TributaryReflections
Separate streams, one river
The short version
Traditions separated by oceans and by thousands of years keep arriving at the same handful of insights, with no known contact between them. Sometimes they agree closely. More often they rhyme, and the places where they diverge turn out to also be interesting.
Tributary Reflections collects those convergences and divergences, traces every teaching back to a text you can go and read yourself, and tries to open the door to your own reflection. Ultimately, the most resonant lessons are self-derived.
Most spiritual writing today is either secular or sectarian. It will try to explain these traditions away or argue for one of them. I'm trying for a third option: taking the teachings seriously on their own terms, collectively rather than siloed, without asking you to join anything.
Adding to the choir
I recognize this is definitely not a new idea. People have been noticing these parallels for centuries, and a great deal has been written about them by scholars who have spent their lives on single or multiple traditions. This is not a claim that I cracked the code or am inventing something novel. I just want to add one more voice in a chorus that was already singing, hopefully contribute some value to others' lives, and continue to learn more about these traditions by creating.
The method
I spent several years as an army intelligence officer. That work is built on coalescing multiple sources into as full a picture as can be derived with the information available. You look for where they corroborate, you weight that corroboration by how genuinely independent the sources are, and you pay close attention to where they disagree. You also clearly state what is your opinion and what comes from the source reporting. These are all features I hope to incorporate into this project.
Two sources agreeing tells you very little if the second is parroting the first. It is the same here. A Stoic and a Christian writer landing in the same place is less remarkable than it first appears, because one grew up inside a world the other had already shaped.
That is why the dates and the places sit under every teaching. They help show how close or far apart these teachers were when they transferred their ideas.
Where there is a plausible line of influence, I will do my best to call that out. Thoreau was reading Hindu scripture at Walden and said so, which makes his agreement with the Bhagavad Gita weaker evidence, not stronger.
Where the teachings come from
Every teaching in this library is traced to a specific edition of a specific text, and the edition is named. There is a fixed list of source texts, and nothing is drawn from outside it. If a passage cannot be traced to something on that list it won't be presented as source material.
Everything is drawn from works in the public domain, so you can follow any citation and read the surrounding passage for free.
On paraphrase
Most of what you will read here is paraphrase rather than quotation. The teachings are rendered in plain modern English, usually shorter than the original, and that rendering is a judgement call that can be got wrong.
This is the main reason the citations are there. They are not ornament and they are not there to look rigorous. They are there so you can check a rendering against the passage it came from and draw your own conclusions about what the writer was actually trying to say.
The two main reasons I pull from the public domain are to respect the ownership of copyrighted works and also to allow you to follow the threads for free as opposed to buying someone's book.
Also worth pointing out, for the non-Western traditions, it usually means I pulled from a nineteenth century translation by European scholars. Many of them had their own agendas and views that I do not endorse and could muddy the authenticity of the original.
Where possible, the paraphrase works from the sense of the passage rather than the Victorian phrasing and is cross-checked against a modern translation even where that translation cannot be quoted. It is a mitigation rather than a fix, and it is worth knowing about as you read.
Opinions
Occasionally there will be opinions here, and they will be marked as such. But the point is not to tell you what to think about any of this. I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't passionate about this subject and I like to speak my mind on it.
However, the primary point is to put the teachings in front of you with enough context that you can form your own view, and to make the sources easy enough to check that you can go past this site entirely if you want to.
Mistakes
I will make many mistakes. I am looking at many traditions across millennia, and people have devoted lifetimes to just one of these traditions without exhausting it. Some of the citations will turn out to be wrong. Some of the paraphrases will be more accurate than others.
That being said, when you find an error, please tell me. If you know one of these traditions from the inside and something here reads wrongly, that is exactly the kind of thing worth hearing. This project comes from a place of wanting to learn what these traditions have to teach and many people out there know far more about them than I do. If you're one of them and you notice a flaw in my analysis or thinking, please help me to better understand what you know and think.
I am a real person who actually reads the emails that come in, and I can only learn what people are willing to teach.
Hear when there is something new
No schedule and no daily anything. Just a note when I publish something worth reading.
Nothing else, ever. Unsubscribe any time. How I handle your address
My content is free to everyone and free of ads. If you would like to put something toward the time it takes, there is a tip jar. There is nothing behind it and nothing to unlock.
Leave a tip