Traditions that fit poorly into Western categories of religion.
9 topics · 8 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Treatise on Response and Retribution
Anonymous · 1150
A popular morality tract teaching that spirits record every human deed and dispense fortune or misfortune accordingly, the single most widely…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Analects
Confucius · 450 BCE
Short recorded exchanges on ritual, duty and character that became the operating ethic of East Asian public life for two millennia.
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Li Ki (Book of Rites)
Anonymous · 100 BCE
Codifies the mourning periods, sacrificial offerings and ancestral-tablet rites owed to different degrees of kin, treating correct performance of…
+2 more at this level
8 works
Anonymous
A popular morality tract teaching that spirits record every human deed and dispense fortune or misfortune accordingly, the single most widely circulated text of Chinese folk-religious Daoism.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Confucius
Short recorded exchanges on ritual, duty and character that became the operating ethic of East Asian public life for two millennia.
about 2 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Ō no Yasumaro
Japan's oldest surviving chronicle, deriving the genealogy of the imperial line directly from the actions of the kami — the founding text of Shinto mythology and of the emperor's claimed divine descent.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Frank Hamilton Cushing
Documents the Zuni system of stone and shell fetish objects tied to hunting and healing, based on the author's unusual years of embedded fieldwork living within Zuni Pueblo society — a landmark of early participant-observation whose outsider authority the Zuni have themselves since contested.
about 70 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026John S. Mbiti
Argues that African traditional religions share a coherent underlying philosophy of time, community and the living-dead, despite enormous variation between individual peoples and languages.
Anonymous
Codifies the mourning periods, sacrificial offerings and ancestral-tablet rites owed to different degrees of kin, treating correct performance of these obligations as inseparable from being a moral person at all.
link checked 17 Sept 2026J. J. M. de Groot
A detailed ethnography of Chinese funerary and ancestral practice arguing Chinese religion is best understood not as a set of doctrines but as one integrated system of ideas about the dead.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Waldemar Bogoras
A firsthand ethnography of Chukchee shamanic practice in Siberia — spirit possession, drumming, trance — treated as a coherent religious system rather than as primitive superstition, unusually for its period.
link checked 17 Sept 2026