Glossary
For the words in their original scripts, see terms in their own languages.
A
- Abba
Father: the title given to an experienced elder of the desert, who guided others; a woman elder was amma.
- Abhaṅga
The devotional verse form of the Marathi poet-saints of the Vārkarī tradition.
- Abhidhamma
The “higher teaching”: the systematic Buddhist analysis of mind and matter into momentary elements.
- Abhyāsa
Practice: the steady effort to remain in stillness, paired in yoga with dispassion.
- The Absolute
The unconditioned, ultimate reality on which all else depends, and which depends on nothing.
- Absolute Nothingness
In the Kyoto School, the groundless openness beyond being and non-being in which all things arise.
- Acedia
The noonday demon: a spiritual listlessness and restlessness that tempts the monk to abandon his cell.
- Acintya-bhedābheda
Inconceivable difference-in-identity: the Vedānta of the Caitanya tradition of devotion to Kṛṣṇa.
- Active intellect
The intellect that makes things knowable, in Aristotle; for some later thinkers a cosmic intelligence.
- Adab
Courtesy: right conduct and refined manners toward God, the master and others, the outward form of inner purity.
- Adam Kadmon
Primordial Man: in Lurianic Kabbalah, the first manifestation of the divine light after contraction.
- Adhikāra
Eligibility: the fitness of a person for a particular teaching or practice.
- Adhyāropa-apavāda
Superimposition and negation: the Advaita teaching method of first attributing qualities to Brahman, then denying them.
- Adhyāsa
Superimposition: the error of attributing to one thing the qualities of another, as when a rope is seen as a snake.
- Advaita
Nondualism: the Vedānta teaching that the self and ultimate reality, Brahman, are not two.
- Agape
Self-giving love: the love of God for the world and the love Christians are called to show to all.
- Ahaṃ brahmāsmi
“I am Brahman”: one of the great sayings of the Upaniṣads, from the Bṛhadāraṇyaka.
- Ahaṃkāra
“I-maker”: the sense of ego that appropriates experience as “mine” and the body and mind as “I”.
- Ahiṃsā
Non-harming: the principle of not injuring any living being, in thought, word or deed.
- Ajātivāda
The doctrine of non-origination: Gauḍapāda’s teaching that nothing has ever truly come into being.
- Ajīva
The non-living: in Jain thought, matter, space, time and the media of motion and rest.
- Akāl Takht
The “Throne of the Timeless”, at Amritsar: the seat of Sikh temporal and communal authority.
- Ākāśa
Space or ether: the first and subtlest of the five elements, whose quality is sound.
- ʿĀlam al-mithāl
The world of images: an intermediate realm between spirit and matter where spirits take form, known through imagination.
- Ālaya-vijñāna
Storehouse consciousness: in Yogācāra, the deep consciousness in which the seeds of all experience are stored.
- Alētheia
Truth: literally unconcealment, the disclosure of what is.
- al-Ḥaqq
The Real or the Truth: one of the names of God, much used by the Sufis.
- al-Insān al-kāmil
The perfect human: the human being who fully manifests the divine names, the goal of the Sufi path.
- Allegory of the cave
Plato’s image of prisoners who take shadows for reality until one is freed and climbs to the sun.
- Āḻvārs
The twelve Tamil poet-saints devoted to Viṣṇu, whose hymns are sacred in Śrī Vaiṣṇavism.
- Amitābha
The Buddha of Infinite Light, who vowed to receive in his Pure Land all who call on him.
- Amor fati
Love of fate: welcoming whatever happens as necessary and good.
- Amrit
Nectar of immortality: the sweetened water of Sikh initiation, and the divine Name tasted within.
- Anā al-Ḥaqq
“I am the Truth”: the ecstatic saying of al-Ḥallāj, executed in Baghdad in 922.
- Anagogy
The upward-leading sense of scripture or symbol, pointing to heavenly realities and the soul’s ascent.
- Analects
The sayings of Confucius and his disciples, the foundational text of Confucianism.
- Anamnesis
Recollection: Plato’s teaching that learning is remembering what the soul knew before birth.
- Ānanda
Bliss: the joy that Vedānta holds to be the nature of the self and of Brahman, beyond pleasure and pain.
- Ānāpānasati
Mindfulness of breathing: a basic Buddhist meditation, the Buddha’s own practice on the night of awakening.
- Anattā
Not-self: the teaching that no permanent, independent self is found in body or mind.
- Anchoress
A woman enclosed for life in a cell attached to a church, devoted to prayer.
- Anekāntavāda
The Jain doctrine of many-sidedness: reality has infinite aspects, and no single view grasps it whole.
- Anicca
Impermanence: the truth that all conditioned things arise and pass away.
- Anirvacanīya
Indescribable: the Advaita term for the status of māyā and the world, neither real nor unreal.
- Annihilated soul
Marguerite Porete’s teaching that the soul reduced to nothing, without will of its own, is united with God.
- Antaḥkaraṇa
The “inner instrument”: in Vedānta, the mind in its fourfold function of thinking, deciding, remembering and saying “I”.
- Anussati
Recollection: meditations on the Buddha, the teaching, the community, virtue, generosity, the gods, death and peace.
- Anuttara
The unsurpassable: the highest reality in Kashmir Śaivism, beyond which there is nothing.
- Anuvrata
The five “lesser vows” of Jain lay people: the great vows held in a form suited to household life.
- Aparigraha
Non-possessiveness: the vow of holding nothing, inwardly and outwardly, as one’s own.
- Apatheia
Dispassion: freedom from disordered passions, a calm in which love becomes possible.
- Apeiron
The boundless: Anaximander’s indefinite, eternal source from which all things arise and to which they return.
- Apokatastasis
The final restoration of all things to God, taught by Origen and Gregory of Nyssa.
- Apophatic theology
The negative way: speaking of God by denying all that God is not, since God is beyond every concept.
- Appamāda
Heedfulness: diligent, careful attention, which the Dhammapada calls the path to the deathless.
- ʿAql
Intellect or reason: in Islamic philosophy, the faculty that knows universals and, at its height, the divine.
- Arahant
The worthy one: a person who has attained nirvāṇa and will not be reborn, the ideal of early Buddhism.
- Archē
Origin or first principle: what the early Greek philosophers sought as the source of all things.
- Ardās
The Sikh congregational prayer of petition and remembrance, said standing at the end of worship.
- Aretē
Excellence or virtue: the quality that makes a thing, or a person, good at being what it is.
- Asamprajñāta samādhi
Absorption without an object, in which only latent impressions remain, leading toward liberation.
- Āsana
Posture: in classical yoga, a seat that is steady and comfortable; in haṭha yoga, the many bodily postures.
- Āsava
Taints or outflows: the deep currents of sensual desire, becoming and ignorance that keep beings in saṃsāra.
- Asceticism
Spiritual training through self-discipline: fasting, vigils, celibacy and the renunciation of comforts.
- Āśrama
A stage of life in the classical Hindu scheme: student, householder, forest-dweller and renouncer.
- Āsrava
The inflow of karmic matter into the soul, caused by activity of body, speech and mind.
- Aṣṭāṅga yoga
The eight limbs of classical yoga: restraints, observances, posture, breath, withdrawal, concentration, meditation and absorption.
- Asubha
Contemplation of the unattractive: meditation on the parts of the body or on a corpse, as an antidote to lust.
- Ataraxia
Tranquillity: freedom from disturbance, the goal of Epicurean and Sceptic philosophy.
- Ātman
The self: in the Upaniṣads, the innermost reality of a person, which is said to be one with Brahman.
- Ātma-vicāra
Self-inquiry: the practice of asking “Who am I?” to trace the sense of I back to its source.
- Avadhūta
One who has shaken off all conventions: a liberated sage living beyond social and religious rules.
- Avalokiteśvara
The bodhisattva of compassion, who hears the cries of the world; Guanyin in China, Chenrezig in Tibet.
- Avasthā-traya
The three states of waking, dreaming and dreamless sleep, analysed in Vedānta to discover the self.
- Avataṃsaka Sūtra
The Flower Garland Sūtra: a vast scripture of the interpenetration of all things, basis of the Huayan school.
- Avatāra
Descent: a form in which God, especially Viṣṇu, comes into the world to restore dharma.
- Avidyā
Ignorance: the beginningless misunderstanding of one’s true nature that, in Indian thought, binds the self to suffering.
- Avodah be-gashmiyut
Worship through the material: the Hasidic teaching that ordinary physical acts can be service of God.
- Awareness
The bare knowing of experience, prior to thought about it; the light in which all things appear.
- Aʿyān thābita
The immutable entities: in Ibn ʿArabī, the eternal archetypes of things in God’s knowledge.
- Ayin
Nothingness: in Kabbalah and Hasidism, the divine nothing from which all things come, and to which the soul returns.
B
- Bahir
The Book of Brightness: an early kabbalistic text, among the first to describe the sefirot as divine powers.
- Bandha
Bondage: the binding of karmic matter to the soul through the passions.
- Baqāʾ
Subsistence: the state after passing away, in which the Sufi lives on in God and returns to the world.
- Baraka
Blessing: the spiritual power of grace that flows from God through the Prophet, the saints and holy places.
- Bardo
An intermediate state, especially the passage between death and rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism.
- Barzakh
Isthmus: an intermediate reality between two others, such as the world between death and resurrection.
- Baul
A tradition of wandering minstrels of Bengal who sing of the divine within the body.
- Beatific vision
The direct vision of God’s essence that, in Christian theology, is the final happiness of the blessed.
- The Beautiful Names
al-Asmāʾ al-ḥusnā: the ninety-nine names of God, such as the Merciful, the Light and the Loving.
- Beauty
To kalon: in Platonism, the radiance of the Good, which awakens love and draws the soul upward.
- Beginner’s mind
Shoshin: the open, eager attitude free of preconceptions that Zen asks the practitioner to keep.
- Beguines
Lay religious women of the medieval Low Countries and Rhineland who lived in community without permanent vows.
- Being
That which is, and the fact that anything is at all: the first subject of metaphysics.
- Being (Parmenides)
Parmenides’ teaching that what is, is one, unchanging and indivisible, and that change and plurality are illusion.
- Bhagavad Gītā
The “Song of the Lord”: Kṛṣṇa’s teaching to Arjuna in the Mahābhārata on action, knowledge and devotion.
- Bhāgavata Purāṇa
The great Purāṇa of devotion to Viṣṇu, especially as Kṛṣṇa, and a classic of Hindu bhakti.
- Bhajana
A devotional song, or the practice of worshipful singing and remembrance.
- Bhakti
Loving devotion to God: the path of love and surrender, central to much of Hindu religion.
- Bhakti yoga
The yoga of devotion: union with God through love, worship and surrender.
- Bhāva
Feeling or emotional attitude: in devotion, the loving relationship a devotee cultivates with God.
- Bhāvanā
Cultivation or development: the Buddhist word for meditation as a training of the mind.
- Bhedābheda
Difference-and-non-difference: Vedānta schools holding that the self and world are both different from and one with Brahman.
- Bhikkhu
A Buddhist monk: one who lives by alms under the monastic discipline; a nun is a bhikkhunī.
- Bhūmi
A ground or stage: one of the ten stages through which a bodhisattva progresses to buddhahood.
- Binah
Understanding: the third sefirah, the divine mother in whom the seed of wisdom is developed.
- Birth of the Word in the soul
Meister Eckhart’s teaching that God the Father gives birth to the Son in the ground of the detached soul.
- Bittul
Self-nullification: the Hasidic practice of annulling the ego before God.
- Bodhi
Awakening: the realization of the truth that makes one a buddha or an arahant.
- Bodhicitta
The mind of awakening: the aspiration to attain buddhahood for the benefit of all beings.
- Bodhisattva
A being bound for awakening: one who vows to attain buddhahood in order to free all beings.
- Bodhisattva vow
The vow to attain awakening for the sake of all beings, taken formally by Mahāyāna practitioners.
- Brahma Sūtras
A terse summary of Upaniṣadic teaching attributed to Bādarāyaṇa, on which every school of Vedānta commented.
- Brahman
In the Upaniṣads and Vedānta, the ultimate reality from which all things arise, by which they live and into which they return.
- Brahmavidyā
The knowledge of Brahman: the highest knowledge, which the Upaniṣads say liberates the knower.
- Brahmavihāras
The four divine abodes: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity.
- Buddha
“The awakened one”: Siddhārtha Gautama, founder of Buddhism, and any being who has fully awakened.
- Buddha-nature
The potential for, or presence of, awakening in all beings, central to East Asian and Tibetan Buddhism.
- Buddhi
The intellect: the faculty of discernment and decision, highest of the inner instruments.
- Butterfly dream
Zhuangzi’s dream that he was a butterfly, after which he did not know if he was a man who had dreamed or a butterfly dreaming.
C
- Cakra
A wheel: one of the centres of subtle energy along the central channel of the body in tantric yoga.
- Carmelites
The religious order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, home of Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross.
- Cataphatic theology
The affirmative way: speaking of God through names, images and attributes drawn from creation and scripture.
- Catharsis
Purification: in Plato and the Neoplatonists, the cleansing of the soul from the body’s passions.
- Cenobitism
Communal monastic life, as opposed to the solitary life of the hermit.
- Centering prayer
A modern method of silent contemplative prayer using a sacred word, developed from The Cloud of Unknowing.
- Cetanā
Intention: the volition that the Buddha identified with karma itself.
- Chabad
A Hasidic movement founded by Schneur Zalman of Liadi, combining mystical devotion with intellectual contemplation.
- Chan
The Chinese meditation school of Buddhism, which emphasizes direct insight into one’s own nature; Zen in Japan.
- Chaṛhdī Kalā
Ever-rising spirit: the Sikh ideal of unshakeable optimism and courage, grounded in God.
- Cheng
Sincerity or integrity: being wholly real, the way of heaven and the goal of self-cultivation.
- Chesed and Gevurah
Lovingkindness and judgement: the fourth and fifth sefirot, divine expansion and restraint.
- Chishtiyya
A Sufi order of South Asia, known for its love of God, service to the poor and devotional music.
- Chokhmah
Wisdom: the second sefirah, the first point of divine thought, the beginning of being.
- Cit
Consciousness: in Vedānta, the pure awareness that is the nature of the self and of Brahman.
- Citta
Mind-stuff: the field of consciousness in which thoughts, impressions and memories arise.
- The Cloud of Unknowing
A fourteenth-century English treatise teaching that God is reached by love through a cloud of unknowing.
- Coincidence of opposites
Nicholas of Cusa’s doctrine that in God, the infinite, all opposites meet and coincide.
- Common Core Thesis
The view that mystical experiences share one essential core across traditions, differently interpreted.
- Comparative Mysticism
The study of mystical writings and experiences across traditions, their likenesses and differences.
- Comparative Religion
The study of the world’s religions side by side, their histories, beliefs and practices.
- Conference of the Birds
ʿAṭṭār’s allegory of the birds who cross seven valleys to find their king, the Sīmurgh.
- Consciousness
Awareness itself: the fact of experience, in which anything at all appears.
- Consolation and desolation
Ignatius’s terms for the movements of the soul toward and away from God, attended to in discernment.
- Constructivism
The view that mystical experiences are shaped throughout by the concepts and practices of their tradition.
- Contemplation
A loving, wordless attention to God or to reality, beyond reasoning and discursive prayer.
- Contemplative life
Bios theōrētikos: the life devoted to contemplation, which Aristotle held to be the happiest and most divine.
- Cosmic Consciousness
R. M. Bucke’s term for a sudden awareness of the life and order of the universe, beyond self-consciousness.
- Cosmopolitanism
Citizenship of the world: the Cynic and Stoic teaching that all human beings belong to one community.
- Cosmos
Order or adornment: the universe as a beautiful, ordered whole, in Greek thought.
D
- Daimonion
Socrates’ divine sign: an inner voice that warned him against wrong actions.
- Dāna
Generosity: giving, the first of the Buddhist perfections and the foundation of practice.
- Dantian
Elixir field: the centres in the body, especially below the navel, where vital energy is gathered in Daoist practice.
- Dao
The Way: in Daoism, the nameless source and pattern of all things; in Confucianism, the right way of life.
- Daodejing
The Classic of the Way and its Virtue: the short Daoist scripture attributed to Laozi.
- Daoism
The Chinese tradition of the Dao, from the philosophy of Laozi and Zhuangzi to the religious schools of immortality.
- Daozang
The Daoist canon: the great collection of Daoist scriptures, compiled in its present form in the Ming dynasty.
- Dark night of the soul
John of the Cross’s name for the painful purification through which God leads the soul to union.
- Darśana
Seeing: the sight of a holy person or image, and also a school of Indian philosophy.
- Dasvandh
The Sikh practice of giving a tenth of one’s earnings for the community and those in need.
- De
Virtue or power: the potency of the Dao as it is realized in things and in the sage.
- Deity yoga
The tantric practice of visualizing oneself as an enlightened deity, to realize one’s buddha-nature.
- Demiurge
The craftsman: in Plato’s Timaeus, the divine maker who shapes the cosmos after the eternal model.
- Dependent origination
The Buddhist teaching that all things arise in dependence on conditions, in a chain of twelve links.
- Dervish
A Sufi, especially a member of an order living in poverty; from the Persian for one at the door.
- Desert fathers
The hermits and monks of the Egyptian, Palestinian and Syrian deserts in the fourth and fifth centuries.
- Detachment
Freedom from clinging to things, outcomes and self, so that one may love and act rightly.
- Deus sive Natura
Spinoza’s phrase “God or Nature”, expressing that God is the one substance of which all things are modes.
- Devekut
Cleaving: the soul’s attachment and communion with God, the goal of Jewish mystical life.
- Devī
The Goddess: in Śākta Hinduism, the supreme divine power and mother of the universe.
- Devotio Moderna
The “modern devotion”: a fourteenth-century movement of interior piety in the Low Countries.
- Dhamma
The Buddha’s teaching, the truth it reveals, and the path it describes; in Sanskrit, dharma.
- Dhammapada
A collection of 423 verses of the Buddha’s teaching, among the most loved texts of Buddhism.
- Dhāraṇā
Concentration: binding the mind to a single place or object, the sixth limb of yoga.
- Dhāraṇī
A long mantra or formula, recited to retain the teaching, to protect and to concentrate the mind.
- Dharma
The order that upholds the world, and the right conduct by which a person takes part in it.
- Dharma transmission
The recognition by a Chan or Zen teacher that a student’s realization matches their own.
- Dharmadhātu
The realm of reality: the totality of all phenomena in their true nature.
- Dharmakāya
The truth body of the Buddha: ultimate reality itself, identical with emptiness and suchness.
- Dharmamegha samādhi
The “cloud of virtue” absorption: the highest samādhi of the Yoga Sūtras, just before liberation.
- Dhikr
Remembrance: the repetition of God’s names or sacred formulas, the central practice of Sufism.
- Dhyāna
Meditation: the unbroken flow of attention toward its object, the seventh limb of yoga.
- Dialectic
The art of question and answer by which, in Plato, the mind ascends to the Forms.
- Diamond Sūtra
A Perfection of Wisdom sūtra on the bodhisattva who saves beings without perceiving any being saved.
- Dichotomy of control
Epictetus’s teaching that some things are up to us, our judgements and choices, and others are not.
- Digambara
The “sky-clad” branch of Jainism, whose monks renounce all clothing as the final possession.
- Dīkṣā
Initiation: the rite by which a teacher admits a disciple to a path, often with a mantra.
- Discernment of spirits
The art of distinguishing movements of the soul that come from God from those that lead away from God.
- Divided line
Plato’s analogy of four levels of cognition, from images to the direct grasp of the Forms.
- Divine darkness
The darkness beyond light in which, according to the mystics, God is met beyond all knowing.
- Divine energies
In Orthodox theology, God’s uncreated activities, in which creatures can share while God’s essence remains unknowable.
- Divine madness
Theia mania: Plato’s account in the Phaedrus of the god-given madness of prophecy, initiation, poetry and love.
- Divine Names
Dionysius the Areopagite’s treatise on the names of God and the way beyond them.
- Doxa
Opinion or belief: the uncertain cognition of changing things, contrasted with knowledge.
- Draṣṭā
The seer: in the Yoga Sūtras, pure consciousness, which sees but is not itself seen.
- Dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi-vāda
The view that the world is created in the act of perceiving it, as in a dream.
- Dualism
The view that reality has two fundamental kinds, such as mind and matter, or spirit and nature.
- Dukkha
Suffering, unsatisfactoriness: the first noble truth, that conditioned existence cannot finally satisfy.
- Dvaita
Dualism: Madhva’s Vedānta, holding that God, selves and matter are eternally distinct.
- Dzogchen
The Great Perfection: a Tibetan teaching that the nature of mind is already perfect and needs only to be recognized.
E
- Ecstasy
Standing outside oneself: a state of rapture in which the soul is carried out of ordinary awareness toward God.
- Ego
The sense of being a separate “I”, which contemplative traditions seek to see through or surrender.
- Ehyeh asher ehyeh
“I am that I am” or “I will be what I will be”: the name God gives Moses at the burning bush.
- Ein od milvado
“There is none else besides him”: the verse that Hasidic thought reads as meaning nothing exists but God.
- Ein Sof
The Infinite: in Kabbalah, God as utterly hidden and beyond all description, prior to the sefirot.
- Elenchus
The Socratic method of refutation, examining a person’s beliefs through questioning to expose contradictions.
- Emanation
The flowing forth of reality from a single source, as light from the sun, in Neoplatonism and related traditions.
- Enlightenment
Spiritual awakening to the truth of reality, freeing one from ignorance and suffering.
- Enneads
The collected treatises of Plotinus, arranged by Porphyry in six groups of nine.
- Enthusiasm
Enthousiasmos: being filled with a god, the inspired state of prophets, poets and initiates.
- Epektasis
Endless progress: Gregory of Nyssa’s teaching that the soul stretches forward into God forever.
- Epistēmē
Knowledge in the strict sense: secure, reasoned understanding, contrasted with opinion.
- Epistemology
The theory of knowledge: what knowing is, how it is justified, and what its limits are.
- Epistrophe
Return: in Neoplatonism, the turning back of each being toward its source.
- Equanimity
Evenness of mind in pleasure and pain, gain and loss: a fruit of contemplative practice in every tradition.
- Eremitism
The solitary life of the hermit, devoted to prayer in withdrawal from society.
- Eros
Desiring love: in Plato, the longing that draws the soul from beautiful bodies to Beauty itself.
- Esotericism
Inner or hidden teaching reserved for initiates; in scholarship, a family of Western currents such as Hermeticism.
- Essence and existence
Avicenna’s distinction between what a thing is and the fact that it is, central to medieval metaphysics.
- Eucharist
Thanksgiving: the Christian sacrament of the bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ.
- Eudaimonia
Flourishing: the good life, the highest human good in Greek ethics.
- Examen
The daily examination of conscience and consciousness taught by Ignatius of Loyola.
- Extrovertive and Introvertive Mysticism
W. T. Stace’s distinction between unity seen in the world and unity found in empty consciousness.
F
- Falsafa
Islamic philosophy in the Greek tradition, from al-Kindī and al-Fārābī to Avicenna and Averroes.
- Fanāʾ
Passing away: the annihilation of the self in God, a central goal of the Sufi path.
- Faqr
Poverty: spiritual poverty, the recognition of one’s utter need of God, from which the word fakir comes.
- Fasting of the heart
Xinzhai: the Zhuangzi’s inner discipline of emptying the mind so that the Dao can gather there.
- Five aggregates
Form, feeling, perception, formations and consciousness: the five groups into which Buddhism analyses a person.
- Five hindrances
Sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and doubt: the obstacles to concentration.
- Five Khaṇḍs
The five realms of the Japjī through which the soul ascends: duty, knowledge, effort, grace and truth.
- Five Ks
The five articles of faith worn by initiated Sikhs: uncut hair, comb, steel bracelet, undergarment and sword.
- Five Thieves
Lust, anger, greed, attachment and pride: the vices that, in Sikh teaching, rob the soul of its wealth.
- Flight of the alone to the Alone
The phrase with which the Enneads end, describing the soul’s solitary ascent to the One.
- Formless attainments
Four meditative states beyond form: infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness and neither-perception-nor-non-perception.
- Forms
Plato’s eternal, unchanging realities, such as Beauty and Justice, of which things in the world are images.
- Four Books
The Analects, Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean: the core Confucian classics chosen by Zhu Xi.
- Four Marks of Mysticism
William James’s criteria for mystical states: ineffability, noetic quality, transiency and passivity.
- Four Noble Truths
The Buddha’s first teaching: suffering, its arising, its cessation, and the path to its cessation.
- Four senses of scripture
The literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical meanings that medieval readers found in the Bible.
- Four sprouts
Mencius’s teaching that every heart contains the beginnings of humaneness, righteousness, propriety and wisdom.
- Four stages of awakening
Stream-entry, once-return, non-return and arahantship: the four noble paths of early Buddhism.
- Four worlds
Emanation, creation, formation and action: the four levels of reality in Kabbalah.
- Free and easy wandering
Xiaoyao you: the Zhuangzi’s image of carefree freedom, roaming beyond the limits of the world.
- Friends of God
A fourteenth-century movement of devout clergy and laity in the Rhineland and Switzerland.
- Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam
The Bezels of Wisdom: Ibn ʿArabī’s concentrated account of the wisdom revealed through twenty-seven prophets.
G
- Geist
Spirit or mind: in Hegel, the Absolute coming to know itself through nature, history and human thought.
- Gelassenheit
Releasement or letting-be: Meister Eckhart’s word for the soul that has let go of self and will.
- Gematria
The interpretation of words by the numerical values of their Hebrew letters.
- Gewu
The investigation of things: the Neo-Confucian method of learning by examining the principle in each thing.
- Ghazal
A lyric poem of love and longing, the favourite form of Persian Sufi poetry.
- Gilgul
The transmigration of souls in Kabbalah, by which a soul returns to complete its repair.
- Gnosis
Knowledge: in religious usage, a saving, experiential knowledge of the divine.
- Gnosticism
A family of early Christian and related movements teaching salvation through secret knowledge of the soul’s divine origin.
- Godhead
In Meister Eckhart, the hidden divine essence beyond the persons of the Trinity, of which nothing can be said.
- Golden elixir
Jindan: the immortal substance of Daoist alchemy, in inner alchemy the realized spirit.
- The Good
In Plato, the highest Form, source of being and knowability, compared to the sun.
- Gopī
One of the cowherd women of Vraja whose love for Kṛṣṇa is the model of devotion.
- Gotrabhū
Change of lineage: the moment of mind that passes from the ordinary person to the noble one, just before the path.
- Grace
God’s free, unmerited gift of love and help, by which the soul is turned, healed and drawn to union.
- Great doubt
The intense, focused questioning that kōan practice arouses and that breaks open in awakening.
- Greater struggle
Jihād al-nafs: the struggle against one’s own ego, which Sufi tradition calls the greater jihad.
- Ground of Being
Paul Tillich’s phrase for God, not as one being among others but as being-itself.
- Ground of the soul
In Meister Eckhart, the innermost depth of the soul where God’s ground and the soul’s ground are one.
- Guide for the Perplexed
Maimonides’ philosophical masterpiece reconciling the Torah with Aristotelian philosophy.
- Guṇas
The three qualities of nature: sattva, clarity; rajas, activity; and tamas, inertia.
- Guṇasthāna
The fourteen Jain stages of spiritual development, from delusion to final liberation.
- Gurbāṇī
The utterance of the Gurus: the hymns of the Sikh scripture, sung and recited as the Guru’s living word.
- Gurdwārā
“Door of the Guru”: the Sikh house of worship, where the scripture is installed and all are welcome.
- Gurmukh
One turned toward the Guru, living by the Word rather than the self; opposite of manmukh.
- Gurprasād
The Guru’s grace: in Sikh teaching, the gift by which God is known, closing the Mūl Mantar.
- Guru
A spiritual teacher: in the Indian traditions, one who dispels darkness and guides the disciple to liberation.
- Guru Gobind Singh
The tenth Sikh Guru (1666–1708), poet and warrior, who founded the Khālsā and named the scripture as Guru.
- Guru Granth Sahib
The Sikh scripture and living Guru, a collection of hymns by the Gurus and by Hindu and Muslim saints.
- Guru Nānak
The first Sikh Guru (1469–1539), poet and teacher of the one God beyond the divisions of religion.
H
- Hadith
A report of the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, second only to the Qurʾān in authority.
- Ḥadīth qudsī
A sacred hadith: words of God reported by the Prophet but not part of the Qurʾān.
- Ḥāl
A state: a spiritual experience given by God, such as longing or intimacy, which comes and goes.
- Halakha
The way: Jewish religious law, governing worship, ethics and daily life.
- Ḥaqīqa
Reality or truth: the inner reality of things and of religion, the goal of the Sufi path.
- Hard Problem of Consciousness
David Chalmers’s name for the question why physical processes give rise to experience at all.
- Harimandir Sāhib
The Golden Temple at Amritsar, the holiest Sikh shrine, set in a pool of nectar.
- Harmony of religions
Ramakrishna’s teaching that the religions are many paths to one God: “as many faiths, so many paths”.
- Harmony of the spheres
The Pythagorean idea that the heavenly bodies move in mathematical proportions that make a celestial music.
- Hasidism
The Jewish revival movement founded by the Baal Shem Tov in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe.
- Haṭha yoga
The yoga of force: medieval methods of posture, breath and energy for purifying the body and awakening kuṇḍalinī.
- Haumai
Egoism, “I-me”: in Sikh teaching, the root affliction that separates the soul from God.
- Heart Sūtra
The shortest Perfection of Wisdom sūtra: form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
- Hēgemonikon
The ruling faculty: in Stoicism, the commanding centre of the soul, where reason judges.
- Hekhalot
The palaces: texts of early Jewish mysticism describing ascent through seven heavenly palaces.
- Henosis
Union: in Neoplatonism, the soul’s mystical union with the One, beyond thought.
- Hermeneutics
The art and theory of interpretation, first of scripture and then of all texts and understanding.
- Hermeticism
The tradition of the Hermetic writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, on God, the cosmos and the rebirth of the soul.
- Hesychasm
The Eastern Christian tradition of inner stillness and unceasing prayer of the heart, especially the Jesus Prayer.
- Hesychia
Stillness: inner quiet and watchfulness, the state the Eastern Christian contemplatives seek.
- Hidden treasure
The saying, cited by Sufis, in which God says he was a hidden treasure who loved to be known, and so created.
- Ḥikma
Wisdom: philosophy as a way of wisdom, uniting reasoning with spiritual realization.
- Hiraṇyagarbha
The golden embryo: in Vedic thought, the first-born source of the universe, later the cosmic mind.
- Hitbodedut
Self-seclusion: a Jewish practice of solitary, spontaneous prayer and meditation, taught by Nachman of Bratslav.
- Hitlahavut
Burning enthusiasm: the fervent, joyful ecstasy of Hasidic prayer.
- Holy fool
One who feigns madness or flouts convention for Christ’s sake, especially in Byzantine and Russian tradition.
- Holy indifference
Ignatian detachment: freedom from attachment to any created thing, so as to choose only what serves God.
- Huayan
The Flower Garland school of Chinese Buddhism, teaching the unobstructed interpenetration of all phenomena.
- Hukam
The divine order or will: in Sikh teaching, the command by which all things exist and move.
- Hundun
Chaos: the faceless emperor of the Zhuangzi who dies when given the senses, an image of primal wholeness.
- Hypostasis
Underlying reality: in Plotinus, the three primary realities of the One, Intellect and Soul.
I
- Icon
A sacred image of Christ, the Mother of God or the saints, venerated in Eastern Christianity as a window onto heaven.
- Idealism
The view that reality is fundamentally mental or spiritual, or known only as it appears to mind.
- Iḥsān
Excellence or spiritual beauty: to worship God as if you see him, for if you do not, he sees you.
- Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn
The Revival of the Religious Sciences: al-Ghazālī’s great synthesis of law, ethics and Sufism.
- Ik Oṅkār
“One Being”: the opening of the Sikh scripture, affirming the oneness of the Creator.
- Ikhlāṣ
Sincerity: purity of intention, doing everything for God alone.
- Illumination
The illuminative way: the second stage of the mystical path, in which the mind is enlightened by grace.
- Image of God
The teaching that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, the ground of their capacity for union.
- Imitation of Christ
The fifteenth-century devotional classic, attributed to Thomas à Kempis, on the inner life and the following of Christ.
- Immanence
The divine as present within the world and the self, pervading all things.
- Incarnation
The Christian belief that the eternal Word of God became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth.
- Indra’s net
A jewelled net in which each jewel reflects all the others: the Huayan image of the interpenetration of all things.
- Ineffability
The quality of being beyond words: what mystics say their experience cannot be told.
- Infused contemplation
Contemplation given by God rather than achieved by effort, distinguished from acquired contemplation.
- Inner light
The Quaker teaching that the light of Christ is present in every person and can be met in silent worship.
- Insight knowledges
The stages through which insight unfolds, from seeing rise and fall to equanimity and the path.
- Integral yoga
Sri Aurobindo’s yoga of transforming the whole of life, not only liberating the self from it.
- Intellectual Intuition
A direct, non-sensory seeing of reality by the intellect, as opposed to knowing by reasoning.
- Intellectual Love of God
Spinoza’s amor Dei intellectualis: the joy of knowing all things in God, which is the mind’s highest freedom.
- Intellectual vision
A knowledge of God or spiritual truth given directly to the mind without images.
- Intentionality
The “aboutness” of mind: the way consciousness is always consciousness of something.
- Interior Castle
Teresa of Ávila’s image of the soul as a castle of seven dwellings, with God at the centre.
- Intuition
Immediate knowing without reasoning; in contemplative use, a direct insight into truth.
- ʿIshq
Passionate love: the overwhelming love of the soul for God, celebrated in Sufi poetry.
- Ishrāq
Illumination: Suhrawardī’s philosophy, in which reality is a hierarchy of lights known by direct presence.
- Iṣṭa-devatā
The chosen deity: the form of God that a devotee takes as the focus of worship.
- Īśvara
The Lord: in Hindu thought, God as the personal ruler of the universe and the object of devotion.
- Īśvara-praṇidhāna
Devotion or surrender to the Lord: one of the observances of classical Yoga.
J
- Jain Āgamas
The scriptures of the Śvetāmbara Jains, held to transmit the teaching of Mahāvīra through his disciples.
- Jainism
The ancient Indian tradition of the Jinas, teaching liberation of the soul through non-harming, restraint and right knowledge.
- Japa
The repetition of a mantra or divine name, often counted on a string of beads.
- Japjī
Guru Nānak’s great hymn opening the Guru Granth Sahib, recited by Sikhs each morning.
- Jātaka
A story of one of the Buddha’s previous lives, illustrating the perfections.
- Jesus Prayer
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”: the short prayer repeated unceasingly in Eastern Christian practice.
- Jhāna
Meditative absorption: one of four deepening states of calm, joy and unification in Buddhist meditation.
- Jing, qi, shen
Essence, energy and spirit: the three treasures of the body in Daoist inner alchemy.
- Jīva
The individual living self, bound by karma and ignorance, which takes birth again and again.
- Jīva (Jain)
In Jainism, the living soul: eternal, conscious and by nature omniscient, bound by karmic matter.
- Jīvanmukti
Liberation while living: the state of one who has realized the truth and lives on in the body, free.
- Jñāna yoga
The path of knowledge: liberation through discrimination and the direct knowledge of the self.
- Junzi
The exemplary person: the Confucian ideal of the noble, cultivated and virtuous human being.
K
- Kabbalah
“Receiving” or tradition: the Jewish mystical tradition of the hidden God, the sefirot and the soul’s ascent.
- Kabīr
Fifteenth-century weaver-poet of Banaras, who sang of the one God beyond Hindu and Muslim forms.
- Kaivalya
Isolation or aloneness: liberation in Sāṃkhya and Yoga, when pure consciousness stands free of matter.
- Kalām
Islamic theology: rational defence and explanation of the articles of faith.
- Kalyāṇamitta
The good friend: the spiritual companion or teacher whom the Buddha called the whole of the holy life.
- Karma
Action and its consequences: the law by which deeds shape a person’s future in this life and the next.
- Karma (Jain)
In Jainism, a fine matter that flows into the soul through activity and passion and obscures its knowledge and bliss.
- Karma Yoga
The yoga of action: doing one’s duty without attachment to its fruits, offered to God.
- Karuṇā
Compassion: the wish that beings be free from suffering, central to all Buddhist traditions.
- Kaṣāya
The four passions of Jain teaching, anger, pride, deceit and greed, which make karma bind to the soul.
- Kashf
Unveiling: the direct disclosure of spiritual realities to the purified heart.
- Kasiṇa
A meditation device, such as a coloured disc or element, used to develop concentration.
- Kavanah
Intention: the inward direction of the heart in prayer and in performing the commandments.
- Kelippot
Husks or shells: in Kabbalah, the forces of evil that encase and feed on fallen sparks of holiness.
- Kenosis
Self-emptying: Christ’s emptying of himself in becoming human, and the soul’s self-emptying before God.
- Kenshō
Seeing one’s nature: an awakening experience in Zen, the direct insight into buddha-nature.
- Keter
Crown: the highest of the sefirot, the divine will, closest to the hidden Ein Sof.
- Kevala Jñāna
Omniscience: in Jainism, the perfect, unobstructed knowledge of the liberated soul.
- Kevalin
One who has attained kevala jñāna, omniscience, while still embodied.
- Khālsā
The order of initiated Sikhs founded by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699, sworn to devotion and justice.
- Khalwa
Seclusion: a spiritual retreat, often of forty days, spent in prayer and remembrance.
- Khānqāh
A Sufi lodge, where disciples live, practise and receive guests under a master.
- Khayāl
Imagination: in Ibn ʿArabī, a faculty and a world that unites spirit and body, through which God is seen in forms.
- Khiḍr
The Green One: the mysterious servant of God in the Qurʾān who guides Moses, and the hidden teacher of the Sufis.
- Khudī
Selfhood: Muhammad Iqbal’s teaching that the self is to be strengthened, not dissolved, in relation to God.
- Kirat Karnī
Earning an honest living by one’s own labour: a pillar of Sikh life.
- Kīrtana
Devotional singing of God’s names and praises, often in call and response.
- Kleśa
Affliction: the root causes of suffering, such as ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion and clinging to life.
- Know thyself
Gnōthi seauton: the maxim inscribed at Delphi, which Socrates made the starting point of philosophy.
- Knowledge by Identity
Knowing a thing by being one with it, as opposed to knowing it by perception or inference.
- Kōan
A case from the Chan or Zen tradition, often a paradoxical exchange, used to provoke awakening.
- Kriyā yoga
The yoga of action in the Yoga Sūtras: austerity, self-study and dedication to the Lord.
- Kṛṣṇa
A descent of Viṣṇu and, for many devotees, the supreme God: teacher of the Gītā and beloved of the cowherds.
- Kula
Family: the clan-based tantric traditions, whose practice centres on the Goddess and the transformation of the senses.
- Kundakunda
Revered Digambara teacher whose Samayasāra distinguishes the pure soul from all that is not it.
- Kuṇḍalinī
The coiled power: in tantric yoga, the divine energy lying dormant at the base of the spine.
L
- Ladder of Divine Ascent
John Climacus’s seventh-century guide to monastic life in thirty steps.
- Ladder of love
Diotima’s account in the Symposium of the ascent from bodily beauty to the vision of Beauty itself.
- Lama
A teacher in Tibetan Buddhism, the equivalent of the Sanskrit guru.
- Lamed vav tzaddikim
The thirty-six hidden righteous ones on whose merit, Jewish legend says, the world depends.
- Langar
The free community kitchen of the gurdwara, where all eat together as equals.
- Laṭīfa
A subtle centre: one of the spiritual organs of perception in Sufi psychology, especially in the Naqshbandī order.
- Learned ignorance
Nicholas of Cusa’s teaching that the highest knowledge of God is the knowing of one’s ignorance.
- Lectio divina
Sacred reading: the monastic practice of reading scripture slowly, moving through meditation and prayer to contemplation.
- Leśyā
The “colouring” of the soul, six hues from black to white, reflecting its moral and karmic state.
- Li (principle)
Principle: in Neo-Confucianism, the rational pattern of the cosmos, present whole in every thing.
- Li (ritual)
Ritual propriety: the rites and forms of conduct through which, in Confucianism, character and society are formed.
- Liangzhi
Innate knowing: Wang Yangming’s teaching that everyone has an innate knowledge of the good.
- Līlā
Divine play: the world as the spontaneous, purposeless sport of God.
- Liṅga
The sign or emblem of Śiva, an aniconic form in which he is worshipped.
- Liturgy of the Hours
The daily cycle of prayer at fixed hours, chiefly of psalms, sung or recited by monks and clergy.
- Locution
A word or message experienced as spoken by God within the soul.
- Logismoi
The eight evil thoughts of the desert tradition: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory and pride.
- Logos
Word, reason, account: the rational principle of the cosmos, and in Christian thought the divine Word made flesh.
- Lojong
Mind training: Tibetan slogans and practices for transforming adversity into the path of compassion.
- Lotus Sūtra
A Mahāyāna sūtra teaching that all paths lead to buddhahood and that the Buddha’s life is eternal.
- Lurianic Kabbalah
The Kabbalah of Isaac Luria of Safed: contraction, the breaking of the vessels and repair.
M
- Mādhurya bhāva
The mood of sweetness: devotion to God as one’s beloved, the highest attitude in Bengal Vaiṣṇavism.
- Madhyamaka
The Middle Way school of Nāgārjuna, which teaches the emptiness of all things through rigorous dialectic.
- Maḥabba
Love: the love between God and the soul, the subject of a whole station on the Sufi path.
- Mahābhārata
The great Sanskrit epic of the war between the Pāṇḍavas and Kauravas, containing the Bhagavad Gītā.
- Mahāmudrā
The Great Seal: a Tibetan teaching and practice of recognizing the nature of mind, central to the Kagyu school.
- Mahāsiddha
A great adept: one of the tantric masters of medieval India, often unconventional, revered in Vajrayāna.
- Mahāvākya
A “great saying” of the Upaniṣads expressing the unity of the self and Brahman.
- Mahāvīra
The twenty-fourth Jain tīrthaṅkara, an elder contemporary of the Buddha, who gave Jainism its present form.
- Mahāvrata
The five great vows of Jain monks and nuns: non-harming, truth, non-stealing, chastity and non-possession.
- Mahāyāna
The “Great Vehicle”: the Buddhist movement centred on the bodhisattva’s path to buddhahood for the sake of all beings.
- Maieutics
Midwifery: Socrates’ art of helping others give birth to the ideas within them.
- Maitreya
The future Buddha, now a bodhisattva in the Tuṣita heaven, who will come when the Dharma has been forgotten.
- Mala
Impurity: in Śaiva thought, the three limitations that bind the soul: smallness, difference and action.
- Malāmatiyya
The path of blame: Sufis who hid their piety and invited reproach to guard against pride.
- Malkhut
Kingdom: the last sefirah, the Shekhinah, through which divine life flows into the world.
- Manas
The mind: in Indian thought, the faculty that receives the senses, considers and doubts.
- Maṇḍala
A circle: a sacred diagram of an enlightened deity’s palace and retinue, used in tantric ritual and meditation.
- Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad
The shortest principal Upaniṣad: twelve verses on the syllable Oṃ and the four states of the self.
- Mañjuśrī
The bodhisattva of wisdom, depicted with a flaming sword that cuts through ignorance.
- Mantra
A sacred word, syllable or verse, repeated in worship and meditation for its power and meaning.
- Maqām
A station: a stage of the Sufi path attained by effort and made permanent, such as repentance or trust.
- Maraṇasati
Mindfulness of death: remembering that death is certain and its time uncertain.
- Maʿrifa
Gnosis: the direct, experiential knowledge of God, distinguished from learned knowledge.
- Masnavī
Rūmī’s great poem in six books of rhyming couplets, called the Qurʾān in Persian.
- Māyā
The power by which the one reality appears as the many; in Advaita, the appearance of the world, neither simply real nor unreal.
- Merit
Puṇya: the wholesome power generated by good actions, which can be dedicated to the benefit of others.
- Merkavah
The chariot: the early Jewish mysticism of ascent to the divine throne, based on Ezekiel’s vision.
- Metanoia
A change of mind or heart: the Greek word for repentance, a turning of the whole person toward God.
- Metaphysics
The study of the ultimate nature of reality: being, cause, mind, time and the first principle.
- Metempsychosis
The transmigration of the soul from one body to another, taught by the Pythagoreans and Plato.
- Mettā
Loving-kindness: the wish for all beings to be happy, the first of the divine abodes.
- Mevlevī
The Sufi order founded on the teaching of Rūmī, known for its whirling ceremony.
- Microcosm
The little world: the idea that the human being mirrors the whole cosmos.
- Middle Way
The path between sensual indulgence and self-mortification, which the Buddha found led to awakening.
- Midrash
Rabbinic interpretation of scripture, legal and narrative, often searching beneath the plain meaning.
- Mīmāṃsā
The school of Vedic exegesis that interprets the ritual injunctions of the Vedas and defends their authority.
- Mindfulness
Sati: clear, present awareness of what is happening as it happens, central to Buddhist meditation.
- Minne
Love: the courtly word for love used by the Beguine mystics for the soul’s passionate love of God.
- Miʿrāj
The Prophet’s night ascension through the seven heavens to the presence of God.
- Mitzvah
Commandment: one of the divine commands of the Torah, traditionally counted as 613.
- Mokṣa
Liberation: in the Indian traditions, release from the cycle of birth and death and from suffering.
- Mokṣa (Jain)
In Jainism, the complete freedom of the soul from karma, when it rises to the top of the universe.
- Monasticism
The life of monks and nuns, withdrawn from ordinary society for prayer, discipline and community.
- Monism
The view that reality is ultimately one, whether one substance, one kind of thing or one principle.
- Mu
“No”: Zhaozhou’s answer when asked whether a dog has buddha-nature, the most famous Zen kōan.
- Muditā
Sympathetic joy: gladness at the happiness and success of others, the third divine abode.
- Mudrā
A seal: a symbolic gesture of the hands, or a bodily practice that seals energy in yoga.
- Mukti (Sikh)
Liberation in Sikh teaching: freedom from ego and rebirth through union with the Name, attainable in life.
- Mūl Mantar
The “root formula” at the start of the Guru Granth Sahib, summarising the nature of God.
- Mumukṣutva
The longing for liberation: the fourth qualification of the seeker in Advaita Vedānta.
- Murāqaba
Watchfulness: Sufi meditation, attending to God’s gaze on the heart and to one’s own inner states.
- Murīd
A disciple: one who has taken the oath of allegiance to a Sufi master and entered the path.
- Mūrti
A sacred image: the form in which a deity is worshipped and believed to be present.
- Mussar
A Jewish ethical and spiritual discipline of character refinement, revived in nineteenth-century Lithuania.
- Mysterious female
Xuanpin: the Daodejing’s image of the Dao as the inexhaustible, receptive source of life.
- Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans
Otto’s description of the holy as a mystery that makes one tremble and also attracts.
- Mystery religions
Ancient initiatory cults, such as Eleusis, which promised a blessed afterlife through secret rites.
- Mystical Ascent
The image of the spiritual life as a climb through stages or heavens toward God.
- Mystical Experience
An experience taken to disclose ultimate reality directly, often as unity, beyond ordinary subject and object.
- Mystical theology
Knowledge of God through union rather than reasoning; also the title of Dionysius’s treatise.
- Mystical union
Unio mystica: the soul’s union with God, the goal of Christian mystical life.
- Mysticism
The pursuit and experience of direct, transforming union with, or knowledge of, ultimate reality.
N
- Nāda
Sound: in yoga and tantra, the inner sound heard in meditation and the vibration from which creation unfolds.
- Nāḍī
A channel of the subtle body through which vital energy flows.
- Nafs
The self or ego: in Sufism, the lower self with its passions, to be disciplined and transformed.
- Nām
The divine Name: in Sikh teaching, the presence of God pervading creation, remembered and lived.
- Nām Japnā
Meditating on the Name: one of the three pillars of Sikh life, with honest work and sharing.
- Nāma-rūpa
Name-and-form: mind and body, mentality and materiality, as Buddhism analyses experience.
- Namokāra Mantra
The central Jain prayer, honouring the arhats, siddhas, teachers, preceptors and all ascetics.
- Naqshbandiyya
A Sufi order known for silent remembrance and for its principle of “solitude in the crowd”.
- Nāth
A tradition of Śaiva yogins, founded according to legend by Matsyendranāth and Gorakhnāth, central to haṭha yoga.
- Nature Mysticism
The experience of the divine, or of unity, in and through the natural world.
- Nāyaṉārs
The sixty-three Tamil saints devoted to Śiva, whose hymns form part of the Tamil Śaiva canon.
- Nayavāda
The Jain theory of standpoints: partial viewpoints from which a thing may truly be described.
- Nefesh, ruach, neshamah
The levels of the soul in Kabbalah: the vital soul, the spirit and the higher soul.
- Negative attributes
Maimonides’ teaching that God can be described only by what God is not.
- Neidan
Inner alchemy: Daoist practices that refine the body’s vital energies into an immortal spirit.
- Nembutsu
The recitation of Amida Buddha’s name, “Namu Amida Butsu”, the central practice of Pure Land Buddhism.
- Neo-Confucianism
The revival of Confucian thought from the Song dynasty, with a metaphysics of principle and practices of self-cultivation.
- Neoplatonism
The late ancient Platonism of Plotinus and his successors, centred on the One and the soul’s return.
- Nepsis
Watchfulness: sober, vigilant attention to the movements of the heart and mind, guarding against distracting thoughts.
- Neti neti
“Not this, not this”: the Upaniṣadic way of pointing to Brahman by denying every description of it.
- Ngöndro
The preliminary practices of Tibetan Buddhism: refuge, purification, offering and guru yoga, each done many times.
- Nibbidā
Disenchantment: the turning away from conditioned things that arises when their nature is clearly seen.
- Niggun
A wordless melody sung in Hasidic gatherings to lift the soul in devotion.
- Nirankār
The Formless: a Sikh name for God, beyond all shape and incarnation.
- Nirguṇa bhakti
Devotion to God without form or attributes, as in the poetry of Kabīr and the Sants.
- Nirguṇa Brahman
Brahman “without qualities”: the absolute as it is in itself, beyond every attribute, name and form.
- Nirjarā
The shedding of karma already bound to the soul, chiefly through austerity and meditation.
- Nirodha-samāpatti
The attainment of cessation: a state in which perception and feeling cease entirely.
- Nirvāṇa
The extinguishing of craving, hatred and delusion: the unconditioned peace that is the goal of Buddhism.
- Nirvikalpa samādhi
Absorption without mental constructs, in which the distinction of knower and known disappears.
- Niṣkāma karma
Desireless action: work done as duty or offering, without attachment to its results.
- Nitzotzot
Sparks: the fragments of divine light scattered in the world, to be raised by holy action.
- Niyama
The observances of yoga: purity, contentment, austerity, self-study and devotion to the Lord.
- Noble Eightfold Path
The fourth noble truth: right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration.
- Noetic Quality
The sense in mystical states of knowing, of insight into truth, not merely feeling.
- Non-abiding nirvāṇa
The Mahāyāna nirvāṇa that dwells neither in saṃsāra nor in a passive peace, but acts in the world.
- Nonduality
“Not two”: the realisation that the separation of self and world, or self and God, is not ultimately real.
- Nous
Intellect: in Greek philosophy, the highest faculty of mind, and in Plotinus the second hypostasis, eternal thought.
- Numinous
Rudolf Otto’s word for the holy as wholly other: awe-inspiring, mysterious and fascinating.
- Nūr Muḥammadī
The light of Muhammad: the primordial light created before all things, from which creation proceeds.
- Nyāya
The school of Indian logic and epistemology, concerned with the valid means of knowledge.
O
- Oikeiōsis
Appropriation: the Stoic account of how care for oneself expands to embrace all humanity.
- Olam ha-ba
The world to come: the life of the soul after death and the age of redemption, in Jewish thought.
- Oṃ
The sacred syllable of the Hindu traditions, said to contain all sound and to stand for Brahman.
- The One
In Plotinus, the absolutely simple first principle beyond being and thought, source of all that is.
- One body with all things
The Neo-Confucian teaching that the humane person forms one body with heaven, earth and the myriad things.
- Ontology
The branch of philosophy that studies being: what exists and what it is to exist.
- Orphism
Ancient Greek religious movement teaching the soul’s divine origin, purification and release from the cycle of births.
- Other-power
Tariki: reliance on the power of Amida’s vow rather than one’s own efforts for salvation.
- Ousia
Being or substance: the essential reality of a thing, in Greek philosophy and theology.
- Over-Soul
Emerson’s name for the universal mind in which every soul participates.
P
- Paccekabuddha
A solitary buddha: one who awakens without a teacher but does not found a teaching community.
- Pañca-kośa
The five sheaths of the self in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad: of food, breath, mind, understanding and bliss.
- Pañca-mahābhūta
The five great elements: space, air, fire, water and earth.
- Panentheism
The view that all things are in God, while God is more than all things.
- Panta rhei
“All things flow”: the teaching attributed to Heraclitus that everything is in constant change.
- Pantheism
The view that God and the universe are identical: all is God, and God is all.
- Papañca
Proliferation: the mind’s tendency to spin concepts and stories out of simple experience.
- Pāramī
A perfection: one of the virtues, such as generosity, patience and wisdom, perfected on the way to buddhahood.
- Pāramitās
The perfections of the bodhisattva: generosity, ethics, patience, energy, meditation and wisdom.
- Pardes
The orchard: the rabbinic image of mystical speculation, and the four levels of interpreting scripture.
- Pariṇāma
Real transformation: the view that an effect is a genuine change in its cause, as milk becomes curd.
- Parinirvāṇa
Final nirvāṇa: the passing away of an awakened one at death, with no further rebirth.
- Participation
Methexis: Plato’s account of how sensible things share in the Forms, and later of how creatures share in God.
- Partzufim
Countenances: in Lurianic Kabbalah, the configurations of the sefirot as divine faces or persons.
- Paryuṣaṇa
The holiest Jain festival, eight or ten days of fasting, study and forgiveness at the end of the rains.
- Paśu, pati, pāśa
The bound soul, the Lord and the bond: the three realities of Śaiva Siddhānta.
- Penthos
Compunction: the grief for sin and the gift of tears prized by the desert fathers.
- Perennial Philosophy
The view that one truth about the divine ground and the way to it underlies the world’s religions.
- Perichoresis
Mutual indwelling: the interpenetration of the three persons of the Trinity in one another.
- Phaedo
Plato’s dialogue on the last day of Socrates, arguing for the soul’s immortality and philosophy as practice for death.
- Phenomenology
The philosophical study of experience as it is lived, describing how things appear to consciousness.
- Philokalia
The “love of the beautiful”: an anthology of Eastern Christian writings on prayer and watchfulness.
- Philosophy
The love of wisdom: in its ancient sense, a way of life oriented to truth and the good, not only a discipline of argument.
- Philosophy as a way of life
Pierre Hadot’s account of ancient philosophy as a practice of spiritual exercises transforming the self.
- Philosophy of Mind
The branch of philosophy that asks what minds are and how they relate to bodies and the world.
- Philosophy of Religion
The philosophical study of religious claims, experience, language and practice.
- Phowa
The transference of consciousness at death to a pure land, a Tibetan tantric practice.
- Phronēsis
Practical wisdom: the virtue of judging well what to do in particular situations.
- Pietism
A seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestant movement emphasizing inner devotion and the life of the heart.
- Platform Sūtra
The teachings attributed to Huineng, the sixth patriarch of Chan, on seeing one’s nature suddenly.
- Pleroma
Fullness: in the New Testament, the fullness of God in Christ; in Gnostic myth, the divine realm of aeons.
- Pneuma
Breath or spirit: in Stoicism the fiery breath that pervades the cosmos; in Christianity the Holy Spirit.
- Practice of dying
Socrates’ teaching in the Phaedo that philosophy is the rehearsal for death, the separation of soul from body.
- Practice of the presence of God
Brother Lawrence’s way of living in continual conversation with God in ordinary tasks.
- Prajñā
Wisdom: the direct insight into the true nature of things, which liberates.
- Prajñāpāramitā
The perfection of wisdom: the insight into emptiness, and the sūtras that teach it.
- Prakāśa
Light: in Kashmir Śaivism, consciousness as the self-luminous light in which everything appears.
- Prakṛti
Primordial matter or nature: in Sāṃkhya, the source of body, mind and world, made of the three qualities.
- Pramāṇa
A means of valid knowledge, such as perception, inference or reliable testimony.
- Prāṇa
Breath or life-force: the vital energy that sustains the body, and in the Upaniṣads a symbol of Brahman.
- Prāṇāyāma
Regulation of the breath: the fourth limb of yoga, controlling inhalation, exhalation and retention.
- Prapatti
Surrender: throwing oneself on the grace of God as the means of salvation, in Śrī Vaiṣṇavism.
- Prārabdha karma
The karma that has begun to bear fruit and has produced the present life; it runs its course even after liberation.
- Prāsaṅgika
The branch of Madhyamaka that refutes all positions by drawing out their absurd consequences.
- Prasthānatraya
The “three starting points” of Vedānta: the Upaniṣads, the Brahma Sūtras and the Bhagavad Gītā.
- Pratikramaṇa
The Jain rite of turning back: confession and repentance for harm done, said morning and evening.
- Pratyabhijñā
Recognition: the Kashmir Śaiva teaching that liberation is recognizing oneself as Śiva.
- Pratyāhāra
Withdrawal of the senses: the fifth limb of yoga, turning attention inward from sense objects.
- Prayer of quiet
A state of infused prayer in which the will rests in God while the other faculties may still wander.
- Prayer of recollection
The gathering of the senses and faculties inward, to be with God present in the soul.
- Prayer of the heart
Prayer that has descended from the mind into the heart, becoming continuous and self-acting.
- Prayer of union
A brief, infused union in which all the faculties are suspended in God, in Teresa’s fifth dwellings.
- Prema
Pure love of God: the highest form of devotion, free of any wish for reward.
- Premeditation of evils
Praemeditatio malorum: the Stoic exercise of imagining misfortunes in advance, to lessen their power.
- Prohairesis
Moral choice: in Epictetus, the faculty of will and judgement that alone is truly our own.
- Prophetic Kabbalah
Abraham Abulafia’s ecstatic Kabbalah, using letter combinations and breathing to attain prophetic union.
- Psyche
Soul: the life and mind of a living being, in Plato the immortal self that seeks the Good.
- Pudgala
Matter in Jain metaphysics, made of atoms, including the subtle karmic matter that binds the soul.
- Pūjā
Worship: the offering of honour, flowers, light and food to a deity, in the home or the temple.
- Purāṇa
One of the encyclopaedic “ancient tales” of Hinduism: myths of creation, gods, kings and devotion.
- Pure Consciousness Event
A state of wakeful awareness without any content, proposed as evidence against constructivism.
- Pure Land
A buddha-field, especially Amitābha’s western paradise, and the school devoted to rebirth there.
- Pure love
Love of God for his own sake alone, without any self-interest, even in one’s own salvation.
- Pure prayer
Prayer free of images and thoughts: the summit of prayer in Evagrius and the Eastern tradition.
- Purgation
The purgative way: the first stage of the mystical path, purification from sin, vice and attachment.
- Puruṣa
Pure consciousness: in Sāṃkhya and Yoga, the witnessing self, inactive and wholly distinct from matter.
- Puruṣārthas
The four aims of human life in Hindu thought: dharma, wealth, pleasure and liberation.
- Pythagoreanism
The philosophy and way of life of Pythagoras and his followers: number, harmony, purification and the soul’s transmigration.
Q
- Qādiriyya
One of the oldest and most widespread Sufi orders, founded on the teaching of ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī.
- Qalandar
A wandering dervish who rejects social convention, often shocking in appearance and conduct.
- Qalb
The heart: in Sufism, the spiritual organ of knowing God, which must be polished like a mirror.
- Qawwālī
The devotional music of the Chishtī Sufis of South Asia, sung to awaken ecstasy and love.
- Qi
Breath, vital energy: the dynamic stuff of which all things are made in Chinese thought.
- Qigong
Breath work: Chinese practices of movement, breathing and meditation for cultivating vital energy.
- Qualia
The felt qualities of experience, such as the redness of red or the taste of salt.
- Quanzhen
The School of Complete Perfection: a monastic Daoist order founded by Wang Chongyang, centred on inner alchemy.
- Quiet sitting
Jingzuo: the Neo-Confucian practice of sitting in stillness to calm and clarify the mind.
- Quietism
A seventeenth-century movement teaching a passive prayer of pure abandonment, condemned by the Catholic Church.
- Qurʾān
The scripture of Islam, revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, the foundation of Sufi as of all Islamic thought.
- Quṭb
The pole: the supreme saint of an age, around whom the spiritual order of the world turns.
R
- Rābiʿa’s love
The love of God for his own sake alone, without fear of hell or hope of paradise, associated with Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya.
- Rādhā
The beloved of Kṛṣṇa among the cowherd women, the model of devotion and, for some traditions, divine herself.
- Rāja yoga
The “royal yoga” of meditation: a later name for Patañjali’s classical yoga of the mind.
- Rajas
The quality of passion, energy and restless activity in nature and the mind.
- Rāma
The hero of the Rāmāyaṇa, a descent of Viṣṇu and an ideal of righteous kingship.
- Rāmāyaṇa
The Sanskrit epic of Prince Rāma, attributed to Vālmīki, and a model of dharma in Hindu culture.
- Rasa
Taste or flavour: aesthetic emotion in Indian poetics, and in devotion the relish of love for God.
- Rebirth
The continuation of a being’s life process in a new existence after death, shaped by karma.
- Religious Pluralism
The view that more than one religion can be a valid response to ultimate reality.
- Ren
Humaneness: the supreme Confucian virtue of benevolence and love for others.
- Return
Fan: the Daodejing’s teaching that returning is the movement of the Dao.
- Revelations of Divine Love
Julian of Norwich’s account of the sixteen showings she received in 1373, the first book in English known to be by a woman.
- Reverence
Jing: seriousness or reverent attention, the Neo-Confucian discipline of keeping the mind collected.
- Riḍā
Contentment: satisfaction with whatever God decrees, the last of the stations in some Sufi lists.
- Rigpa
Pure awareness: in Dzogchen, the self-knowing, primordial nature of mind.
- Rinzai
The Japanese Zen school descended from Linji, known for kōan practice and sudden awakening.
- Ṛta
The cosmic order of the Vedas, by which the world, the seasons and the ritual are kept in harmony.
- Ruach ha-kodesh
The holy spirit: in Judaism, the divine inspiration that rests on prophets and the righteous.
- Rūḥ
Spirit: the divine breath breathed into Adam, the spiritual principle in the human being.
- Rule of Saint Benedict
The sixth-century rule for monks that shaped Western monasticism: prayer, work, stability and obedience.
S
- Ṣabr
Patience: steadfast endurance in the face of trial, a station of the Sufi path.
- Saccidānanda
Being, consciousness and bliss: a classic Vedānta description of the nature of Brahman.
- Sach Khaṇḍ
The “realm of truth”, the highest of the five realms, where the soul dwells with the Formless One.
- Sacrament
A visible sign of invisible grace: a rite through which, in Christian belief, God acts.
- Sacrament of the present moment
Abandonment to God’s will as it comes in each moment, in the spirituality attributed to Jean-Pierre de Caussade.
- Ṣaḍ-darśana
The six orthodox schools of Indian philosophy, paired as Nyāya–Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya–Yoga and Mīmāṃsā–Vedānta.
- Saddhā
Faith or confidence: trust in the Buddha’s awakening, the first of the five spiritual faculties.
- Sādhana
Spiritual practice: the disciplined means by which a seeker pursues the goal of the path.
- Sādhana-catuṣṭaya
The fourfold qualification of the seeker in Advaita: discrimination, dispassion, six virtues and longing for liberation.
- Sage
Shengren: the perfected person of Confucian and Daoist thought, who embodies the Way.
- Saguṇa Brahman
Brahman “with qualities”: the absolute described as the personal Lord, creator and object of worship.
- Sahaj
Natural ease: in Sikh and Sant poetry, the effortless state of union with the divine.
- Sahaja samādhi
Natural absorption: realization that continues effortlessly through ordinary activity.
- Śaiva Siddhānta
A dualist tradition of Śaiva theology and ritual, influential especially in Tamil South India.
- Sākṣī
The witness: the pure consciousness that observes body, mind and the three states without being affected by them.
- Śakti
Power: the creative energy of the divine, worshipped as the Goddess and inseparable from Śiva.
- Śaktipāta
The descent of power: in Śaiva tantra, the grace by which God awakens the soul to liberation.
- Sallekhanā
The Jain vow of peaceful death by gradual fasting, taken when life is near its natural end.
- Samāʿ
Listening: Sufi gatherings of music, poetry and sometimes movement, to awaken ecstasy and remembrance.
- Samādhi
Absorption: the state of complete concentration in which the mind becomes one with its object.
- Sāmarasya
Oneness of taste: the harmony in which all experiences have one flavour, in tantric thought.
- Samatha
Calm or tranquillity: meditation that stills and unifies the mind, leading to absorption.
- Sāmāyika
The Jain practice of equanimity: a period of meditation in which one lives for a time as a monk.
- Sāṃkhya
The Indian philosophy of enumeration, distinguishing pure consciousness from matter and its evolutes.
- Saṃnyāsa
Renunciation: the life of the wandering renouncer who has given up home, property and ritual.
- Samprajñāta samādhi
Absorption with an object or support, accompanied by awareness of that object, in classical yoga.
- Saṃsāra
The round of birth, death and rebirth, driven by karma and ignorance, from which liberation is sought.
- Saṃskāra
An impression left by experience in the mind, which shapes future thought and action.
- Saṃvara
The stopping of karmic inflow through vows, vigilance, self-control and meditation.
- Saṃyama
Concentration, meditation and absorption practised together on one object, the source of yogic insight and powers.
- Saṅgat
The holy congregation: the community of seekers gathered in the presence of the Word.
- Saṅgha
The community: the order of Buddhist monks and nuns, and in a wider sense all who follow the path.
- Sant
A holy person, and the North Indian tradition of saint-poets devoted to the formless God.
- Śarīra-traya
The three bodies of Vedānta: the gross physical body, the subtle body and the causal body.
- Sat
Being, reality or truth: in Vedānta, the pure existence that is the ground of all that exists.
- Satipaṭṭhāna
The four foundations of mindfulness: body, feelings, mind and mental states.
- Satori
Awakening or understanding: the Zen experience of realization, often used interchangeably with kenshō.
- Satsaṅga
“Company of the true”: the company of the wise and holy, valued as a means of spiritual growth.
- Sattva
The quality of clarity, purity and lightness, which makes knowledge and calm possible.
- Sefer Yetzirah
The Book of Creation: an early, short Hebrew text on creation through ten numbers and twenty-two letters.
- Sefirot
The ten emanations or attributes through which the hidden God manifests and governs the world.
- Self
The subject of experience; in contemplative traditions, either the true inner reality or a constructed illusion.
- Self-Realisation
The direct knowledge of one’s true nature as the Self, beyond body and mind.
- Self-Reliance
Emerson’s doctrine of trusting the inner voice, which he held to be the voice of the universal soul.
- Sesshin
An intensive Zen meditation retreat, usually of several days, with long periods of zazen.
- Sevā
Selfless service, offered without thought of reward, as a form of devotion.
- Seven factors of awakening
Mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquillity, concentration and equanimity: the qualities of a mind ready to wake.
- Seven purifications
The stages of the Buddhist path, from virtue to knowledge and vision, likened to a relay of chariots.
- Seven Tattvas
The seven Jain realities: soul, non-soul, inflow, bondage, stopping, shedding and liberation.
- Shabad
The Word: a hymn of the Guru Granth Sahib, and the divine Word through which God is known.
- Shabbat
The Sabbath: the seventh day of rest and holiness, from Friday evening to Saturday night.
- Shahāda
The testimony of faith: there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.
- Sharīʿa
The revealed law of Islam, governing worship and conduct, the outer foundation of the Sufi path.
- Shaṭḥ
Ecstatic utterance: a seemingly blasphemous saying spoken in the intoxication of union.
- Shaykh
A Sufi master: the guide who initiates disciples and leads them on the path.
- Shefa
Flow or abundance: the divine influx that descends through the sefirot to sustain the worlds.
- Shekhinah
The divine presence dwelling in the world, in Kabbalah the feminine aspect of God, in exile with Israel.
- Shema
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one”: the central declaration of Jewish faith.
- Shevirat ha-kelim
The breaking of the vessels: the Lurianic catastrophe in which the vessels of divine light shattered, scattering sparks.
- Shikantaza
“Just sitting”: the Sōtō Zen practice of objectless, wholehearted sitting.
- Shingon
The Japanese school of esoteric Buddhism founded by Kūkai, teaching buddhahood in this very body.
- Shinjin
True entrusting: in Shinran’s Pure Land teaching, the faith awakened in the believer by Amida.
- Shukr
Gratitude: thankfulness to God for every gift, paired in Sufi teaching with patience.
- Siddha
A perfected one: an adept who has attained the goal of yoga or tantra, often credited with powers.
- Siddha (Jain)
A perfected, liberated soul dwelling at the summit of the universe, free of body and karma.
- Siddhi
An extraordinary power or accomplishment attained through yoga, and also perfection or liberation itself.
- Sikhism
The tradition founded by Guru Nānak in the Punjab, centred on the one Creator and remembrance of the divine Name.
- Sīla
Ethics or virtue: the restraint of body and speech, the first of the three trainings.
- Silsila
Chain: the lineage of masters through which a Sufi order traces its teaching back to the Prophet.
- Simran
Remembrance: the Sikh practice of keeping God in mind through repetition of the Name.
- Sirr
The secret: the innermost part of the heart, where the secret of God and the soul is kept.
- Śiva
The auspicious one: a principal god of Hinduism, ascetic and dancer, supreme for the Śaiva traditions.
- Śiva Sūtras
A foundational text of Kashmir Śaivism, said to have been revealed to Vasugupta.
- Six realms
The realms of rebirth: gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts and hell beings.
- Skilful means
Upāya-kauśalya: the art of teaching each person in the way suited to them, central to the Mahāyāna.
- Smṛti
“That which is remembered”: Hindu sacred tradition, such as the epics, the Purāṇas and the law books.
- Socratic ignorance
Socrates’ awareness of his own ignorance, which the oracle declared made him the wisest of men.
- Sophia
Wisdom: in Greek philosophy the highest knowledge, and in Jewish and Christian thought the divine Wisdom.
- Sōphrosynē
Temperance or self-possession: soundness of mind and moderation in desire.
- Sōtō
The Japanese Zen school founded by Dōgen, centred on shikantaza and the unity of practice and realization.
- Spanda
Vibration: in Kashmir Śaivism, the dynamic pulsation of consciousness from which the world arises.
- Spark of the soul
The highest point of the soul, untouched by sin, through which it is united with God.
- Spiritual direction
The practice of accompanying another person in their life of prayer and discernment.
- Spiritual Exercises
Ignatius of Loyola’s month-long programme of meditation, contemplation and discernment.
- Spiritual marriage
The highest union of the soul with God, described by Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross.
- Spiritual senses
The doctrine that the soul has inner senses, of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, by which it perceives God.
- Śravaṇa, manana, nididhyāsana
Hearing, reflection and contemplation: the threefold discipline of Vedānta study.
- Śrī Vidyā
A tantric tradition of worship of the goddess Lalitā Tripurasundarī through her mantra and yantra.
- Śruti
“That which is heard”: the revealed scripture of Hinduism, chiefly the Vedas and Upaniṣads.
- Starets
An elder: a monk of the Russian Orthodox tradition revered as a spiritual guide.
- Sthitaprajña
The person of steady wisdom whom the Bhagavad Gītā describes: content in the self, unmoved by pleasure and pain.
- Stigmata
Wounds corresponding to those of the crucified Christ, appearing on the bodies of certain mystics.
- Stillness
Jing: quiet and tranquillity, the root of movement in Daoist teaching.
- Stoicism
The Hellenistic philosophy of living according to nature and reason, indifferent to what is beyond our control.
- Stream-entry
Sotāpatti: the first stage of awakening, entering the stream that flows irreversibly to nirvāṇa.
- Stūpa
A Buddhist reliquary monument, a mound or tower enshrining relics and symbolizing the Buddha’s awakened mind.
- Sublime
The experience of something so vast or powerful that it overwhelms the senses and lifts the mind.
- Substance
In philosophy, what exists in its own right and underlies changing qualities.
- Suchness
Tathatā: things as they truly are, beyond conceptual distortion.
- Sudden awakening
The Chan teaching that awakening happens all at once, not by gradual stages.
- Śuddhādvaita
Pure nondualism: Vallabha’s Vedānta, in which the world is a real manifestation of Kṛṣṇa, not an illusion.
- Sufism
Taṣawwuf: the inner, mystical dimension of Islam, the path of purifying the heart to know and love God.
- Ṣuḥba
Companionship: keeping company with a master and fellow seekers, a primary means of Sufi transformation.
- Sukr and ṣaḥw
Intoxication and sobriety: the two Sufi modes of experiencing union, ecstatic or composed.
- Śūnyatā
Emptiness: the Mahāyāna teaching that all things lack independent, inherent existence.
- Supermind
In Sri Aurobindo’s thought, the truth-consciousness above mind, whose descent will transform human nature.
- Suṣumnā
The central channel of the subtle body, through which kuṇḍalinī rises.
- Sutta
A discourse of the Buddha or his disciples; in Sanskrit, sūtra.
- Svadharma
One’s own dharma: the duty proper to a person’s nature and station in life.
- Svādhyāya
Self-study: the study and recitation of scripture, one of the observances of yoga.
- Svātantrya
Freedom: the absolute autonomy of consciousness to manifest, conceal and reveal itself.
- Śvetāmbara
The “white-clad” branch of Jainism, whose monks and nuns wear simple white robes.
- Syādvāda
The Jain method of qualified assertion: every statement is true “in some respect”.
- Sympatheia
The mutual connection of all things in the cosmos, as parts of one living whole.
- Symposium
Plato’s dialogue on love, in which speeches at a drinking party culminate in Diotima’s ladder of beauty.
- Synteresis
The innate habit of conscience that grasps the first principles of right action, in medieval thought.
T
- Taiji
The supreme ultimate: the source from which yin and yang arise, and in Neo-Confucianism the totality of principle.
- Tajallī
Self-disclosure: God’s manifestation of himself in the forms of the world and in the heart.
- Talmud
The central text of rabbinic Judaism: the Mishnah and its vast commentary, the Gemara.
- Tamas
The quality of darkness, inertia and heaviness, which obscures and dulls.
- Taṇhā
Craving or thirst: the second noble truth, the desire that drives rebirth and suffering.
- Tantra
A family of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions using ritual, mantra, visualization and energy to realize the divine in embodied life.
- Tanya
The foundational work of Chabad Hasidism by Schneur Zalman of Liadi, on the soul and the service of God.
- Tanzīh and tashbīh
Incomparability and similarity: the two ways of speaking of God, as beyond all likeness and as present in all things.
- Tapas
Austerity: the heat of spiritual discipline, through fasting, endurance and self-restraint.
- Tārā
The saviouress: a female buddha of compassionate action, especially beloved in Tibet.
- Ṭarīqa
The way: the Sufi path, and the Sufi orders that transmit it from master to disciple.
- Tat tvam asi
“That thou art”: the great saying of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad that the self is one with the ground of all.
- Tathāgata
“Thus gone” or “thus come”: the title the Buddha used of himself.
- Tathāgatagarbha
The womb or embryo of the Buddha: the teaching that every being contains the potential for buddhahood.
- Tattva
“Thatness”: a principle of reality, as in the twenty-five principles of Sāṃkhya or the thirty-six of Kashmir Śaivism.
- Tattvārtha Sūtra
Umāsvāti’s compendium of Jain doctrine, accepted by all Jain schools.
- Tawakkul
Trust in God: reliance on God for all things, a station of the Sufi path.
- Tawba
Repentance: turning back to God, the first station of the Sufi path.
- Tawḥīd
The oneness of God: the central affirmation of Islam, which Sufis seek to realize as lived experience.
- Teleology
Purposiveness: explanation of things by their ends or purposes, central to Aristotle.
- Ten fetters
The ten bonds, from self-view to ignorance, whose cutting marks the stages of awakening.
- Ten oxherding pictures
A Zen series of images showing the path from seeking the ox to returning to the marketplace with open hands.
- Teshuvah
Return: repentance in Judaism, the turning back of the soul to God.
- Tetragrammaton
The four-letter name of God, YHWH, too holy to be pronounced in Jewish practice.
- Tetralemma
The four-cornered logic: a thing is, is not, both is and is not, or neither.
- Theoria
Contemplation or vision: in Greek philosophy and Eastern Christianity, the beholding of divine truth.
- Theosis
Deification: the Eastern Christian teaching that human beings are called to become by grace what God is by nature.
- Theravāda
“The teaching of the elders”: the form of Buddhism of Sri Lanka and South-East Asia, based on the Pali canon.
- Theurgy
Divine work: the Neoplatonic ritual practices by which the soul is united with the gods.
- Thing-in-Itself
Kant’s Ding an sich: reality as it is apart from our ways of knowing it, which we cannot know.
- Three bodies of the Buddha
The dharma body, the enjoyment body and the emanation body: the Mahāyāna doctrine of the Buddha’s nature.
- Three Jewels
The Buddha, the Dhamma and the Saṅgha, in which Buddhists take refuge.
- Three Jewels (Jain)
Right faith, right knowledge and right conduct, which together form the Jain path to liberation.
- Three marks of existence
Impermanence, suffering and not-self: the characteristics of all conditioned things.
- Three natures
The imagined, the dependent and the perfected: Yogācāra’s analysis of how experience exists.
- Three poisons
Greed, hatred and delusion: the three roots of unwholesome action in Buddhism.
- Three teachings
Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, regarded in China as complementary paths.
- Three trainings
Ethics, concentration and wisdom: the threefold structure of the Buddhist path.
- Three treasures
Compassion, frugality and not daring to be first in the world: the treasures of the Daodejing.
- Three vehicles
The paths of the disciple, the solitary buddha and the bodhisattva, and their relation.
- Three ways
The purgative, illuminative and unitive ways: the classic stages of the Christian mystical path.
- Threefold truth
Emptiness, provisional existence and the middle: the Tiantai teaching that every phenomenon is all three at once.
- Tian
Heaven: the supreme power and moral order of Chinese religion and philosophy.
- Tianming
The mandate of heaven: heaven’s commission to rule, granted to the virtuous and withdrawn from the corrupt.
- Tiantai
The Chinese school founded by Zhiyi on the Lotus Sūtra, teaching the threefold truth and calm-and-insight meditation.
- Tiferet
Beauty: the central sefirah, harmonizing mercy and judgement, identified with the Holy One, blessed be he.
- Tikkun
Repair: the restoration of the broken divine order through prayer, commandments and right action.
- Timaeus
Plato’s dialogue on the creation of the cosmos by the demiurge, the most influential Platonic text in the Middle Ages.
- Tipiṭaka
The “three baskets”: the Pali canon of the Theravāda, comprising discipline, discourses and higher teaching.
- Tīrthaṅkara
A “ford-maker”: one of the twenty-four Jain teachers who crossed the stream of rebirth and showed the way.
- Todo y nada
“All and nothing”: John of the Cross’s teaching that to come to possess all, one must desire to possess nothing.
- Tonglen
Sending and taking: the Tibetan meditation of breathing in others’ suffering and breathing out happiness.
- Torah
Teaching: the five books of Moses, and in a wider sense the whole of Jewish revelation and learning.
- Traditionalism
The school of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, holding that the religions share a transcendent unity.
- Transcendence
The divine as surpassing the world, beyond all that is finite, conditioned and knowable.
- Transcendentalism
The New England movement of Emerson and Thoreau, holding that the divine is known by intuition in the soul and nature.
- Trika
The “triad”: the nondual Śaivism of Kashmir, taught by Abhinavagupta and others.
- Trimūrti
The triad of Brahmā the creator, Viṣṇu the preserver and Śiva the destroyer.
- Trinity
The Christian doctrine of one God in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
- Truth
What is so; for the contemplative traditions, also the Real itself, to be known and lived.
- Tulku
A recognized reincarnation of a Tibetan teacher, such as the Dalai Lama.
- Turīya
“The fourth”: pure consciousness beyond waking, dreaming and deep sleep, in the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad.
- Twelve links
The twelve links of dependent origination, from ignorance to ageing and death.
- Two truths
Conventional truth and ultimate truth: the Buddhist distinction between how things appear and how they are.
- Tzaddik
The righteous one: in Hasidism, the spiritual leader through whom divine blessing flows to the community.
- Tzimtzum
Contraction: Isaac Luria’s teaching that God withdrew into himself to make space for creation.
U
- Uncarved block
Pu: the simplicity of the Dao and of the sage, like wood before it is cut into vessels.
- Unconditioned
Asaṅkhata: that which is not produced by causes, the early Buddhist description of nirvāṇa.
- Uncreated light
The divine light seen by the hesychasts, identified with the light of Christ’s Transfiguration on Mount Tabor.
- Unitive Knowledge
Knowledge of reality by union with it, rather than by observation from outside; the theme of this site.
- Unitive way
The third stage of the mystical path: the soul’s union with God in love.
- Unity
Oneness: the experience or doctrine that all things are one, or one with their source.
- Unity of knowing and acting
Wang Yangming’s teaching that true knowledge is already action, and knowledge not acted on is not yet known.
- Unmoved mover
Aristotle’s first cause: eternal, unchanging thought that moves the cosmos as an object of love.
- Upādāna
Clinging or grasping: the intensified craving that binds beings to becoming.
- Upaniṣad
One of the philosophical texts that close the Vedas, teaching the identity of the self and Brahman.
- Upāsana
Devout meditation or worship: sitting near God in thought, often on a symbol or form of the divine.
- Upāya
A means: in Kashmir Śaivism, the four ways to realization, from the “no-means” to the individual means.
- Upekkhā
Equanimity: balanced, even-minded regard for all that arises, neither attracted nor repelled.
- Uposatha
The Buddhist observance day, at the new and full moon, when monks recite the rules and lay people keep extra precepts.
- Usefulness of the useless
The Zhuangzi’s teaching that what seems useless may flourish, like the gnarled tree no carpenter cuts.
- Uwaysī
A Sufi initiated by a dead master or by the Prophet in spirit, without a living teacher.
V
- Vāhigurū
“Wonderful Lord”: the name of God most used by Sikhs in prayer and meditation.
- Vairāgya
Dispassion: freedom from craving for the objects of this world and the next.
- Vaiśeṣika
The Indian school of natural philosophy that analyses the world into atoms and categories.
- Vajrayāna
The Diamond Vehicle: tantric Buddhism, with its mantras, maṇḍalas, deity yoga and initiations.
- Vaṇḍ Chhakṇā
Sharing what one has with others, especially the needy: a pillar of Sikh life.
- Vāsanā
A latent tendency: the subtle trace of past experience that colours perception and desire.
- Vassa
The rains retreat: the three months of the monsoon during which Buddhist monks stay in one place.
- Vedanā
Feeling: the pleasant, painful or neutral tone of every experience.
- Vedānta
The “end of the Veda”: the schools of Hindu philosophy that interpret the Upaniṣads, the Brahma Sūtras and the Gītā.
- Vedas
The oldest scriptures of Hinduism: four collections of hymns, ritual texts and philosophical teachings in Sanskrit.
- Veils
Ḥijāb: what conceals God from the soul, often said to be seventy thousand veils of light and darkness.
- Videhamukti
Disembodied liberation: the final freedom of the liberated one when the body falls away at death.
- View from above
The Stoic and Platonic exercise of imagining the world from a cosmic height, to see human affairs in proportion.
- Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra
A Śaiva tantra of 112 brief methods for entering the state of pure awareness.
- Vijñaptimātra
Representation-only: the Yogācāra thesis that what appears as an external world is only consciousness.
- Vimalakīrti Sūtra
A Mahāyāna sūtra in which a lay householder out-teaches the Buddha’s disciples, ending in a thunderous silence.
- Vimarśa
Reflective awareness: consciousness knowing itself, the dynamic aspect of Śiva in Kashmir Śaivism.
- Vinaya
The monastic discipline: the rules and procedures governing Buddhist monks and nuns.
- Viññāṇa
Consciousness: the awareness that arises at each of the six senses, the fifth aggregate.
- Vipāka
The ripening of karma: the results that intentional actions bring in this or future lives.
- Vipassanā
Insight: meditation that sees directly the impermanence, suffering and not-self of experience.
- Viraha
Love in separation: the longing of the devotee for the absent beloved, a central mood of devotion.
- Viśiṣṭādvaita
Qualified nondualism: Rāmānuja’s Vedānta, in which Brahman is one but qualified by real selves and matter.
- Viṣṇu
One of the principal gods of Hinduism, the preserver of the world, worshipped in his descents as Rāma and Kṛṣṇa.
- Visuddhimagga
The “Path of Purification”: Buddhaghosa’s fifth-century manual of the whole Theravāda path.
- Viśvarūpa
The universal form: Kṛṣṇa’s revelation of himself as the whole cosmos in the eleventh chapter of the Gītā.
- Vivarta
Apparent transformation: the Advaita view that the world is an appearance of Brahman, which does not itself change.
- Viveka
Discrimination: the discerning between the real and the unreal, the self and the not-self.
- Vivekacūḍāmaṇi
The “Crest-Jewel of Discrimination”: a classic verse manual of Advaita Vedānta attributed to Śaṅkara.
- Viveka-khyāti
Discriminative discernment: the knowledge that pure consciousness is distinct from matter, which liberates.
- Vṛtti
A movement or modification of the mind: thought, perception, memory, imagination or sleep.
W
- Waḥdat al-shuhūd
The oneness of witnessing: Aḥmad Sirhindī’s view that unity is experienced, not that creatures are God.
- Waḥdat al-wujūd
The oneness of being: the teaching, associated with Ibn ʿArabī, that there is only one true existence, God’s.
- Walden
Thoreau’s account of two years living simply by Walden Pond, a classic of contemplative life.
- Walī
A friend of God: a Muslim saint, one brought near to God.
- Wheel of life
The Tibetan image of saṃsāra: the six realms, the twelve links and the three poisons at the hub, held by Death.
- Who knows himself knows his Lord
A saying, cherished by Sufis, that self-knowledge is the way to knowledge of God.
- Wisdom
Knowledge joined to understanding and right living; in contemplative traditions, insight into ultimate truth.
- World soul
The soul of the cosmos, which animates and orders the universe as a living whole.
- Wu
Non-being or nothingness: in Chinese thought, the formless source from which being arises.
- Wu wei
Non-action or effortless action: acting in accord with the Dao, without forcing or contrivance.
- Wuji
The limitless: the undifferentiated source before all distinctions, prior to taiji.
- Wujūd
Being or existence: in Islamic philosophy and Sufism, the most fundamental concept, which in its fullness belongs to God.
- Wuxing
The five phases: wood, fire, earth, metal and water, the cycles of transformation in Chinese cosmology.
X
- Xian
Immortal: a Daoist adept who has transcended death, often pictured as dwelling in mountains or rising to heaven.
- Xiao
Filial piety: reverence and care for parents and ancestors, the root of virtue in Confucianism.
- Xin
Heart-mind: in Chinese thought, the single organ of feeling, thinking and willing.
- Xing
Nature: human nature, debated by Mencius, who thought it good, and Xunzi, who thought it bad.
- Xing and ming
Nature and destiny: in inner alchemy, the original nature of mind and the vital life of the body, both to be cultivated.
- Xu
Emptiness or tenuousness: the empty, receptive state of the mind that the Daoist sage cultivates.
- Xuanxue
Learning of the mysterious: the metaphysical revival of Daoist thought in third- and fourth-century China.
Y
- Yajña
Sacrifice: the Vedic fire ritual, and later any act offered to God.
- Yama
The ethical restraints of yoga: non-harming, truthfulness, non-stealing, chastity and non-possessiveness.
- Yantra
A sacred diagram used in tantric worship and meditation as the form of a deity.
- Yetzer ha-ra
The evil inclination: the human impulse toward selfishness and sin, balanced by the good inclination.
- Yi
Righteousness: doing what is right and fitting, one of the cardinal Confucian virtues.
- Yichudim
Unifications: kabbalistic meditations on divine names to unite the sefirot and the Shekhinah.
- Yijing
The Book of Changes: an ancient Chinese divination text of sixty-four hexagrams, with philosophical commentaries.
- Yin and yang
The complementary forces of Chinese thought: dark and light, receptive and active, whose interplay makes all change.
- Yoga
Union or discipline: the Indian methods of training body and mind for liberation, and the school of Patañjali.
- Yoga Sūtras
Patañjali’s classic aphorisms on yoga, defining it as the stilling of the movements of the mind.
- Yoga Vāsiṣṭha
A long dialogue in which the sage Vasiṣṭha teaches Prince Rāma that the world is a projection of the mind.
- Yogācāra
The “practice of yoga” school, which analyses experience as consciousness and its transformations.
- Yoniso manasikāra
Wise attention: attending to experience in a way that leads to understanding and away from suffering.
Z
- Zazen
Seated meditation: the central practice of Zen.
- Zen
The Japanese form of Chan Buddhism, centred on seated meditation and the direct realization of one’s true nature.
- Zhaozhou
A ninth-century Chinese Chan master famed for brief, ordinary replies that became classic kōans.
- Zhenren
The true person: the Zhuangzi’s name for the realized sage, free and in accord with heaven.
- Zhongyong
The Doctrine of the Mean: a Confucian classic on balance, harmony and sincerity.
- Zhuangzi
The book of the Daoist philosopher Zhuang Zhou: parables of freedom, relativity and the transformation of things.
- Ziran
Self-so: spontaneity, the natural way things are of themselves, which the Dao follows.
- Zohar
The Book of Radiance: the central work of Kabbalah, a mystical commentary on the Torah in Aramaic.
- Zuhd
Renunciation: detachment from the world and its pleasures, the early form of Islamic asceticism.
- Zuowang
Sitting and forgetting: the Daoist meditation of letting go of body, knowledge and self to merge with the Dao.