A family of traditions rather than a single system.
9 topics · 8 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Songs of Kabir
Kabir · 1450
Verse by the fifteenth-century weaver-poet insisting God is found through direct devotion within the heart, and mocking the external ritual of Hindu…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Bhagavad Gita
Anonymous · 200 BCE
A conversation on a battlefield about duty, detachment and action without attachment to its fruits — the core text of Hindu practice.
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Jaina Sutras
Anonymous · 300 BCE
Sets out the ascetic disciplines and the vow of non-violence at the centre of Jain monastic life, in words attributed to Mahavira and transmitted…
+2 more at this level
8 works
Kabir
Verse by the fifteenth-century weaver-poet insisting God is found through direct devotion within the heart, and mocking the external ritual of Hindu and Muslim orthodoxy alike.
about 65 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Anonymous
A conversation on a battlefield about duty, detachment and action without attachment to its fruits — the core text of Hindu practice.
about 80 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Robert Ernest Hume
Translates the foundational philosophical texts of the Vedic corpus, whose recurring claim is that the innermost self and the ultimate ground of the universe are one and the same thing.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Anonymous
Sets out the household rituals marking a Brahmin life from birth to death — naming, initiation, marriage, funeral — as a domestic counterpart to the public Vedic sacrifice.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Max Arthur Macauliffe
Translates and narrates the lives of the ten Sikh Gurus alongside selections from the Guru Granth Sahib, compiled specifically to correct what its author saw as missionary and colonial misrepresentation of the tradition.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Anonymous
Sets out the ascetic disciplines and the vow of non-violence at the centre of Jain monastic life, in words attributed to Mahavira and transmitted through his disciples.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Patanjali
Sets out an eight-limbed path toward stilling the fluctuations of the mind, treating physical posture as only a minor preliminary to what is fundamentally a philosophy of concentration.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Adi Shankara
A line-by-line commentary on the Brahma Sutras arguing the world's plurality is ultimately an illusion superimposed on one undifferentiated reality, and that liberation is simply recognising this.
about 13 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026