (trans.), Chuang Tzŭ (1889; Gutenberg #59709): chs. 2, 18. - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Confucius" (dates, disciples, Analects composition and excavated copies, Mandate of Heaven, Zhu Xi), "Mencius" (2A6, 6A6), "Xunzi" (23.1a, 17.7, 17.8), "Laozi" (Sima Qian, dating, Guodian, Mawangdui, Wang Bi, Celestial Masters, Xiang'er). - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Daoist Philosophy" (daojia/daojiao, Zhang Daoling c. 142 CE, Taiping jing and Yellow Turbans, Ge Hong, Shangqing 360–370, Lingbao, Tang, the three teachings, Quanzhen, Daozang, Cultural Revolution, Zhuangzi's dates and chapters). - UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, "Mazu belief and customs" (inscribed 2009). C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society (1961); Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (1972). Dates for the imperial examinations (605–1905), the oracle bones and the Rites Controversy (1715, 1939) follow standard reference accounts, including George Minamiki, The Chinese Rites Controversy (1985). - Basil Hall Chamberlain (trans.), Kojiki (1882, public domain; Wikisource): Introduction (712, 720), Preface, Sects. I, X, XI, XVI. - Kokugakuin University, Encyclopedia of Shinto (d-museum.kokugakuin.ac.jp/eos): entries "Shinbutsu Bunri," "Honjisuijakusetsu," "State Shintō," "Modern and Contemporary Shinto," "Problems of religion and government," "Jinja Honchō," "Shikinensengū," "Hatsumōde," "Hatsumiyamōde," "Shichigosan," "Shinzenkekkon," "Tenrikyō," "Kojikiden," "Shinto in the Early Modern Period," "History (Modern) Research" (Tsuda Sōkichi; Kokutai no hongi). - Ise Jingū, schedule of the 63rd Shikinen Sengū (isejingu.or.jp). - Agency for Cultural Affairs, Religious Statistics Survey results (published December 2025; figures as of 31 December 2024). World Bank, population of Japan (data updated October 2026). Recruit, Zexy Wedding Trend Survey 2024 (October 2024). - Yasukuni Shrine, "About Yasukuni Shrine" and "History"; nippon.com, "Yasukuni Shrine: the Basics" (10 September 2014), "Postwar Japan-China Relations: A Timeline" (2020), "Japan PM Takaichi Skips Yasukuni Shrine Visit" (Jiji Press, 19 October 2026). - nippon.com, "Aum Shinrikyō: A Timeline" (2018), "Yamagami Sentencing Reveals Japan's Troubled Response to Religious Cults" (4 February 2026) and "Japan Timeline for March 2026"; Founding dates from Sōka Gakkai, "Our History" (sokaglobal.org), Risshō Kōsei-kai, "Basic Information" (rk-world.org) and Komeito, "History" (komei.or.jp). National Diet Library, Birth of the Constitution of Japan: the Imperial Rescript of 1 January 1946. Go deeper - 📘 The Analects of Confucius — Edward Slingerland (trans.) (2003). A modern translation with selections from traditional Chinese commentaries, so you see how the text has been read for two thousand years. - 📘 Daoism and Chinese Culture — Livia Kohn (2001). A clear history of religious Daoism, from the Celestial Masters to today; corrects the "philosophy versus superstition" picture. - 📘 The Souls of China — Ian Johnson (2017). A journalist's year inside temples, pilgrimages and house churches in today's China; the best way to see the folk revival up close. - 📘 Shinto: A History — Helen Hardacre (2017). The authoritative history, from the ancient chronicles to Yasukuni and the Association of Shinto Shrines. - 📘 A New History of Shinto — John Breen and Mark Teeuwen (2010). A shorter, provocative account of how "Shinto" was made, through case studies of shrines. - 📘 Practically Religious — Ian Reader and George J. Tanabe (1998). On charms, prayers and "this-worldly benefits": how Japanese religion actually works for ordinary people. - 🌐 Kokugakuin University, Encyclopedia of Shinto — free, scholarly entries on every shrine, rite and term, written by Japanese specialists. - 🌐 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Laozi" — the state of scholarship on the man, the text and the manuscripts. - 🌐 Related pieces in this library: The World's Religions, One Page Each; Laozi; Bodhidharma; Indigenous and Folk Religions; Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It; Pilgrimage; and in this series, Buddhism: The Path of Awakening. Step 20. Religion in the Modern Age: New Faiths, Secularisation and What People Believe Now ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: Religion in the modern age. Sociologists once predicted that modern life would dissolve religion. In some places it has. Elsewhere faith is growing, new religions keep being born, and the real picture turns out to be stranger and more interesting than either side expected. Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each, Spiritual, Not Religious and Atheism, Agnosticism & Humanism, Fairly. Companion pieces: the Religions long reads on Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Jainism and Sikhism; Indigenous and Folk Religions; and Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It. In 1997 one of the most famous sociologists of religion in the world told an interviewer that he had been wrong. Peter Berger had spent the 1960s explaining, as most of his colleagues did, that modern societies would become steadily less religious. Science, cities, schooling and the sheer variety of beliefs in a modern country would wear away the old certainties. Thirty years later he looked around and said this: "Most of the world today is certainly not secular. It's very religious." He was half right, and the half he got wrong matters too. In the decade to 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, the number of people with no religion grew by 270 million, more than any group except Muslims. In ten countries, from the Netherlands to Uruguay to New Zealand, people with no religion are now the majority. Yet the world as a whole is still about three-quarters religious, and the number of religious people keeps rising because religious families have more children. Meanwhile new faiths, from the Bahá'í Faith to the Latter-day Saints to modern Paganism, have grown from a handful of founders into communities of thousands or millions, and religion has become a central force in the politics of India, Israel, Iran, Russia, Nigeria and the United States. This long read is about that tangled present: the theories that tried to explain it, the numbers as they stand in 2026, the new movements born in the last two centuries, the long argument about the word "cult", the rise of the "spiritual but not religious", religion and politics around the world, faith online, and what the evidence says, and does not say, about whether religion is good for you. A note on approach: this piece describes each religious movement as its own members describe it, then adds what outside observers and historians say, keeping the two apart. It does not rank religions or argue for or against belief. Numbers are dated and sourced, and where sources disagree, both are given. Membership figures that come from a movement itself are labelled as such; they are counted in different ways and are not directly comparable. In this long read The theory that religion would fade, and its reversal The world in numbers: who is growing, who is leaving America: the decline that paused Europe, Canada and the post-Christian West What counts as a "new religious movement"? The Bahá'í Faith The Latter-day Saints Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists Old faiths in new places: Sikh and Hindu diasporas Cao Đài and Rastafari: faiths born of empire's edges Wicca and modern Paganism The "cult" debate Spiritual but not religious Religion and politics around the world Religion online Is religion good for you? What the evidence says, and its limits Part 1 — The theory that religion would fade, and its reversal The secularisation thesis The idea that modernity and religion are at odds is older than sociology: many Enlightenment and nineteenth-century thinkers expected reason, science or social progress to replace faith. But the version that shaped twentieth-century scholarship came from the German sociologist Max Weber. Weber described modern Western history as a process of rationalisation, and one part of it was what he called Entzauberung, usually translated as "disenchantment". The world, in this picture, had once been full of spirits, magic and meanings built into things. Modern science and bureaucracy explained and managed it instead. Religion did not vanish, but it lost its grip on the public world. The closing pages of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism picture the rationalised modern world as an "iron cage", and he seems to have regarded the process as close to irreversible. By the 1960s a fuller "secularisation thesis" had become the mainstream view in the sociology of religion. It had several strands, which are worth separating because they turned out to have different fates: Differentiation. Institutions that the church once ran, such as schools, hospitals, welfare, law and marriage, are taken over by the state and by professions. Religion becomes one specialised sphere among many. Privatisation. Religion becomes a personal choice rather than a public framework everyone shares. Decline. Fewer people believe, belong and practise, generation after generation. Berger's own book The Sacred Canopy (1967) gave the thesis one of its best-known forms. As its title suggests, it pictured religion as a canopy of meaning stretched over a whole society, plausible because everyone shared it, and asked what happens to that canopy when modern pluralism means everyone meets people of other faiths and none. The reversal By the 1990s the evidence was awkward for the strongest version. The Iranian revolution of 1979 had put clerics in power in a modernising state. Evangelical Protestantism and Pentecostalism were exploding across Latin America, Africa and Asia (see the Christianity long read). Islamic revival movements were reshaping the Middle East and South Asia. Hindu nationalism was rising in India. The United States, the most modern society of all, remained stubbornly religious. And after the Soviet Union fell, churches and mosques reopened across the former communist world. Berger changed his mind in public. In an interview with The Christian Century in October 1997, he said that what he and most other sociologists of religion had written about secularisation in the 1960s "was a mistake". The underlying argument, that modernisation brings secularisation, "wasn't a crazy theory", he said, but it was "basically wrong". The world was very religious; so was the United States. "The one exception to this is Western Europe." Two years later he edited a volume with a deliberately provocative title, The Desecularization of the World (1999). Berger died in June 2017, aged 88; Boston University, where he taught for decades, remembered him for path-breaking work on religion and the developing world. "Most of the world today is certainly not secular. It's very religious. So is the U.S. The one exception to this is Western Europe." — Peter Berger, interview in The Christian Century, 1997 The theories now on the table The debate did not end with Berger's reversal. It split into several schools, each with real evidence behind it. Theory Key voices Core claim Strongest evidence Main objection Secularisation (revised) Steve Bruce, God Is Dead (2002) Modernisation does erode religion, slowly and generationally; the US and Global South are delayed, not exceptions Steady generational decline in Western Europe, Canada, Australia and now the US Struggles to explain religious growth in rapidly modernising countries Existential security Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular (2004) People turn to religion where life is insecure; where health, wealth and safety rise, religion declines Pew finds less-developed countries tend to be more religious; religious populations are growing because they have more children Some wealthy places (the Gulf states, Singapore, the US) remain highly religious Desecularisation Peter Berger (after 1997) Modernity creates pluralism, not secularity; Europe is the exception Global religious revival since the 1970s Recent data show secularisation spreading beyond Europe "Believing without belonging" Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945 (1994) In Britain belief persists after church attendance collapses; religion becomes "vicarious" Many Britons who never attend still hold some belief or want church weddings and funerals Later surveys show belief also falling, close behind belonging A secular age Charles Taylor, A Secular Age The key change is not less belief but new conditions of belief: faith is now one option among others, even for believers Believers and unbelievers alike experience their view as chosen and contested Philosophical rather than easily testable Most scholars now hold some mixture. The world is not becoming uniformly secular, but in many rich, safe, educated societies religion is fading generation by generation, while in poorer and faster-growing societies it remains strong, and differences in birth rates mean those societies are a growing share of humanity. The rest of this piece looks at what the numbers actually show. Part 2 — The world in numbers: who is growing, who is leaving The 2025 Pew count In June 2025 the Pew Research Center published its most detailed global estimate yet, based on more than 2,700 sources, including censuses, surveys and population registers, and covering the decade from 2010 to 2020. It is the best single picture available, though it ends in 2020, and Pew notes that new projections past 2020 are not yet available. Group (2020) Number Share of world Change 2010–2020 Christians 2.3 billion 28.8% +122 million; share down 1.8 points Muslims about 2 billion (calculated from Pew's share) 25.6% +347 million, more than all other religions combined; share up 1.8 points Religiously unaffiliated ("nones") 1.9 billion 24.2% +270 million; share up nearly a point Hindus 1.2 billion 14.9% +126 million; share steady Buddhists 324 million 4.1% −19 million, the only major group to shrink Jews 14.8 million 0.2% share steady All others about 2.2% Source: Pew Research Center, "How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020" (9 June 2025). Shares are rounded. Read carefully, this table holds two opposite stories at once. One is growth: in absolute numbers, every major group except Buddhists grew, because the world's population grew. Nearly three in four people on Earth (75.8 percent) still identify with a religion. The other is erosion: people without religion were the only group apart from Muslims to grow as a share of humanity. Why Muslims grew fastest Pew explains religious change through demography (fertility rates and the age of each group) and through switching. Muslim populations are, on average, younger and have more children, so each generation is larger than the last. Switching makes little difference to Islam's size: slightly more people join than leave, Pew finds, but switching into or out of Islam is relatively uncommon. Demography also drives much of Christianity's continued growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Why the "nones" grew The unaffiliated grew for the opposite reason: switching. Pew's surveys of adults aged 18 to 54 in 117 countries asked people what religion they were raised in and what they are now. For every adult who joined a religion after being raised without one, 3.2 left religion altogether. For Christianity, 3.1 left for every one who joined; for Buddhism, the figure was 1.8. The unaffiliated have lower birth rates, so they grow only by recruiting from religious families, and in much of the world they are doing exactly that. Where the nones are Country or territory What Pew found (2020) China about 1.3 billion unaffiliated, about 90% of the population, the largest number anywhere United States 101 million unaffiliated, the second-largest number Japan 73 million, 57% Netherlands 54% unaffiliated, a majority Uruguay 52%, a majority New Zealand 51%, a majority Chile, Australia unaffiliated share up about 17 points in a decade South Korea Buddhist share down about 7 points In total, ten countries and territories had unaffiliated majorities in 2020, up from seven in 2010. In 35 countries the unaffiliated share rose by five points or more, including the United States (up 13 points by Pew's measure) and Uruguay (up 16). The Buddhist decline is worth pausing on, because it is not the same story as Western secularisation. Buddhist populations are concentrated in East Asian countries, such as Japan, China, Thailand and South Korea, where birth rates are very low and populations are ageing. And in places like South Korea and Japan, many people raised in Buddhist families now describe themselves as having no religion, even if they still visit temples for funerals or festivals. (The China and Japan long read explains why "religion" is a slippery category in East Asia, where many people practise without belonging.) Development and belief Pew found that countries with lower scores on the Human Development Index, a UN measure combining income, education and life expectancy, tend to have higher shares of religiously affiliated people. This is the pattern Norris and Inglehart predicted. But it is a correlation, not a law. The causation could run several ways: insecurity may push people towards faith, religious communities may provide services that states provide elsewhere, or both religion and development may be shaped by history and culture. The projections, and why to hold them lightly In 2015 Pew projected that by 2050 Muslims (about 2.8 billion, 30 percent) would nearly equal Christians (about 2.9 billion, 31 percent), and that Muslims might outnumber Christians around 2070. Those projections also expected the unaffiliated share of the world to fall, to 13 percent by 2050, because unaffiliated people have fewer children. The 2020 data show the opposite happening so far: switching out of religion outpaced the demographic effect. Other researchers project differently. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, which uses different methods and counts more generously, projects up to 3.4 billion Christians by 2050. The honest summary is that birth rates favour the religious, switching favours the unaffiliated, and nobody knows for certain which force will win in the long run. Part 3 — America: the decline that paused For decades the United States was the great counter-example to secularisation: rich, modern and devout. Then, from the 1990s, it began to secularise quickly. In Pew's Religious Landscape Study, Christians fell from 78 percent of American adults in 2007 to 71 percent in 2014 and 62 percent in 2023–24, while the unaffiliated rose to 29 percent. Then something unexpected happened: the decline stopped, at least for now. Year Identify with a religion Pray daily Religion very important Attend at least monthly 2007 (RLS) 83% 58% 56% — 2014 (RLS) 77% 55% 53% — 2020 71% 48% 45% 33% 2022 67% 45% 41% 30% 2024 70% 46% 42% 32% 2026 70% 47% 44% 34% Source: Pew Research Center, "Religion Remains Stable in the U.S., With Mixed Signals for Young Adults" (28 October 2026). Attendance figures from 2007 and 2014 are not comparable with later surveys because methods changed. Pew's October 2026 report found that since 2020 the share of Americans who identify with a religion, pray daily, call religion very important and attend at least monthly has held steady. In a June 2026 survey, 34 percent said they had attended religious services in person in the last month, and 45 percent said they had attended in person or watched online or on television: both the highest levels since Pew began asking in July 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic. The young adults puzzle The most talked-about part of the report concerns the youngest adults, and the picture is genuinely mixed. The very youngest adults (born 2004–2008, roughly 18 to 22) report relatively high attendance: 41 percent say they go to services at least once or twice a month, higher than the 33 percent of all adults in the same pooled 2025–26 surveys (the table's 34 percent for 2026 comes from one of those surveys alone). Their slightly older peers (born 2000–2003, roughly 23 to 26) are the least religious age group Pew measures on prayer, importance of religion and affiliation; only 27 percent attend monthly. Young men now attend more often than young women, among the youngest adults. Pew says it has not seen this before in its surveys; historically American women have been more religious than men. No cohort is getting more religious. Pew found no clear evidence that any birth cohort it can track has become more religious in recent years. The youngest adults are no more religious than people of the same age were in 2014, and less religious than their counterparts in 2007. So a "religious revival among Gen Z", a phrase common in the media in 2025 and 2026, is not what the data show. What they show is a pause in decline, an unusual rise in attendance among the youngest men, and a great deal of uncertainty. Pew also notes that this is not the first time the youngest Americans have entered adulthood with relatively high attendance that then fell as they aged. Part 4 — Europe, Canada and the post-Christian West Berger's exception, Western Europe, remains the clearest case of secularisation, and it has been joined by Canada, Australia and New Zealand. England and Wales. The 2021 census marked a threshold. For the first time in a census of England and Wales, fewer than half the population (46.2 percent, 27.5 million people) described themselves as Christian, down from 59.3 percent in 2011 and 71.7 percent in 2001. "No religion" rose to 37.2 percent (22.2 million), up from 25.2 percent in 2011. Muslims were 6.5 percent of the population, Hindus about 1.0 million (1.7 percent). The census also counted about 74,000 people who described themselves as Pagan and about 13,000 as Wiccan. Canada. The 2021 census found that just over half of Canadians (53.3 percent) reported a Christian religion, down from 67.3 percent in 2011 and 77.1 percent in 2001. About 12.6 million people, 34.6 percent, reported no religious affiliation, more than double the 16.5 percent of 2001. Census 2001 2011 2021 England and Wales: Christian 71.7% 59.3% 46.2% England and Wales: no religion 14.8% 25.2% 37.2% Canada: Christian 77.1% 67.3% 53.3% Canada: no religious affiliation 16.5% 34.6% Sources: Office for National Statistics; Statistics Canada. Grace Davie's phrase "believing without belonging" captured the British situation of the 1990s: people who rarely went to church but still believed in something and still wanted the church to be there, for christenings, weddings, funerals and national mourning. Critics such as Steve Bruce reply that belief has followed belonging downwards, only a generation later; the census numbers above suggest the trend continues. But "post-Christian" does not mean "irreligious". Those same censuses show religion becoming more diverse, not simply fading. Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs grew in both countries. Immigrant churches, often African or Latin American, Pentecostal or Catholic, have brought new congregations to many European cities. The West is becoming less Christian and more religiously plural at the same time. Part 5 — What counts as a "new religious movement"? Every religion was new once. Christianity was a suspicious new sect in first-century Rome; Islam was new in seventh-century Mecca; Sikhism was new in fifteenth-century Punjab. Scholars use the neutral term new religious movement (NRM) for faiths that arose relatively recently, usually in the last two centuries, and that stand apart from the established traditions around them. The term was adopted partly to avoid the word "cult", which in everyday English has become an insult (Part 12 looks at that debate). Sociologists such as Eileen Barker, whose study The Making of a Moonie (1984) examined the Unification Church, argued that scholars should describe these movements on the basis of evidence, not alarm. Some features recur across many NRMs, though none is universal: A founder with a revelation, often in living memory, whose words carry great authority. Claims of restoration or fulfilment: the movement presents itself as restoring an original faith or fulfilling the prophecies of older ones. A strong first generation of converts, followed by the harder task of passing the faith to children born into it. Tension with the surrounding society, which may ease over time as the movement becomes respectable, or may harden into persecution. Many of the movements below have long since outgrown the label. The Latter-day Saints, the Seventh-day Adventists and the Jehovah's Witnesses are each larger than many old denominations, and the Bahá'í Faith is often listed among the world religions in its own right. Movement Began Where Founder(s) or key figure Size (source; how counted) Bahá'í Faith 1844 (the Báb); 1863 (Bahá'u'lláh's declaration) Iran, then Baghdad and ʻAkká The Báb; Bahá'u'lláh Present in more than 100,000 localities (bahai.org) Latter-day Saints 1830 New York State, USA Joseph Smith 17,887,212 members (church newsroom, 2026) Seventh-day Adventists 1863 (formal denomination) USA Ellen G. White and others about 24.4 million members (end of 2025, church statistics) Jehovah's Witnesses 1870s Pennsylvania, USA Charles Taze Russell 9,205,326 active publishers (2025 report) Cao Đài 1920s French Indochina (southern Vietnam) Spirit revelations to a circle of officials about 1% of Vietnam (Vietnamese government figure) Rastafari 1930s Jamaica Inspired by Marcus Garvey; Leonard Howell no reliable global figure; 6,000 in England and Wales (2021 census) Wicca 1950s (publicly) England Gerald Gardner 13,000 Wiccans and 74,000 Pagans in England and Wales (2021 census) Part 6 — The Bahá'í Faith The story as Bahá'ís tell it In the spring of 1844, in the Persian city of Shiraz, a young merchant who took the title the Báb ("the Gate") declared that he was the bearer of a new revelation and the herald of one greater still to come. His movement spread quickly and was fiercely suppressed; by the Bahá'í account, thousands of his followers, men, women and children, were killed, and the Báb himself was publicly executed in Tabriz on 9 July 1850. One of his followers was a nobleman named Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʻAlí, born in Tehran on 12 November 1817, who became known as Bahá'u'lláh ("the Glory of God"). Imprisoned and then exiled from Iran to Baghdad, he spent twelve days at the end of April 1863 in a garden he named Ridván ("Paradise"), where he declared that he was the one the Báb had foretold. Further exiles followed, to Constantinople, Adrianople (Edirne) and finally the Ottoman prison city of ʻAkká, in what is now Israel, where he arrived on 31 August 1868. He spent the rest of his life as a prisoner or exile, writing the works that Bahá'ís regard as scripture, and died on 29 May 1892. He named his eldest son, ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, as his successor and the authorised interpreter of his writings. Date Event Spring 1844 The Báb declares his mission in Shiraz 9 July 1850 The Báb is executed in Tabriz April 1863 Bahá'u'lláh's declaration in the garden of Ridván, near Baghdad 31 August 1868 Bahá'u'lláh arrives as a prisoner in ʻAkká 29 May 1892 Bahá'u'lláh dies; ʻAbdu'l-Bahá leads the community 1963 First election of the Universal House of Justice What Bahá'ís believe The Bahá'í community's official website summarises its central teachings as the oneness of God and of religion, the oneness of humanity and freedom from prejudice, the nobility of the human being, the "progressive revelation" of religious truth, the integration of worship and service, the equality of women and men, and the harmony of religion and science. "Progressive revelation" is the key idea. Bahá'ís believe that one God has sent a line of messengers, among them Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, each suited to the needs of their age, and that Bahá'u'lláh is the messenger for this age, whose mission is the unity of humankind. Local and national communities are run by elected councils, called Local and National Spiritual Assemblies, and the worldwide community is guided by the Universal House of Justice, a nine-member body first elected in 1963 and re-elected every five years. Bahá'í life centres on prayer, an annual fast, study circles, children's classes and devotional gatherings open to anyone, and service to the wider community. The faith's own site says it is established in more than 100,000 localities in virtually every country and territory. Persecution in Iran In Iran, the land of its birth, the Bahá'í Faith is not among the officially recognised religions. The US State Department's 2023 report on religious freedom in Iran, citing Human Rights Watch, says Bahá'ís in Iran number at least 300,000, making them one of the country's three largest non-Muslim minorities. The same report cites the NGO Human Rights Without Frontiers as counting more than 1,000 Bahá'ís who were imprisoned, in custody, under house arrest or awaiting a hearing, and the Bahá'í International Community as reporting that the authorities closed 59 Bahá'í-owned businesses in a single month in mid-2023, alongside raids on homes and arrests. Members of unrecognised minorities, Bahá'ís among them, are reportedly denied higher education and government jobs unless they declare themselves members of a recognised religion. Part 7 — The Latter-day Saints The story as Latter-day Saints tell it The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints traces its origins to Joseph Smith (1805–1844), a young man in upstate New York whom his followers regard as a modern prophet. Latter-day Saints believe that through him God brought forth the Book of Mormon, translated from ancient engraved plates (its first edition carries the testimony of witnesses who said an angel showed them the plates), and restored the original Church of Jesus Christ, from which other churches had gone astray. The church was organised in April 1830, when Smith met with a small group of believers in northwestern New York; it began with six members. "An angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates." — The Testimony of Three Witnesses, printed in the Book of Mormon (1830) Intense persecution drove the early Saints westward. After Joseph Smith's death in 1844, Brigham Young led the migration to the valley of the Great Salt Lake, reached in 1847, in what would become Utah. That trek remains a founding story for the church. What Latter-day Saints believe Latter-day Saints accept the Bible and also the Book of Mormon as scripture, and believe in continuing revelation through living prophets. As the BBC's guide summarises their distinctive teachings, they believe that human beings existed before birth, that God has a physical body, and that the faithful can become like God in the afterlife. Temples are regarded as houses of God, set apart for the most sacred ordinances. Daily life is shaped by a strong focus on family, tithing, fasting and a health code that rules out alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee and drugs. Many young members serve as full-time missionaries. Are they Christian? The BBC's guide put the dispute plainly in 2009: many Christian groups deny that Latter-day Saints are Christian, and Latter-day Saints disagree. Latter-day Saints answer that they worship Jesus Christ as Saviour and Son of God, and the church asks to be called by its full name precisely to emphasise this. Many Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches reply that Latter-day Saint teaching about God, in particular the rejection of the creeds of Nicaea and Chalcedon (see the Christianity long read), places it outside historic Christianity. Both positions are sincerely held. The question depends on whether "Christian" is defined by devotion to Christ or by the creeds. Size As of late 2026 the church's newsroom lists 17,887,212 members in 32,046 congregations, 78,596 full-time missionaries and 211 operating temples. The church reports that more members now live outside the United States than inside it; it took until 1947 to reach its first million. These are the church's own figures, which count everyone baptised and not formally removed, whether or not they still take part; outside surveys find smaller numbers of active members. The same is true of most churches' figures. Part 8 — Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists Both movements grew out of the same nineteenth-century American excitement about the Bible's prophecies of Christ's return. The Adventists In the 1830s and 1840s a Baptist farmer and preacher named William Miller calculated from the book of Daniel that Christ would return around 1844. Tens of thousands of "Millerites" waited. When nothing visible happened, the date became known as the Great Disappointment. Most followers drifted away, but a small group reinterpreted the prophecy as concerning an event in heaven rather than on Earth. Among them was Ellen G. White (1827–1915), whose visions and writings guided the group. They formally organised as the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1863. Adventists share most mainstream Protestant teaching, with two distinctive emphases. They keep the Sabbath on Saturday, the seventh day, as they read the Bible's commandment. And they treat health as a religious duty: they do not smoke or drink alcohol, and the church recommends a vegetarian diet, while permitting meat within the Bible's rules on clean and unclean food. The church opened its first health institution in 1866 and, by the BBC's count, now runs more than 700 medical facilities around the world, along with a large school system. The church's own statistics office counted 24,372,139 members at the end of 2025. Jehovah's Witnesses Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916), a Pennsylvania businessman, led a Bible study group in the 1870s and in 1879 began publishing Zion's Watch Tower. His Bible Students movement grew into an international organisation; the name Jehovah's Witnesses came into wide use from 1931. Witnesses believe that Jehovah is the one true God, that Jesus is God's son but not God himself, and that the holy spirit is God's active force, not a person. They reject the Trinity as a later, pagan-influenced idea. They believe God's Kingdom will soon replace human governments and restore the Earth to paradise. Because Christ said his kingdom was "no part of the world", Witnesses stay out of politics and refuse military service; they do not celebrate Christmas or Easter, which they regard as shaped by pagan customs. They are best known for their door-to-door preaching and literature stands. Their count is unusually strict. The 2025 report lists 9,205,326 Jehovah's Witnesses in 119,652 congregations in 241 lands, and the movement says it counts only those who are actively preaching each month, so many more people attend its meetings than appear in the total. Persecution. Witnesses' refusal to salute flags or bear arms has brought them into conflict with many governments. In Nazi Germany, where they refused the Nazi salute, more than half of German Witnesses had been sent to concentration camps by the second half of the Second World War, according to the BBC's history, and one in four died. In Russia today they are banned as "extremist". The US State Department's 2023 report, citing Witness representatives, said 115 Witnesses were imprisoned on extremism charges as of 18 December 2023. Human Rights Without Frontiers reported more than 2,000 Witness homes raided between early 2017 and September 2023, and 730 people prosecuted. Pew's 2026 report on religious restrictions also noted physical attacks on Witnesses in Spain and Norway in 2023. Seventh-day Adventists Jehovah's Witnesses Origin Millerite movement; formally 1863 Russell's Bible Students, 1870s; name from 1931 Holy day Saturday Sabbath No weekly Sabbath; weekly meetings Distinctive practice Health code: no alcohol or tobacco, vegetarian diet recommended; schools and hospitals Door-to-door preaching; political neutrality; no Trinity Holidays Christmas and Easter commonly kept Christmas and Easter not celebrated Relationship to other churches Generally seen as Protestant; some disagree Sees itself as restoring true Christianity; mainstream churches regard it as outside orthodoxy Part 9 — Old faiths in new places: Sikh and Hindu diasporas Not every modern religious change is a new religion. One of the biggest is old religions in new places. Migration since the 1950s has carried Sikh, Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist communities to Britain, North America, Australia, East Africa, the Gulf and beyond. In their new homes these communities have often become more visibly religious, not less, as temples and gurdwaras became centres of language, food, marriage and identity for people far from home. The numbers. In Canada, the share of the population reporting a Hindu religion rose from 1.0 percent in 2001 to 2.3 percent in 2021, and the Sikh share from 0.9 percent to 2.1 percent; the Muslim share rose from 2.0 to 4.9 percent. In England and Wales about 1.0 million people (1.7 percent) identified as Hindu in 2021. Sikhs are concentrated in particular towns: in Wolverhampton 12.0 percent of residents described their religion as Sikh, and in Sandwell 11.5 percent. Share of population 2001 2021 Canada: Hindu 1.0% 2.3% Canada: Sikh 0.9% 2.1% Canada: Muslim 2.0% 4.9% England and Wales: Hindu 1.7% (about 1.0 million) Wolverhampton: Sikh 12.0% (9.1% in 2011) Sandwell: Sikh 11.5% (8.7% in 2011) Sources: Statistics Canada; Office for National Statistics. What changes in the diaspora. Several shifts recur: Temples take on new jobs. In India a Hindu temple is usually a place for individual worship (darshan) rather than a congregation. In Leicester, Toronto or New Jersey, the temple also becomes a community centre with weekly gatherings, language classes, weddings and youth camps. Religion becomes something to explain. Second-generation young people, asked about their faith by school friends, often learn it more self-consciously than their parents did, from books, websites and youth groups. Large organisations grow. Global devotional movements, such as the Swaminarayan organisations and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON, founded in New York in 1966 by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada), have built large temples across the Western world. ISKCON is unusual in having been founded in the West and having attracted Western converts, the "Hare Krishnas" of 1960s and 1970s city streets, before becoming a major institution for Indian diaspora families as well. Homeland politics travels. Diaspora communities are often deeply involved in the politics of their homelands, including debates over Hindu nationalism and over the history and future of Punjab. These debates can divide communities abroad as sharply as at home. (For the history and beliefs of these traditions, see the Hinduism and the Jainism and Sikhism long reads.) Part 10 — Cao Đài and Rastafari: faiths born of empire's edges Two movements of the twentieth century grew directly from colonial experience, and both fused older traditions into something new. Cao Đài Cao Đài emerged in French-ruled southern Vietnam in the 1920s; its full name translates roughly as "the Great Faith for the Third Universal Redemption". The anthropologist Janet Hoskins, in her study The Divine Eye and the Diaspora (2015), calls the period from 1925 to 1934 the "age of revelations", when a circle of Vietnamese civil servants and intellectuals received messages from God and from spirits through séances. The religion was formally established in Tây Ninh in 1926, and its Holy See stands there still. Its central symbol is the Divine Eye, the left eye of God. Cao Đài combines, in one common description, ethical precepts from Confucianism, practices from Daoism, the Buddhist teachings of karma and rebirth, and a hierarchical organisation modelled on the Catholic Church. Its honoured figures include the French novelist Victor Hugo, and Hoskins' publisher notes that Joan of Arc and even Vladimir Lenin appear among its spirit messengers. To outsiders this can seem eclectic or even comic. To Caodaists it expresses the faith's central claim: that all religions come from one source, and that the colonised could receive revelations as profound as those of the coloniser. Size is uncertain. Hoskins' publisher speaks of four million followers worldwide. The Vietnamese government's own figures, as cited in the US State Department's 2023 report, put Cao Đài adherents at about one percent of Vietnam's population. Today the Vietnamese state registers some Cao Đài groups and not others, and independent Caodaists have reported pressure from the registered ones. Hoskins traces an "age of diaspora" from 1975, when many Caodaists left Vietnam, carrying the religion to the United States and elsewhere. Cao Đài Rastafari Began 1920s, French Indochina 1930s, Jamaica Sparked by Spirit revelations to Vietnamese officials and intellectuals The 1930 coronation of Haile Selassie I Central idea All religions flow from one source, now reunited Exile in "Babylon" and return to Africa Organisation Hierarchy modelled on the Catholic Church No central church; several groupings Size about 1% of Vietnam (government figure); 4 million claimed worldwide no reliable global count Rastafari Rastafari began in Jamaica in the 1930s, after Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia in 1930. Many poor Black Jamaicans saw his coronation as the fulfilment of a prophecy associated with the Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey, that a Black king would be crowned in Africa. Some came to see Haile Selassie as the returned messiah, God incarnate (Jah). Leonard Howell is usually credited with founding the first Rastafari community, in 1935. At the heart of Rastafari is an experience of exile and return. Africans carried into slavery were scattered across the world, and the lands of their captivity became known as "Babylon", the name of the city where the Bible's Israelites were exiled; Africa, and Ethiopia above all, is the longed-for homeland. Rastafari is not a centralised church. Its groupings, such as the Bobo Shanti, the Nyahbinghi Order and the Twelve Tribes of Israel, differ on many points. Practice includes communal "reasonings", discussion sessions in which marijuana (ganja) is smoked as a sacrament to aid insight; larger gatherings called Nyabinghi, with drumming and chanting; dreadlocks, which carry religious meaning; and food laws. Through reggae, and above all the music of Bob Marley, Rastafari became one of the best-known religious movements in the world, far out of proportion to its size; the 2021 census of England and Wales counted about 6,000 Rastafarians. Part 11 — Wicca and modern Paganism What Pagans mean by Paganism "Pagan" was originally a Christian word for non-Christians, often with a sneer in it. Modern Pagans have reclaimed it for a family of religions that look to pre-Christian Europe and to nature for inspiration. The family includes Wiccans, Druids, Heathens (who honour the Norse and Germanic gods), and reconstructionists who try to revive the religions of ancient Greece, Rome or the Baltic peoples, along with many people who practise alone and eclectically. What unites them is usually a sense of the sacred in nature, a calendar of seasonal festivals, and belief in many gods, or in a goddess and a god, rather than in a single transcendent creator. Wicca's origins The best-known Pagan religion, Wicca, was popularised by Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), a retired tea planter and amateur archaeologist. Gardner claimed to have been initiated in 1939 into a coven of witches that met in the New Forest in Hampshire, and in Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959) he presented their craft as a Pagan religion of great antiquity. His books produced a surge of interest that spread around the world. Whether anything like Gardner's ancient survival existed is disputed. The BBC's guide describes Wicca's roots as lying in pre-Christian traditions, folklore, folk witchcraft and ritual magic, and the historian Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon (1999) is the standard scholarly history of how modern Pagan witchcraft took shape. Many Wiccans accept a modern origin calmly. They see Wicca as a living religion that draws on ancient themes, and judge it, as people of older faiths do, by what it gives them. What Wiccans do Wiccans traditionally meet in covens, which by tradition have no more than thirteen members, though many are smaller and many Wiccans practise alone. Wiccans honour a Triple Goddess, whose aspects of maiden, mother and crone are linked to the waxing, full and waning moon, and a Horned God. They mark eight festivals, or sabbats, through the year: the solstices and equinoxes, and four festivals in between, Imbolc (1–2 February), Beltane (30 April–1 May), Lughnasadh or Lammas (1–2 August) and Samhain (around 31 October). Many draw on a Book of Shadows, a book of rituals and spells. Sabbat Date (northern hemisphere) Marks Yule 20–21 December Winter solstice, the shortest day Imbolc 1–2 February Spring equinox 20–21 March Day and night equal Beltane 30 April–1 May May Eve Midsummer 21–22 June Summer solstice, the longest day Lughnasadh (Lammas) 1–2 August "Loaf Mass" Autumn equinox 20–21 September Day and night equal Samhain around 31 October All Hallows Source: BBC Religions, "Wicca". Modern Paganism is small but has grown in Britain, North America, Australia and parts of Europe. It appeals especially to people who want a religion that treats nature as sacred, gives women's spirituality a central place, and leaves room for personal experiment. In the 2021 census of England and Wales, about 74,000 people described themselves as Pagan and about 13,000 as Wiccan, along with about 8,000 who described their religion as Shamanism. Part 12 — The "cult" debate The word In ordinary English, a "cult" is a dangerous religious group that controls its members. In older scholarly usage the word simply meant a form of worship (as in "the cult of the saints"), or a small new group. Since the 1970s the word has come to carry so much fear that most scholars of religion avoid it, preferring "new religious movement" or, for groups that demand a great deal of their members, "high-demand group". Others think that avoiding the word can soften real abuse. The disagreement is not just about vocabulary. It is about whether people who join demanding religious groups are choosing, or being manipulated. The brainwashing controversy In the 1970s, as young Americans and Europeans joined groups such as the Unification Church (whose members were nicknamed "Moonies"), the Hare Krishnas and the Children of God, many parents were frightened. A "brainwashing" theory held that these groups used systematic psychological techniques to strip recruits of free will. This theory supported a practice called "deprogramming", in which families hired people to seize adult members and hold them until they renounced the group. Many sociologists who studied the groups at first hand, Eileen Barker among them, were sceptical, pointing out that most people who encounter such movements never join, and that many who join later leave of their own accord. In 1987 the American Psychological Association's Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology declined to accept a report by its task force on "deceptive and indirect methods of persuasion and control", chaired by the psychologist Margaret Singer, saying it lacked "the scientific rigor and evenhanded critical approach" necessary for APA endorsement. Barker's name is closely tied to Inform, an independent educational charity that now works in partnership with King's College London and gives evidence-based information about minority religions to families, journalists, governments and members themselves, with the aim of preventing harm caused by misinformation, whether that harm comes from a group or from panic about it. Real harm The scholars' caution about "brainwashing" was never a claim that groups cannot do harm. Some have done great harm. Event Date What happened Jonestown, Guyana 18 November 1978 Members of Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, died in a mass murder-suicide by poison; the commonly reported toll of 918 includes five people killed at the nearby Port Kaituma airstrip during a visit by US Congressman Leo Ryan, and four members who died in Georgetown. Many of the dead were children. Tokyo subway attack 1995 Members of Aum Shinrikyo released sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway, killing 13 people (some medical studies count 12) and injuring more than 6,000. Unification Church in Japan 2022–2026 After the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2022, the church's fundraising came under intense scrutiny, and Japan passed laws restricting "unfair" solicitation of donations. In October 2023 Japan's education ministry asked a Tokyo court to order the church (now called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification) dissolved, saying its acts had substantially harmed public welfare. It was the first such request based on violations of civil law. The church said the grounds were not in accordance with the law, and members reported being shunned. The Tokyo District Court ordered the dissolution in March 2025, and the Tokyo High Court upheld it on 4 March 2026, ending the church's status as a religious corporation (Part 16 of China and Japan: Confucianism, Daoism and Shinto tells the story). Where the debate stands Most researchers now take a middle path. They reject the idea that any group has a technique powerful enough to override free will, but they take seriously that some groups use deception in recruitment, isolate members from family, control finances and information, and punish those who leave. Many countries, rather than banning "cults", now use ordinary laws, on fraud, child protection, coercive control and abuse, against harmful behaviour wherever it occurs, including in old and respectable religions. The strongest case on each side: Those who use the word "cult" say that ex-members' testimony of manipulation is real and consistent, that the harm can be lifelong, and that academic caution has sometimes protected abusive groups. Those who avoid it say that the label has been used to justify kidnapping, persecution and state bans, as in Russia's treatment of Jehovah's Witnesses; that it is applied mostly to new and unfamiliar faiths while similar behaviour in established religions is called devotion; and that people who join demanding faiths usually do so for reasons they can explain. A useful test, offered in various forms by both sides: rather than asking "is it a cult?", ask concrete questions. Can members leave without punishment? Do they have access to outside information and family? Are finances transparent? Are leaders accountable? These questions can be asked of any religious group, new or old. Part 13 — Spiritual but not religious One of the most widespread "religious identities" in much of the West is not a religion at all. It is the self-description "spiritual but not religious" (SBNR). This library's piece Spiritual, Not Religious explores the experience from the inside; this section only places it in the wider picture. A December 2023 Pew survey found that 70 percent of American adults describe themselves as spiritual in some way, including 22 percent who say they are spiritual but not religious. Belief in a spiritual dimension is widespread even among people who do not call themselves religious: 83 percent of all American adults said people have a soul or spirit as well as a body, and 81 percent said there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it. Pew, "Spirituality Among Americans" (2023) Share of US adults Spiritual in some way 70% Spiritual but not religious 22% People have a soul or spirit as well as a body 83% Something spiritual lies beyond the natural world 81% Some things science cannot possibly explain 74% The historian Robert Fuller's book Spiritual, but Not Religious (2001) traced this stance back through American history, to long traditions of unchurched seeking. What is new is its scale, and the fact that many people now leave religious institutions for spirituality rather than for unbelief. Critics from inside religious traditions say SBNR spirituality can be thin: a consumer's choice of comforting ideas without the demands, the community or the moral accountability that a tradition provides. Defenders reply that people leave institutions for real reasons, including abuse scandals, political entanglement and rigid teaching on sexuality, and that spirituality without dogma can be deep, disciplined and generous. Both critiques have force, and both describe real people. Part 14 — Religion and politics around the world Secularisation theory predicted that religion would retreat from public life. In politics, at least, the opposite has happened in many countries. The following snapshots are dated, and describe positions as their holders state them. Measuring restrictions Since 2007 the Pew Research Center has scored 198 countries and territories on two indexes: a Government Restrictions Index (GRI), which measures laws, policies and actions that restrict religion, and a Social Hostilities Index (SHI), which measures harassment and violence by private individuals and groups. Its sixteenth report, published in June 2026 and covering 2023, found: Measure (2023) Finding Countries with high or very high government restrictions 58, one fewer than the peak of 59 in 2022 Median government restrictions score (0–10) 3.0, the highest in the study's history (1.8 in 2007) Countries with high or very high social hostilities 55, up from 45 in 2022; the peak was 65 in 2012, after the Arab Spring Median social hostilities score 1.6, unchanged for three years Among the very high on government restrictions China, Iran, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Syria, Uzbekistan Among the very high on social hostilities Nigeria, India, Israel, Syria, Bangladesh, Pakistan Pew linked part of the rise in hostilities to the worldwide reverberations of Hamas's attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and Israel's military response in Gaza, including incidents of antisemitism and anti-Muslim hostility in many countries. The long-term trend is that governments have been restricting religion in more ways than when the study began. Snapshots United States. In a September 2022 Pew survey, 45 percent of American adults said the United States should be a "Christian nation", though people meant very different things by it, from a nation shaped by Christian values to one whose laws are based on the Bible. Debates about "Christian nationalism", abortion, religious exemptions and the role of religion in public schools are among the sharpest in American politics. In a May 2026 survey, published ahead of what the White House called a "large-scale revival" meeting on the National Mall, Pew found 37 percent of American adults saying religion was gaining influence in American life, the highest share since 2002, and more than half saying religion plays a positive role in society. India. India's constitution is secular, but the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is rooted in a Hindu nationalist movement. Pew's 2021 survey found that 64 percent of Indian Hindus said it is very important to be Hindu to be "truly" Indian. Supporters see Hindu nationalism as the reassertion of a civilisation's identity after centuries of foreign rule; critics, including Indian Muslims and Christians, see it as making religious minorities second-class citizens. The US State Department's 2023 report noted that a number of states have laws restricting religious conversion by force, fraud or "allurement", which supporters defend as protecting vulnerable people and critics say are used against Christians and Muslims. Israel. Israel defines itself as a Jewish and democratic state. Pew's 2016 survey found Israeli Jews divided into four main groups, from Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) through Dati (religious) and Masorti (traditional) to Hiloni (secular), living largely separate social lives and disagreeing sharply about religion's role in law, marriage, military service and the state. The war after 7 October 2023 has made these questions more pressing, not less. Iran. The Islamic Republic, founded after the revolution of 1979, gives Shia clerics supreme authority. Its defenders see it as a state built on faith rather than Western secularism; its critics, including many Iranians, see clerical rule enforced by coercion. Pew rates its government restrictions as very high. Its treatment of Bahá'ís (Part 6) is one of the most widely documented cases of religious persecution in the world. Russia. Since the fall of communism the Russian Orthodox Church has become closely aligned with the state, and its leadership has supported the invasion of Ukraine (see the Christianity long read). Smaller groups, notably Jehovah's Witnesses, have been banned as "extremist". China. The Chinese state allows religious practice only within limits it sets. Pew rates its government restrictions among the very highest in the world, and, as Part 2 showed, China is home to the world's largest unaffiliated population. Nigeria. With very large Christian and Muslim populations, Nigeria ranks among the very highest in Pew's index of social hostilities involving religion, including violence by armed groups. Many Nigerians stress that the conflicts also involve ethnicity, land and politics, and are not simply religious. The pattern across these cases is that religion and national identity have often become fused, in very different ways, in countries as unlike as India, Israel, Russia and the United States. That was not what most theorists of the 1960s expected. Part 15 — Religion online Religion has always used new media. The printing press spread the Reformation; radio and television made the American televangelists. The internet and the smartphone are the latest chapter. Services online. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 forced congregations of almost every faith to stream their services. Many kept doing so. In Pew's June 2026 survey, 34 percent of American adults had attended a religious service in person in the past month, but 45 percent had attended in person or watched online or on television: a large online audience that overlaps with, and extends beyond, the people in the pews. Measure Figure US adults who attended services in person in the last month (June 2026) 34% US adults who attended in person or watched online or on TV 45% YouVersion Bible app family: installs (company figure) more than 1 billion Scripture on phones. The YouVersion Bible app says its family of apps has been installed more than a billion times and is used in every country, and that Easter is its highest day of engagement each year. (These are the company's own figures.) Qur'an, prayer-time and Bible apps, Buddhist meditation apps and Hindu devotional channels reach audiences that no single temple or church could. What changes. Researchers and religious leaders debate what moving online does to religion. Optimists point to access: the housebound, the isolated and the curious can now find communities and teachers that were once out of reach. Pessimists worry that worship becomes something consumed alone on a screen rather than shared with a body of people, and that online religious authority belongs to whoever is most viral rather than whoever is most learned. Many traditions hold that some things cannot be done through a screen, such as sacraments that require physical presence. Online life also allows the rapid spread of misinformation, conspiracy theories and hostility to religious minorities, as well as new ways of exposing abuse within religious institutions. Part 16 — Is religion good for you? What the evidence says, and its limits A large body of research finds that religious people, on average, report better health and happiness. It is worth looking at what the strongest studies show and at the serious reasons to be careful about them. What the research finds Study Who Finding Pew Research Center (2019) Survey data from the US and more than two dozen other countries People active in religious congregations tend to be happier and more civically engaged than inactive members or the unaffiliated, and to smoke and drink less. But they exercise no more often, are no less likely to be obese, and in most countries are no more likely to rate their health as very good. Li, Stampfer, Williams and VanderWeele, JAMA Internal Medicine (2016) 74,534 US nurses followed from 1992 to 2012 Attending religious services more than once a week was associated with 33 percent lower all-cause mortality, compared with never attending, after adjusting for many risk factors. Chen and colleagues, JAMA Psychiatry (2020) 66,492 US female nurses and 43,141 male health professionals Among the women, those who attended services at least weekly had a 68 percent lower risk of "deaths of despair" (from suicide, drug or alcohol poisoning, and chronic liver disease) than those who never attended. Diener, Tay and Myers, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2011) US and world samples Religiosity was associated with slightly higher well-being, explained by social support, feeling respected, and a sense of purpose. But the link depended on circumstances: in nations with difficult conditions, religion was associated with more well-being; in nations with good conditions, religious and non-religious people did about equally well. Global Flourishing Study, Chen and colleagues, Scientific Reports (2025) 202,898 adults in 22 countries People who attended religious services were also more likely to take part in secular community groups: the two forms of participation seemed to complement rather than replace each other. Why to be careful The authors of these studies are themselves careful, and readers should be too. There are four main reasons. Correlation is not causation. Religious people differ from non-religious people in many ways: age, sex, family life, region and culture. Good studies adjust for these, but no study can adjust for everything. Reverse causation. Sick or depressed people may stop attending services because they are sick or depressed, making attendance look protective when it is partly a sign of health. Long-running studies like the nurses' studies try to address this by measuring attendance years before the outcomes, but cannot rule it out entirely. It may be the community, not the creed. Several studies suggest that much of the benefit comes from regular attendance and belonging, rather than from private belief. Diener and colleagues found the advantage ran through social support, respect and meaning. It is possible that some of these benefits could be found in strong secular communities too, though such communities are rarer. Context matters. Diener's finding that religion's well-being advantage largely disappears in prosperous, secure, more secular societies is a reminder that religion's effects depend on where you live and how your faith fits in with those around you. Being a believer among believers is different from being a believer, or an unbeliever, in a hostile environment. And religion can harm as well as help. People who feel rejected by their religious community, for their sexuality, their doubts or their decision to leave, can suffer deeply; and the abuse crises described in the Christianity long read are a reminder that religious institutions can be the source of terrible damage. What the research supports is a modest claim: belonging to a supportive community that gives life meaning tends to be good for people, and for many people around the world that community is religious. Open questions Will the American pause in decline last, or is it a temporary plateau before decline resumes? Will young men's higher attendance persist as they age? Will birth rates or switching shape the world's religious future more? Pew's next projections, and the 2030 census round, will help answer this. Can secular societies provide the community, meaning and support that religious congregations provide for so many people, or will something new arise to fill the gap? How will governments balance protecting people from harmful high-demand groups against protecting religious freedom for unpopular minorities? What will artificial intelligence do to religion: new forms of teaching and prayer, new forms of authority, or new kinds of belief altogether? The takeaway The prediction that modernity would dissolve religion was half right. In Western Europe, Canada, Australia, East Asia and increasingly the Americas, each generation is less religious than the last, and in the decade to 2020 the unaffiliated grew by 270 million, mostly by people leaving the religions they were raised in. But three-quarters of humanity still identifies with a religion, religious families have more children, and the United States' long decline has paused since 2020. New faiths, from the Bahá'í Faith and the Latter-day Saints to Cao Đài, Rastafari and modern Paganism, keep being born and growing. Old faiths are changing in new places. Religion has become more, not less, central to the politics of many countries. And the research on religion and well-being points less to belief itself than to what religious communities offer: belonging, support and meaning. Try this: pick one religious community near you that you know nothing about, perhaps a gurdwara, a Kingdom Hall, an Adventist church or a Bahá'í devotional gathering. Most welcome visitors; check its website for an open event or service. Go once, as a guest, to listen rather than argue. Afterwards, write down three things that surprised you, and one question you would now ask a member. Sources & Further Reading Sources - Pew Research Center: How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020 (9 June 2025), with its chapters on the religiously unaffiliated and Christian population change; Religious Switching Into and Out of Christianity and Into and Out of Other Religions (26 March 2025); The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050 (2 April 2015); Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off (26 February 2025); Religion Remains Stable in the U.S., With Mixed Signals for Young Adults (28 October 2026); Spirituality Among Americans (7 December 2023); 45% of Americans Say U.S. Should Be a "Christian Nation" (27 October 2022); How Americans Feel About Religion's Influence in Government and Public Life (14 May 2026); Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation (29 June 2021); Israel's Religiously Divided Society (8 March 2016); Religion's Relationship to Happiness, Civic Engagement and Health Around the World (31 January 2019); More Countries Had Elevated Levels of Social Hostilities Involving Religion in 2023 (15 June 2026). - Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, "Quick Facts About Global Christianity". - "Epistemological Modesty: An Interview with Peter Berger", The Christian Century, 29 October 1997 (via religion-online.org); Boston University, "BU's Peter Berger Remembered as Outstanding Sociologist" (30 June 2017); Eerdmans and the Ethics and Public Policy Center on The Desecularization of the World (1999). - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Max Weber", on rationalisation and disenchantment. - Book details (titles, authors, years, publishers) checked through Open Library for Berger, Norris and Inglehart, Davie, Bruce, Taylor, Barker, Fuller, Hutton and Hoskins. - Office for National Statistics, Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021 (29 November 2022); Statistics Canada, The Daily, 26 October 2022 (2021 census on religion and ethnocultural diversity). - Bahá'í Faith official website (bahai.org): pages on Bahá'í beliefs, the Báb, Bahá'u'lláh, ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, the Universal House of Justice and national communities; BBC Religions archive, "Bahá'í" (2009). - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Newsroom, "Facts and Statistics" (accessed October 2026) and Joseph Smith pages; BBC Religions archive, "Mormon" and "Are Mormons Christians?" (2009). - Jehovah's Witnesses (jw.org), "How Many of Jehovah's Witnesses Are There Worldwide?" (2025 report) and "Who Was the Founder of Jehovah's Witnesses?"; BBC Religions archive, "Jehovah's Witnesses" (2009). - General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research, 2026 Annual Statistical Report (advance release), world membership as of 31 December 2025, via adventistatlas.org. - BBC Religions archive, "Seventh-day Adventist Church", "Rastafari" (history, Haile Selassie, worship and customs), "Paganism" and "Wicca". - University of Hawaiʻi Press, description of Janet Hoskins, The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism (2015). - US Department of State, 2023 Report on International Religious Freedom: Iran, Russia, India, Japan and Vietnam chapters. - American Psychological Association, Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology, memorandum on the DIMPAC task force report (11 May 1987), as archived by CESNUR. - Inform (inform.ac), "About Us". - Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University, demographic and FAQ pages on Peoples Temple and Jonestown; FBI, "Jonestown" (famous cases). - A. Sugiyama et al., "The Tokyo subway sarin attack has long-term effects on survivors", PLOS ONE 15 (2020); K. Sakurada and H. Ohta, "No promising antidote 25 years after the Tokyo subway sarin attack", Legal Medicine 47 (2020). - YouVersion Newsroom (youversion.com/press), company figures, October 2026. - S. Li, M. J. Stampfer, D. R. Williams and T. J. VanderWeele, "Association of Religious Service Attendance With Mortality Among Women", JAMA Internal Medicine 176 (2016); Y. Chen, H. K. Koh, I. Kawachi, M. Botticelli and T. J. VanderWeele, "Religious Service Attendance and Deaths Related to Drugs, Alcohol, and Suicide Among US Health Care Professionals", JAMA Psychiatry 77 (2020); E. Diener, L. Tay and D. G. Myers, "The religion paradox: if religion makes people happy, why are so many dropping out?", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101 (2011); Y. Chen et al., "Community participation in secular and religious contexts across sociodemographic groups in 22 countries", Scientific Reports 15 (2025). All checked through Europe PMC abstracts. - The Book of Mormon (1830), title page and testimony of the three witnesses, via Project Gutenberg. - Wikipedia articles on Caodaism (for the 1926 date, the Divine Eye and the common description of its sources) and ISKCON (for its 1966 founding) were used as leads; these points were not confirmed on an independent page. Go deeper - 📘 The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics — Peter L. Berger (ed.) (the book in which the leading theorist of secularisation publicly rethought it; short, readable essays on religion's resurgence around the world) - 📘 A Secular Age — Charles Taylor (long and demanding, but the deepest account of what it feels like to believe, or not believe, when belief is one option among many) - 📘 The Making of a Moonie — Eileen Barker (the classic fieldwork study that changed how scholars think about joining new religions) - 📘 The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft — Ronald Hutton (a historian's sympathetic but rigorous history of how Wicca was made) - 📘 The Divine Eye and the Diaspora — Janet Hoskins (an anthropologist's account of Cao Đài from colonial Vietnam to California) - 🌐 Pew Research Center: How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020 (the data behind Part 2, with chapters on each religious group) - 🌐 Inform (evidence-based information on minority religions, for members, families and the curious) - 🌐 Companion pieces in this library: Spiritual, Not Religious, Atheism, Agnosticism & Humanism, Fairly, Indigenous and Folk Religions, and the Religions long reads on Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Jainism and Sikhism, and China and Japan