Category: Guru & Living Tradition
-
Sahaja: The Natural State
Sahaja names a state the tradition insists is not achieved through effort but simply recognised once the effort of maintaining a false self stops.
-
Maranasmriti: Keeping Death in View
Maranasmriti is the practice of keeping death in view, not as morbidity but as a corrective to forgetting. How and why the tradition prescribes it.
-
Prasad: Why Food Becomes Grace After It’s Offered
Prasad is food that has been offered and returned. The tradition is precise that nothing physical changes, and equally precise that something does.
-
Dharma Sankata: When Two Duties Collide
Dharma sankata is the term for two genuine duties pointing opposite ways. How the tradition handles moral dilemmas without pretending they resolve.
-
Rna: The Three Debts Every Life Owes
The three debts, or rna, are owed to the sages, the ancestors and the gods. Why the Vedas say every person is born already in debt, and how it is repaid.
-
What Exactly Is It That Is Reborn
If the true self never changes, what is reborn? Vedanta says the subtle body carries forward, not the Atman. What reincarnation actually moves.
-
Karma: Sanchita, Prarabdha and Kriyamana
The three types of karma: sanchita, stored; prarabdha, now ripening; kriyamana, being made. Which of the three can actually be changed.
-
Why a Guru Tests a Student Before Teaching Them
Why does a guru test a student before teaching? Refusals, delays and odd tasks recur so often in the tradition that the pattern is deliberate.
-
The Alvars and Nayanars: Poet-Saints of Devotion
Between the sixth and ninth centuries, poets in Tamil country began addressing God in their own language, and the bhakti movement started there.
-
Why Disagreement Was Institutionalised Rather Than Suppressed
Six orthodox schools and several heterodox ones disagreed openly, and none was suppressed by force. How Indian philosophy institutionalised disagreement.
-
The Jain Position on Non-Violence and Knowledge
The Jain position joins ahimsa, total non-violence, with anekantavada, the partiality of every viewpoint. Why the pairing matters.
-
Samsara: Why the Wheel Keeps Turning
Samsara literally means flowing together. Why the wheel of rebirth keeps turning, and why the tradition cares more about the cause than the mechanics.
-
The Mandukya Upanishad in Twelve Verses
The shortest of the principal Upanishads, at just twelve verses, is also considered by many in the tradition to be philosophically the most complete.
-
How an Oral Tradition Achieved Near-Perfect Transmission
The Vedas were passed down orally for over a thousand years with almost no drift. The recitation methods that made that oral tradition so exact.
-
Shruti and Smriti: Heard Versus Remembered
Hindu textual tradition divides its scripture into two categories with different claimed authority: what was heard, and what is remembered.
-
Vishwakarma: The Architect of the Gods
Vishwakarma built Lanka, Dwarka and the weapons of the gods. Why a tradition so focused on liberation also honours the divine architect of making.
-
Kartikeya: The General Born of Fire
Kartikeya, also called Skanda and Murugan, was born of fire for one task: to defeat the asura Taraka. Why the war god had to exist at all.
-
Why There Appear to Be Many When There Is Only One
If only one reality exists, why does experience look so varied? Advaita’s answer is upadhi, the limiting adjunct that makes one appear as many.
-
Anahata: The Sound That Nothing Strikes
Anahata nada is the unstruck sound, the one sound not made by two things meeting. How the tradition builds a practice of listening for it.
-
What Was There Before There Was Anything
What was there before there was anything? Sanatan thought suspects the question itself is malformed, and says so in its oldest texts.
-
Why Sanatan Dharma Has No Founder and No Founding Date
Every major world tradition names a founder and a moment of founding. Sanatan Dharma names neither, and the absence is a claim, not a gap in the record.