Union Compass
A handful of crystals.
Small enough to carry.
The culminating view. Seventeen concerns where the traditions converge, ~32 terms each tradition keeps in its native form, and thirteen disagreements kept, not forced together.
Standpoint Why this approach?
This compass treats each tradition as potentially complementary, not competing for the whole truth.
When twelve traditions, developed across millennia and continents under different cosmologies, converge on the same concern — human dignity, restraint of greed, care for the stranger, honesty in speech — that convergence is evidence. Not proof, but a signal worth attending to.
And when those traditions diverge on something each considers essential — the self, the ultimate, grace versus effort, linear versus cyclical time — that divergence is evidence too. Evidence that the question is genuinely open, and that forcing agreement would lose information.
Most traditions reject this standpoint. We own it. We don't claim it's neutral ground.
The Union Compass
The final deliverable of Plan 010 and the proposal's Sense-2 "union, not intersection". It is earned on top of the Atlas — never a shortcut around it. It draws its shared grounding from the convergence matrix, reads every convergence through surface-vs-foundation.md, preserves the jewels named in structural-analysis.md, and holds the divergences recorded in divergence-map.md.
Standpoint preamble (read this first — it is the whole point)
This is a pluralist synthesis that owns its standpoint. It is one structured reading, not an authoritative one, and it is not neutral ground above the traditions.
Four commitments govern everything below, and they are what make this a union and not an intersection:
Union, not intersection. An intersection compass keeps only what all traditions agree on — and so throws away exactly the untranslatable contributions that make each tradition worth consulting, leaving a bland humanist residue that belongs to no one. This compass does the opposite. It is the assembled whole — hesed and anattā and wu wei and ren each kept in its own language, arranged by the human concern it illuminates. The compass is richer than any single tradition, the way the elephant is larger than what any one blind man touches. Nothing distinctive is flattened to fit.
Shared grounding is convergence-as-evidence, never doctrine. Where the convergence matrix shows that roughly N≥3 traditions across D≥3 independent lineages make the same claim, this compass treats it as a broadly-attested human finding worth standing on. But the pool is not commensurable — there is no shared authority, metaphysics, or arbiter. So a shared claim is evidence, not proof, and every shared claim is presented with the note that the warrants underneath differ (the why is not shared — see surface-vs-foundation.md).
Tensions are held, not smoothed. Some of the traditions' deepest claims directly contradict one another — the self (anattā vs ātman vs created soul), the ultimate goal (cessation vs union vs communion vs world-renovation), grace vs self-effort, theism vs non-theism, linear vs cyclical time. This compass records these as honestly-held tensions and does not resolve them. Holding them is not a failure of the work; it is the honest result of it. Forcing them into harmony would be the one move the methodology forbids — "doctrinal smoothing" — made the design goal.
The standpoint is owned, not smuggled in. Reading the traditions as potentially-complementary partial views of a shared reality is itself a contestable position (akin to religious pluralism, or to the Bahá'í oneness-of-religion claim) that most traditions' own self-understanding rejects — each claiming distinct or final, not partial, truth. We adopt this standpoint deliberately and name it. We do not present it as a neutral vantage above the faiths, and we do not adopt the Bahá'í oneness-of-religion meta-claim as our ground (that would smuggle one tradition's doctrine in as neutral territory — see the held tension on religion itself, below).
What this is built from, and what it is not. Built from the 12 per-tradition N=3 distillations, using public-domain or freely-available translations, with quotes pending the Phase 7 char-for-char and within-tradition review audit. No within-tradition reviewers have yet ratified these readings.
It is NOT a replacement for any tradition's own rooted compass. A family that lives within a tradition should use that tradition's compass — anchored in its own source, making no claim about the others. This union compass is for a different reader: the seeker or family drawn to interfaith common ground in the AI age, who wants to see the whole elephant.
Part 1 — The shared grounding (organized by human concern)
A claim appears here only where the convergence matrix attests it at roughly N≥3, D≥3 (independent lineages), and it is always shown with its plural warrants. Read each as: this is a broadly cross-validated human claim — and the traditions reach it for incompatible reasons, which the union preserves rather than erases. The strongest convergences lead.
R5 (2026-05-29) added a 13th concern — Covenant — the rare case where the warrants genuinely cluster rather than fracture; a near-same-warrant convergence within the Abrahamic+Zoroastrian stream now textually attested on all four sides.
Plan 013 Phase 5 (2026-05-30) adds 4 more concerns — concerns 14 to 17 — surfaced by the deeper N=3 corpus and confirmed by Phase 4 Atlas re-attestation: Role-relational ethics (the named-role-pairs-with-mutual-duties form, MAJORITY), Trustworthiness (the binding-word virtue, near-UNIVERSAL claim-level), Festival cycle / sacred-time architecture (canonical cyclical observance, MAJORITY), and Administrative order / institutional governance (community-self-governance form, MODERATE-at-densely-scriptural-codification). v1.4 prose discipline: native terms appear in glossary anchors and direct quotation; synthesis prose is English.
1. Reciprocity — the Golden Rule
The single cleanest convergence in the Atlas (matrix Theme 6; N=12, D≈12).
Shared claim: Treat others as you would be treated; do not do to others what you would not want done to you.
Attested by: Confucianism (shu, Analects 15:23) · Judaism (Hillel, Lev 19:18; R5: Tobit 4:16 deuterocanonical negative form — "do that to no man which thou hatest") · Christianity (Matt 7:12 per-verse — "all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets") · Jainism (Āk I.4.2.6) · Bahá'í (Aqdas) · Islam · Buddhism (Dhp 129; R5: DN 31 Sigālovāda — the lay-life six directions of mutual duty, parents/children, teachers/pupils, husband/wife, friends, employer/worker, monastics/laity) · Hinduism · Sikhism · Taoism · Zoroastrianism · Shinto.
Warrant note: Confucian shu (negative form), Hillel's negative form, Tobit's deuterocanonical negative form, and the Gospel's positive form are near-verbatim cousins. Uniquely, in Jainism the claim and the warrant align — reciprocity grounded in the shared aversion to pain ("as it would be unto thee, so it is with him whom thou intendest to kill") — a rare same-claim/same-warrant genuine cross-validation. Elsewhere the why differs (covenant command, cultivated relational nature, no-self insight), but the rule itself is the most robustly shared finding in the pool. R5: a structural sub-convergence is now canonically visible — Buddhist DN 31 Sigālovāda, Confucian wǔlún, and the Pauline household codes all articulate reciprocity as six-direction mutual social duty, with Sigālovāda distinctive in having no vow of obedience anywhere (Rhys Davids' note). See Bible Sermon on the Mount per-verse and Buddhism DN 31.
2. The inviolable worth of every person — human dignity
The broadest single claim-convergence in the pool (matrix Theme 3; N≈12, D≈12; the showcase surface-convergence, §A).
Shared claim: Every human being has a worth that is not reducible to status, capacity, productivity, or achievement.
Attested by: Christianity (imago Dei; R5 per-verse: Gen 1:27 + Gen 9:6 + Matt 25:40 — "inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these") · Judaism (b'tzelem Elohim, Gen 1:27 per-verse) · Islam (Q 17:70, 49:13 per-ayah) · Sikhism (one Bestower; langar) · Bahá'í · Zoroastrianism · Hinduism (the one Self in all; R5: Chānd 6 tat tvam asi ×9 + Bṛh 1.4.10 aham brahmāsmi — dignity-from-identity now per-verse anchored) · Buddhism (worth by attainment, not birth) · Jainism (every jīva) · Confucianism (moral nobility) · Taoism (goodness "to the good and bad alike") · Shinto.
Warrant note (this is the showcase): the claim is genuinely shared; the reason fractures into at least five irreconcilable families — bestowed by a personal God (the six theist columns) vs metaphysical identity (Hindu ātman=brahman: dignity follows because the other is oneself) vs shared suffering without any self (Buddhist anattā) vs cultivated achievement (Confucian junzi) vs the impersonal Dao's impartiality (Taoism). Stand on the claim ("treat every person as of inviolable worth"); adopt none of these as "the" reason. For the AI age this is the hinge: a person is never to be reduced to data, output, or utility.
3. Non-harm and compassion
The architecture's own worked example of surface convergence (matrix Theme 5; N≈12, D≈12; §C).
Shared claim: Do not harm living beings; meet others with compassion, mercy, loving-kindness.
Attested by: Buddhism (mettā; "hatred ceases not by hatred," Dhp 5; R5: DN 31 Sigālovāda — six directions of householder non-harm) · Jainism (ahiṃsā) · Hinduism (the one Self in all) · Christianity (agapē; R5 per-verse: Matt 5:44 "love your enemies, bless them that curse you"; Matt 5:38–42 the non-retaliation pericope) · Judaism (hesed, Lev 19:18 per-verse) · Islam (raḥma, Q 5:32 per-ayah) · Sikhism (daya, seva) · Confucianism (ren) · Bahá'í · Zoroastrianism · Taoism ("recompense injury with kindness," TTC 63) · Shinto.
Warrant note: the warrants span every metaphysical family in the pool — no-self insight, "God IS love," divine command, karma-as-matter, identity-of-Self, cultivated nature, the impersonal Dao, cosmic-war allegiance. The architecture's caution stands: Buddhism and Islam both affirm compassion, but on anattā vs the tawḥīd-grounded mercy of a personal God. The scope also diverges (see the held tension on non-harm's limits, below).
4. Truthfulness
Matrix Theme 7; N≈12, D≈12; §G.
Shared claim: Truthfulness is a binding virtue; truth is a real good, not a convenience.
Attested by: Zoroastrianism (Asha — truth fused with cosmic order; the Druj/Lie is the enemy; R5: per-passage at Yasna 30:5, 31:5, 43:1, Yasht 10 — the strongest single-tradition canonical density for "truth as cosmic order" in the pool) · Judaism (no false witness — Decalogue per-verse; honest weights) · Christianity (truth as a common good; Christ "the truth") · Islam · Sikhism (sach/sat) · Confucianism (cheng; zhengming — names answering reality) · Buddhism/Hinduism (truth as liberating insight) · Bahá'í (R5: independent investigation of truth now Íqán-anchored) · Taoism (R5: zhēn P18 — authenticity as Heaven-given spontaneity, a second Taoist truth-warrant alongside the apophatic "sincere words are not fine") · Shinto (makoto) · Jainism (satya).
Warrant note: warrants range from truth-as-cosmic-order (Zor) to truth-as-ontological-power (Con cheng) to truth-as-liberating-insight (Bud/Hin) to truth-as-divine-command (Abrahamic) to truth-as-wordless (Taoism, which from inside relativizes the propositional claim) and truth-as-conditional (Jain syādvāda). The convergence on being truthful is robust; the convergence on what truth is is not. For AI: do not deceive, fabricate, or flatter — the ancient convergence on truthful speech bears on the contemporary algorithmic public square.
5. Mastery of desire
Matrix Theme 10; N=12, D≈12; §D.
Shared claim: Disordered desire and acquisitiveness are a root human malady; self-mastery is central to the good life.
Attested by: Buddhism (taṇhā) · Hinduism (kāma the enemy; the "gates of hell") · Jainism (aparigraha) · Taoism ("no fault greater than the wish to be getting," TTC 46) · Christianity ("cannot serve God and Mammon") · Islam (taqwā; wealth a trust) · Confucianism (subdue self, return to li) · Sikhism (haumai) · Zoroastrianism · Bahá'í (detachment).
Warrant note: the scope of the indictment diverges along the rebirth line. For the Indian-origin traditions, desire itself (Buddhist taṇhā most radically) chains one to saṃsāra; for the Abrahamic traditions only disordered desire — desire against right worship — is the malady, and rightly-ordered desire is commanded. Directly load-bearing for a family in a consumer-and-algorithm age: gently counter grasping, comparison, and manufactured craving.
6. Humility, simplicity, and the limit of human knowing
Two converging concerns: humility/simplicity (Theme 11, N=12) and epistemic humility (Theme 21, N=12, D≈12).
Shared claim: Live simply and humbly; revere the limit of human knowing; resist glib certainty.
Attested by: Taoism ("to know that one does not know is the highest"; return to the uncarved block, pu) · Buddhism (contentment the greatest wealth; paññā over mere learning) · Jainism (aparigraha; anekāntavāda) · Christianity (the Beatitudes; kenōsis; "fear of the Lord begins wisdom") · Hinduism (the Self "cannot be attained by argument") · Judaism ("walk humbly"; "lean not on thine own understanding") · Confucianism (the junzi in awe of Heaven's ordinances) · Islam · Sikhism · Bahá'í · Zoroastrianism · Shinto.
Warrant note: simplicity's warrants split (return-to-original-nature vs ascetic karma-shedding vs imitation of a self-emptying God vs detachment-for-liberation vs cultivated character). For the AI age this ancient cross-tradition convergence (knowing-by-unknowing) grounds an anti-transhumanist posture: the human limit is to be honored, not engineered away. Anekāntavāda (formal many-sidedness of truth) and Taoist apophasis are jewels here (Part 2).
7. Justice and care for the vulnerable
Matrix Theme 8; N=8, D=7 for the structural form — meets the bar.
Shared claim: Justice and fair dealing are central; the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable have a claim on us.
Attested by: Judaism (tzedek/mishpat; the widow, orphan, poor; Amos 5:24) · Christianity (preferential option for the poor) · Islam (ʿadl; zakāt) · Sikhism (honest livelihood; against exploitation) · Bahá'í ("justice the best-beloved of all things") · Zoroastrianism · Confucianism ("the people are the most important element"). The Indian-origin traditions (Hin/Bud/Jai/Tao) affirm generosity and non-acquisitiveness, but frame it individually/ascetically rather than as social-structural justice.
Warrant note: the structural-redistributive form (jubilee, zakāt) is distinctively the Abrahamic + Confucian stream. The prophetic "justice over empty ritual" (Jud/Chr/Isl) is itself a sub-convergence. The held difference of emphasis (structural vs ascetic-individual) is honest, not smoothed.
8. Honest work has dignity
Matrix Theme 18; N=10, D≈9; §H. A notable convergence for a family compass.
Shared claim: Honest, productive work has dignity; exploitation defiles.
Attested by: Sikhism (kirat karnī — "milk from the honest, blood from the bribed") · Zoroastrianism ("he who sows corn, sows holiness") · Bahá'í (work "exalted to the rank of worship") · Christianity (the dignity of work; the person an end, never a means) · Confucianism · Taoism · Hinduism (karma-yoga) · Judaism (labour balanced by Shabbat rest) · Islam (honest measure).
Warrant note: Sikh, Zoroastrian, Bahá'í, and Christian warrants converge unusually closely — work as a form of worship/holiness — a same-claim/near-same-warrant node. The Hindu karma-yoga warrant (work as detachment-discipline) diverges in aim; the renunciant traditions (Bud/Jai) subordinate work to liberation and sit outside the claim. For the AI age: the insistence that the worker is an end, never a means, and automation must serve persons is the contemporary edge of this ancient convergence.
9. Community, family, and the common good
Two majority convergences kept together: community/common good (Theme 12, N=11, D≈10) and family/elders (Theme 9, N=11, D≈10).
Shared claim: The human person is communal; the good of each is bound to the good of all; family and elders are a primary good to be honored.
Attested by (community): Christianity ("no one is saved alone"; solidarity, subsidiarity) · Sikhism (sangat, langar) · Confucianism (self → family → state → world) · Islam (the ummah; shūrā) · Judaism (covenant people) · Bahá'í (oneness of humanity) · Zoroastrianism · Hinduism (lokasaṃgraha) · Taoism · Shinto (matsuri). (family): Confucianism (xiao — "the root of all benevolent actions") · Christianity (the family as fundamental cell) · Islam · Judaism · Sikhism (the householder-saint) · Bahá'í (the family the first school) · Zoroastrianism · Taoism · Shinto · Hinduism.
Warrant note: a real divergence runs inside both themes and is held, not smoothed — communal soteriology (saved "with one's family") vs individual soteriology (Buddhist/Jain liberation is self-won), and the householder ideal vs the renunciant ideal of where holiness is lived (see the held tension on world-affirming vs world-renouncing, below — flagged as a "natural anchor for a family compass"). The householder convergence (Confucian xiao, the Sikh householder-saint, the Christian primacy of the family) grounds a family-centered use of this compass.
10. There is a describable good life
Matrix Theme 16; N=12, D≈12.
Shared claim: There is a real good human life — not mere preference-satisfaction — and it is recognizably describable.
Attested by: all twelve, with strong convergence on its components — virtue, right relationships, moderation, meaningful work, inner peace — strikingly cross-legible even though the summum bonum (union with God vs liberation vs harmony) diverges.
Warrant note: the picture of a flourishing life converges; the final goal it points to does not (see the held tension on the ultimate goal, below). The union stands on the cross-legible picture and leaves the summum bonum to each tradition.
11. Restraint of speech
Matrix Theme 17; N=12, D≈12.
Shared claim: Restrain harmful speech; match words to deeds; truth and peace in how we speak.
Attested by: all twelve — Buddhism (restrain speech) · Jainism (satya, speak after deliberation) · Islam ("neither defame nor mock," Q 49:11–12) · Confucianism (zhengming) · Taoism ("he who knows does not speak") · Bahá'í ("let deeds be your adorning") · Shinto (makoto) and the rest.
Warrant note: the speech-ethics convergence extends naturally into the digital and algorithmic public square — a contemporary application of a very old convergence, directly relevant to families navigating AI-generated content.
12. Reverence for the natural world
Matrix Theme 19; N=12, with very different intensity and warrant.
Shared claim: The natural world is owed reverence and responsibility.
Attested by: Shinto (kami in nature) · Zoroastrianism (creation "cries for a protector") · Judaism ("dress and keep" the earth, Gen 2:15) · Christianity (stewardship; "the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor") · Islam (khalīfa; creation as āyāt) · Hinduism · Jainism (ahiṃsā to elemental life) · Taoism (ziran) · Sikhism ("air the guru, water our father, earth our mother") · Bahá'í · Confucianism · Buddhism.
Warrant note: warrant fractures sharply — nature is divine (Shinto animism, Hindu one-Self) vs nature is God's creation to steward (Jud/Chr/Isl/Zor) vs nature is the self-so Dao to accord with (Tao). Jain ahiṃsā-to-elemental-life and Shinto kami-in-nature are the most radical (jewels, Part 2).
13. Covenant — the binding word (new in R5)
Matrix Theme 14a (new row, N=4, D=4 within the Abrahamic+Zoroastrian stream); surface §I. The most consequentially newly-crisp finding of R5 — a rare convergence where the warrants genuinely cluster rather than fracture.
Shared claim: Human life is held within a binding mutual word — a personal divine guarantor, named human parties, named ethical content, lifelong (or beyond-lifelong) obligation.
Attested by: Judaism (berit — God binds Himself to all life at the rainbow, Gen 9; to Abraham, Gen 15:6 + 12:1–3 — "in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed"; to Israel at Sinai, Ex 19:5–6; renewed "written on the heart," Jer 31:31–34) · Christianity (the Sinai covenant fulfilled and renewed: 2 Cor 3:6 "the new covenant… not of the letter, but of the spirit"; the Decalogue per-verse retained, the Shema taken up by Jesus as the Greatest Commandment) · Islam (mīthāq / ʿahd — the primordial covenant "Am I not your Lord? They said, Yea" Q 7:172; covenant-fidelity named among the duties, Q 5:1 "fulfil your covenants," Q 17:34 "be faithful in keeping your engagements"; the ummah a covenanted community) · Zoroastrianism (the R3-added Mithra-covenant — Yt 10:1 "I created Mithra… as worthy of sacrifice, as worthy of prayer as myself, Ahura Mazda"; Yt 10:24 "the ruffian who lies unto Mithra brings death unto the whole country"; the bond rises through concentric social rings, ×20 friend → ×10,000 joined to Mazda's law).
Warrant note — this is the unusual one. Unlike the dignity / compassion / desire / goal convergences whose warrants fracture into many irreconcilable families, here the warrants cluster: a personal, all-seeing, righteous God-or-yazata who institutes the contract, remembers it, and guarantees it; the keeper is bound by the act of promising irrespective of the other party's merit. This is therefore closer to a same-claim/same-warrant convergence than to a surface convergence — one of the cleanest near-same-warrant nodes in the entire corpus. The R3 corpus turns the covenant theme from a Judaism-only WEAK-distinctive (as it was in the first matrix) into a MODERATE-within-cluster convergence. Caveat: the cluster is internal to the Abrahamic+Zoroastrian stream and does not extend to the Eastern traditions, where the covenantal form is largely absent (the bond between practitioner and the path is contractual in practice — the precepts, the vows — but not covenantal in the binding-by-promise-from-the-divine sense). The Bahá'í "Covenant" (God's covenant with humanity through the succession of Manifestations) is structurally related but warranted on the P2 progressive-revelation meta-claim — a partial extension, not a full member. For the AI age: the covenant convergence is directly relevant to families thinking about the kind of bond an AI system can and cannot have with them — promises, mutual obligations, the keeping of a word over time — and to the older theological question of whether algorithmic agents can be parties to anything resembling a covenantal relationship at all.
14. Trustworthiness — the binding word of one's own self (new in Plan 013 Phase 5)
Matrix Theme 7a (new row, N=7, D=6; MAJORITY → near-UNIVERSAL claim-level); surface §L. The convergence is broader than Covenant (concern 13) and warrants more loosely. Surfaced because the Phase-1 Confucian retrofit made xin a standalone N=3 principle — the missing anchor that lifts trustworthiness from a distributed sub-element to a named cross-tradition theme.
Shared claim: Keeping faith with one's own plighted word is a binding virtue, interpersonal and (in many traditions) political; it is the binding tissue without which relationship and polity dissolve.
Attested by: Confucianism (xin 信 — trustworthiness, the fifth of the Five Constants; Analects 1:4 Tsang's daily self-examination; Analects 2:22 — "how is a man without truthfulness to get on?"; Analects 12:7 — "if the people have no faith in their rulers, there is no standing for the State") · Judaism (emet אֱמֶת — truth/faithfulness; God abundant in ḥesed and emet, Ex 34:6; honest weights, Lev 19:36; the prophet's word tested, Deut 18:21–22) · Christianity (pistis πίστις / fidelitas — faith/faithfulness; the theological-virtue triad at 1 Cor 13:13; Christ "the faithful and true witness," Rev 3:14) · Islam (amāna أَمَانَة — the trust, Q 33:72; "honest measure," Q 83:1–3; fidelity to covenants, Q 5:1 + Q 17:34; the ummah as covenanted community) · Sikhism (sat / sach ਸਤਿ — truth as the very name of God; honest livelihood; the sangat-and-pangat institutional twin lives on trust) · Bahá'í (P12 — "let deeds, not words, be your adorning"; trustworthiness, patience, and detachment named as the constitutive virtues; the House of Justice members as "the trusted ones of the Merciful among men," Aqdas ¶30) · Zoroastrianism (Asha-aligned word + Mithra-covenant — the ethical triad humata-hūkhta-hvarshta; the bond rises in weight through concentric social rings, friend × 20, partner × 40, spouse × 50, parent–child × 100, between nations × 1,000, joined to Mazda's law × 10,000) · Buddhism affirms the false-speech-precept (musāvādā veramaṇī, the fourth of the Five Precepts) but warrants karmically-soteriologically rather than relationally · Hindu, Taoist, Jain, Shinto traditions affirm the virtue with thinner doctrinal standalone weighting.
Warrant note — surface §L's finding. Across the seven canonically-anchored traditions the claim converges very widely; the warrants cluster more tightly than dignity (concern 2) or compassion (concern 3) for the theist columns. In five of the seven, trustworthiness mirrors God's own truthfulness or covenant-fidelity (Jewish emet, Christian pistis, Islamic amāna, Sikh sat, Bahá'í trustworthiness). The Confucian warrant is distinctively this-worldly and role-relational — xin binds because zhengming requires it (one keeps the role one names) and because polity collapses without it (Analects 12:7), not because God keeps faith. The Zoroastrian warrant is distinctively cosmic-dualist — lying as a cosmic offence in the war between Asha and Druj — and divinely-guaranteed in the contract-keeping sense via Mithra. This is therefore the surface convergence with the closest warrant-cluster after Covenant (concern 13), with a distinctively this-worldly Confucian warrant extending the cluster slightly beyond the theist columns. The Atlas-distinctive political-form finding — Confucian xin as the irreducible ground of the state — has no exact analogue in pre-modern Abrahamic political theology and is a Confucian-distinctive contribution preserved among the jewels (Part 2). For the AI age and for families: trustworthiness in word and deed is daily-load-bearing, and AI systems are weak-trust agents whose claims must be checked because they keep promises only as their training and incentives allow. The ancient convergence — the keeper is bound by the act of promising — names the virtue an AI system structurally cannot bear and a person must.
15. Role-relational ethics — the named role-pairs each carrying mutual duties (new in Plan 013 Phase 5)
Matrix Theme 6b (new row, N=6, D=5; MAJORITY at the structural-form level); surface §J. One of the cleaner same-form / different-warrant convergences in the Atlas: an ethical life structured by named relational bonds, each carrying its constitutive virtue, rather than as a list of universal abstract commands.
Shared claim: The moral life is structured by named role-pairs (parent–child, teacher–pupil, spouse–spouse, friend–friend, employer–worker, sovereign–minister, monastic–lay) each carrying mutual constitutive duties — and is most concrete and binding at that role-relational level, not at the level of abstract universal principle.
Attested by: Confucianism (the Five Relationships wǔlún 五倫 — parent-child qīn affection, sovereign-minister yì righteousness, husband-wife bié separate functions, elder-younger xù proper order, friend-friend xìn fidelity; Mencius III.A.4 + Doctrine of the Mean 20:8 — four hierarchical bonds plus one mutual) · Buddhism (the Sigālovāda six directions DN 31 — parents (east), teachers (south), spouse (west), friends/kin (north), workers (nadir), religious teachers (zenith), each pair carrying mutual obligations; Rhys Davids' note: no vow of obedience anywhere — six pairs all reciprocal-not-hierarchical) · Christianity (the Pauline household codes at Eph 5:21–6:9, Col 3:18–4:1, 1 Pet 2:18–3:7 — husband-wife / parent-child / master-slave-and-servant role-pairs each with reciprocal duties; framed by the prior "be subject to one another in the fear of Christ," Eph 5:21; with Sirach 3 on the aged-parent and Tobit's marriage prayer in the deuterocanon) · Sikhism (the householder-saint ideal — the householder bonds are themselves the spiritual practice; "saved with one's family"; no monastic-renunciant tier) · Judaism (the covenant-relational web — the Decalogue's fifth commandment "honour thy father and thy mother," Ex 20:12; neighbour-love, Lev 19:18; welcome-the-stranger, Ex 23:9 + Lev 19:33–34; hesed + emet bound into the covenant structure) · Zoroastrianism (the bond rises through concentric social rings — friend × 20, partner × 40, spouse × 50, parent–child × 100, nations × 1,000, joined to Mazda's law × 10,000 — Yt 10:115–117; the righteous home of P12). Hinduism sva-dharma + catur-puruṣārtha is structurally cognate at the architectural level; Islam, Jainism, Taoism, Shinto affirm role-bonds without enumerating canonical role-pair sets.
Warrant note — sharp within-form variation. The form converges across six traditions at canonical-name-and-enumeration depth; the warrants and the symmetry of the bonds diverge. Confucian wǔlún is four hierarchical bonds plus one mutual (the friend-friend bond's xìn is the only purely-symmetrical one); Buddhist Sigālovāda is all six pairs reciprocal-not-hierarchical (the worker's duties to the master are matched by the master's duties to the worker — Rhys Davids' note that no vow of obedience appears anywhere is the structural distinctive). Christian household codes are Christ-grounded (the role-bonds carry their warrant from the prior "submitting to one another in the fear of Christ"); Sikh householder-ideal grounds the bonds in the one God's claim on the family; Jewish bonds are covenantal (the divine hesed + emet structure the human bonds); Zoroastrian bonds are Mithra-witnessed plighted faith. For a family compass this is one of the cleanest convergences: the form — that the moral life is most concrete at named-role-pairs with mutual duties — is broadly shared; the family chooses the warrant from within its own tradition.
16. Festival cycle / sacred-time architecture (new in Plan 013 Phase 5)
Matrix Theme 15a (new row, N=8, D=7; MAJORITY at the structural-form level); surface §M. Surfaced because the Phase-3 retrofit anchored cyclic sacred-time as a standalone N=3 principle on three sides for the first time: Judaism P15 (moadim / ḥaggim), Islam P16 (ṣawm + ḥajj), Bahá'í P13 (Nineteen-Day Feast + Badīʿ calendar).
Shared claim: Sacred time is cyclically structured by canonical festivals — weekly, annual, multi-year — that shape communal memory, agricultural rhythm, atonement, and renewal.
Attested by: Judaism (weekly Shabbat + the annual moadim of Lev 23 — Pesaḥ + Shavuot + Sukkot + Rosh Hashanah + Yom Kippur — plus the seven-year shemittah and fifty-year yovel of Lev 25; sacred time as "My appointed seasons," Lev 23:2) · Christianity (the liturgical year of Advent / Christmas / Epiphany / Lent / Holy Week / Easter / Pentecost / Ordinary Time; the daily Office and weekly Eucharist; the Lord's Prayer as daily) · Islam (the lunar Hijri calendar; daily ṣalāt five times; weekly Friday jumuʿah; Ramaḍān as the month of fasting; ḥajj once in a lifetime; the Five Pillars structure together) · Bahá'í (the Nineteen-Day Feast on the 19-day rhythm of the Badīʿ calendar — 19 months × 19 days + intercalary Ayyám-i-Há + nine Holy Days; the 19-day fast preceding Naw-Rúz; Aqdas ¶57 directly institutes the Feast) · Buddhism (the uposatha lunar quarter-day observance for monks; lay observance of the Eight Precepts; Vesak on the May full moon — Buddha's birth, awakening, and parinibbāna; the Vassa three-month rain-retreat) · Zoroastrianism (the six Gahanbars — seasonal festivals each linked to one of Ahura's six creations: sky, water, earth, plants, animals, humans; Nowruz the New Year; the Frawardīgān ten-day year-end honouring of the fravashis) · Shinto (the annual matsuri cycle — each shrine has its own seasonal matsuri keyed to spring planting and autumn harvest; daily morning kamidana offerings; Ōharae purification rites at solstices) · Hinduism (Diwali, Holi, Navaratri, Janmashtami, Maha Shivaratri; daily sandhyā; the twelve-year Kumbh Mela cycle). Sikhism and Jainism affirm strong cyclic-festival practice (the Gurpurabs + Vaisakhi for Sikhism; Paryushaṇa + Mahāvīra Jayanti + Dīpāvali for Jainism) but with thinner founding-scriptural codification of the calendar itself.
Warrant note — broad-but-not-universal claim with sharp warrant fractures. The form converges across at least eight traditions; the warrants cluster into four families: (a) divine ordination of the cycle (Judaism most explicitly — Lev 23:2's "My appointed seasons"; Islam — the Hijri and the Quran-revealed institutions; Bahá'í — Aqdas ¶57 instituting the Feast); (b) commemoration / re-enactment of cosmogonic or salvific events (Christianity replaying Christ's life through the year; Zoroastrianism enacting Ahura's seven creations in the Gahanbars; Buddhism's Vesak); (c) cosmic-cycle alignment (Hindu yuga + Pañcāṅga; Shinto's seasonal matsuri; Buddhist uposatha); (d) liturgical-formation discipline — common across all: the cycle forms the practitioner by repeated immersion. The Jewish shemittah/yovel — extending sacred time into economic-land sabbatical cycles that re-distribute wealth and rest the land — is the distinctive Tanakh contribution with no canonical-scriptural parallel; the Bahá'í distinct calendar (Badīʿ) is the distinctive Bahá'í contribution; the Islamic unified worldwide ḥajj convergence on one site at one time is distinctively Islamic. For a family compass this is one of the cleanest family-level operationalizable convergences in the Atlas — every tradition gives the family a rhythm (weekly observance day and an annual cycle at minimum). The form converges; the content of each family's cycle remains its tradition's.
17. Administrative order / institutional governance (new in Plan 013 Phase 5 — defensibly held-tension rather than shared-grounding)
Matrix Theme 12b (new row, N=12/12 affirm in some form, but densely scriptural institutional-mechanism form attested at N=5, D=4 — MODERATE-at-strict-codification, MAJORITY at the broader claim). Surfaced by the Phase-3 Bahá'í retrofit (P13 administrative order) — the most fully institutionalized clergyless form in the Atlas, instituted in scripture itself rather than by post-founder settlement.
Shared claim: Religious community needs structured governance — communal self-governance through some scripturally- or canonically-grounded institutional form — and the form itself is doctrinally load-bearing.
Attested by: Bahá'í (the administrative order — Local Spiritual Assembly + National Spiritual Assembly + Universal House of Justice; the clergyless democratically-elected three-tier scripturally-instituted form; Aqdas ¶30 — "the House of Justice… the trusted ones of the Merciful among men… take counsel together"; the Nineteen-Day Feast as devotional + consultative + social gathering, Aqdas ¶57) · Sikhism (sangat-and-pangat — the egalitarian congregational gathering + the shared meal langar eaten side by side regardless of caste or class; the closed Gurū succession in 1708 leaves the Akāl Takht as the temporal authority and the Gurū Granth Sāhib as the textual; the gurmatā of the Sarbat Khalsā historically) · Judaism (kahal + the synagogue + the bet din / rabbinic court; the post-Temple congregational settlement) · Buddhism (the Saṅgha — community-constitutive in Tisaraṇa; the vinaya of 227 monastic rules in the Pātimokkha; uposatha gatherings as the institutional rhythm) · Christianity (church polity in plural: Catholic episcopal/synodal + Orthodox conciliar + Anglican episcopal + Presbyterian elder-led + Congregational/Baptist autonomous local-church + Quaker meeting-for-business — the institutional question is itself a major Christian internal divergence) · Islam (shūrā mutual consultation, Q 42:38 + Q 3:159; the ummah; the khilāfa historical institution; the unresolved Sunni-Shīʿī succession question precisely is the governance question) · Confucianism (the rectified-names polity of zhengming; the junzi civil service; the Mandate of Heaven tianming + revocability; the Han-and-later imperial-bureaucratic system) · Zoroastrianism (the Magi priestly class; the dastur-and-mobed hierarchy; the yasna liturgical structure). Hindu (varṇa-āśrama + dharma-śāstra + the paramparā-lineages), Taoist (the Daodejing's small contented community + later priestly lineages), Jain (the śramaṇa-sangha + ācārya leadership), and Shinto (the kannushi priestly class + shrine-based community structure) attest institutional governance forms with less density of scripturally-mandated structural detail.
Warrant note — defensibly held-tension as well as shared-grounding. Every tradition affirms that some governance is needed; the form is sharply contested. The Atlas places this row at MODERATE at the densely-scriptural-codification level (D=4: Bahá'í + Sikhism + Judaism + Buddhism with explicit canonical institutional architecture) and at MAJORITY at the broader claim. Distinctive Bahá'í contribution: the most fully institutionalized clergyless tradition in the corpus — clergyless + democratically-elected + globally-supranational + scripturally-instituted, a 19th-century innovation that handles post-founder continuity differently from how other covenant traditions do. Distinctive Sikh contribution: closed-Gurū-succession + textual authority of the Gurū Granth Sāhib + congregational sangat governance + the Akāl Takht as temporal authority. Distinctive Jewish contribution: the kahal-and-synagogue lay-led congregational form complementing the bet din judicial structure. A note on classification. The Atlas places the form of governance at held-tension #13 below (locus of authority); we place the claim — that some scriptural-or-canonical communal governance is needed — at shared-grounding here. For a family that lives outside any one tradition, this concern is most useful as: do not pretend communal governance is optional; learn how the families around you are governed, and recognize that the choice of institutional form is itself doctrinally load-bearing.
Part 2 — The preserved jewels (each tradition's untranslatable, kept in its own language)
These are the WEAK-distinctive contributions — load-bearing in exactly one tradition, with no cross-tradition twin (structural-analysis Part 2). They are not "low-confidence noise." They are the highest-value inputs of the union: the very things an intersection compass would throw away. Each is kept in its own terms, untranslated, with a gloss. The compass is richer for holding all of them. Where it matters, a one-line note carries the jewel's structural role in its home tradition (its graph form) — because flattening a soteriological chain into a hub-and-spoke would distort what the jewel does. By convention, jewels are presented in their native names — that is the whole point of Part 2 ("preserved jewels, in their own language"). The English gloss column is the unflattening; the structural-role notes carry the deeper unflattening still.
Plan 013 Phase 5 (2026-05-30) substantially expands the jewels following Phase 4 Atlas re-attestation — ~19 new WEAK-distinctive jewels surface across nine traditions, distributed below. Taoist xīn zhāi / zuò wàng / wù huà also enter the table.
| Tradition | The jewel (in its own terms) | Gloss — what it contributes that no other tradition supplies |
|---|---|---|
| Buddhism (Theravāda) | anattā; R5: P14 six-direction Sigālovāda reciprocity (DN 31); R5: P15 Cakkavatti dharmic polity (DN 26); Phase 5: P16 Tisaraṇa (Three Refuges); Phase 5: P17 Pañca Sīlāni (Five Precepts); Phase 5: paṭiccasamuppāda causal substrate | No abiding self — the pool's one denial of a soul; structurally a negation where every other tradition has its soul-node; compassion that needs no self to ground it. R5 adds two structural jewels: (i) the six-direction reciprocal lay ethic — parents/children, teachers/pupils, husband/wife, friends, employer/worker, monastics/laity, each pair carrying mutual duties — distinctive in having no vow of obedience anywhere (Rhys Davids' note), perhaps the strongest non-Western articulation of relational ethics; (ii) the Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda account in which poverty is a causal seed of theft, violence, and social breakdown, and the just king's task is the relief of want — a Buddhist political economy nearly 2,000 years before Marx, and a polity that recovers from below, not by savior-king. Phase 5 adds three more structural jewels: (iii) the Tisaraṇa (the Three Refuges in Buddha + Dhamma + Saṅgha, Dhp 190–192) — the community-affiliative entry node by which one becomes a Buddhist, recited at every formal ceremony; the Buddhist counterpart at the level of form to Christian baptism / Islamic shahāda / Jewish brit milah, though the warrants diverge (orientation toward a path, not creedal assent or covenant entry); (iv) the Pañca Sīlāni (the Five Precepts, Dhp 129 + DN 22 §21 + DN 31 §7) — the voluntarily-undertaken lay floor of non-killing, non-stealing, no-sexual-misconduct, no-false-speech, no-intoxicants; sikkhā-pada (training-rules) rather than commandments, structurally distinct from monastic Pātimokkha and from every other tradition's lay-ethic; (v) paṭiccasamuppāda (the twelve-link conditioning chain whose reversal is the goal-state) — the only causal-substrate doctrine in the corpus whose un-doing constitutes liberation. |
| Hinduism (Vedānta) | ātman = brahman; the plural valid yogas; Phase 5: P16 pañca-kośa (five-sheath anthropology); Phase 5: P15 catur-puruṣārtha (four-aim architecture); Phase 5: three-method realization of the foundation | The innermost Self is identical with the absolute (tat tvam asi, Chānd 6 ×9; aham brahmāsmi, Bṛh 1.4.10; all four Mahāvākyas now per-verse anchored) — dignity from identity, not bestowal; and a tradition that builds plurality of valid paths into its own structure. Phase 5 adds three structural jewels: (i) the pañca-kośa (Tait 2.1–5 — the five sheaths annamaya / prāṇamaya / manomaya / vijñānamaya / ānandamaya) — the layered-stripping-away realization method, the only worked sheath-progression methodology in the corpus; (ii) the catur-puruṣārtha (the four legitimate human aims dharma / artha / kāma / mokṣa) — the only tradition that explicitly names artha (wealth, success) as a legitimate aim rather than condemning it (the renunciant traditions) or absorbing it under another rubric (Abrahamic stewardship); the architectural frame within which the householder stage is held; (iii) the three-method realization for the same foundation — affirm via antaryāmin + deny via neti neti + strip-back via pañca-kośa — no other tradition coordinates three methods for the same foundational claim. |
| Jainism (principles) | ahiṃsā (to elemental life); anekāntavāda* / *syādvāda; Phase 5: P14 ratnatraya + austerity (integrated four-jewel path-formula); Phase 5: P15 mahāvrata/aṇuvrata tier-axis | Non-violence extended to one-sensed earth/water/fire/wind life — an animism of innumerable souls; and the formal many-sidedness of every truth-claim (each assertion only "in some respect" true). Phase 5 adds two structural jewels: (i) the ratnatraya (the Three Jewels of right faith + right knowledge + right conduct, Utt 28) with austerity (tapas) bound in as the fourth integrative element — a path-formula integrating the cognitive, affective, conative, and ascetic dimensions; cousin to the Buddhist sīla/samādhi/paññā and the Christian faith/hope/love triads, distinctively a quadrad and distinctively adding tapas; (ii) the mahāvrata/aṇuvrata tier-axis (Sūy II.6.6 + Jacobi fn. 3) — every great vow lives at two scripturally-recognized intensities: monastic absolute (mahāvrata) and householder calibrated (aṇuvrata). The corpus's clearest worked two-tier ethics structure, one pole of the cross-tradition tiered-ethics vs one-tier-householder finding (Sikhism is the counter-pole). |
| Judaism (Tanakh) | berit (covenant); Shabbat / jubilee; Phase 5: coupled sacred-time architecture (weekly + annual + 7-year + 50-year); Phase 5: warrant-doubling as a structural feature; Phase 5: the Noahide moral floor | A binding gracious mutual bond between God and a people; and structural, egalitarian rest with periodic debt-release built into time. R5 note: berit is no longer Judaism-only — it now also anchors the new cross-tradition Covenant shared-grounding (concern 13); but the structural form of the bond remains a Tanakh signature. Phase 5 adds three structural jewels: (i) the coupled sacred-time architecture — weekly Shabbat (P5) + annual moadim / ḥaggim (Lev 23) + 7-year shemittah (Lev 25:4 land-rest) + 50-year yovel (Lev 25:10 jubilee) — "My appointed seasons" (Lev 23:2), with the economic-land sabbatical cycles extending sacred time into agricultural and economic structure in a way no other tradition's calendar reaches at the canonical-scripture level; (ii) warrant-doubling as a structural feature — Ex 20 creation-warrant and Deut 5 liberation-warrant for the Sabbath; Lev 19:18 neighbour-love and Lev 19:34 stranger-welcome; the Noahide → Abrahamic → Sinaitic → Davidic → new-covenant chain as fivefold over-determination — the Tanakh prefers richly-warranted commandments to bare imperatives, itself a structural distinctive; (iii) the Noahide moral floor (Gen 9 — universal-binding pre-covenant moral floor grounded in the imago-Dei blood-prohibition of Gen 9:6) — the only universal-binding pre-covenant moral floor in the corpus. |
| Christianity (Bible) | incarnation + kenōsis; "God IS love"; charis (grace); bodily resurrection; Phase 5: P15 Pater Noster (Lord's Prayer); Phase 5: trinitarian substrate; Phase 5: theological-virtue triad (faith/hope/love); Phase 5: Beatitudes (descriptive-not-prescriptive form) | The transcendent God becomes finite and self-empties; ultimate reality is love; release is unearned gift; death defeated bodily. No parallel anywhere in the pool. Phase 5 adds four structural jewels: (i) the Pater Noster (Matt 6:9–13) — the daily-prayer integrator that touches dignity (P5), the Decalogue (P6), grace (P9), koinōnia (P11), and the kingdom (P13) in a single recited form; uniquely contains a self-binding mutual-forgiveness clause ("forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors") inside a petition for divine forgiveness — structurally rare in parallel forms; (ii) the trinitarian substrate (Matt 28:19 + 2 Cor 13:14 + John 14:26 / 15:26) — Christianity's monotheism-internal-life articulation; the structural distinctive of one God in three persons absent from Judaism's Shema-rooted strict unitarian monotheism and Islam's tawḥīd; (iii) the theological-virtue triad (faith / hope / love at 1 Cor 13:13) — cousin to the Buddhist sīla/samādhi/paññā, the Jain ratnatraya, and the Confucian Five Constants as an integrative-virtue tuple, distinctively with love at the apex ("the greatest of these is love"); (iv) the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3–10) — the only major virtue-list in the corpus whose form is blessing-pronounced descriptive of the kingdom's inverted logic ("blessed are the poor in spirit… blessed are they that mourn… blessed are the meek") rather than practice-prescribed. |
| Islam (Quran) | tawḥīd; fiṭra* / khalīfa / *amāna; obligatory zakāt; Phase 5: P15 al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā (99 Beautiful Names); Phase 5: P10 iḥsān-axis interior depth; Phase 5: P17 ummah wasaṭ (the witness-community) | Absolute divine oneness; a sound (not fallen) human nature entrusted with the earth; and alms made a quantified obligation, not optional charity. Phase 5 adds three structural jewels: (i) al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā (the 99 Beautiful Names of God, Q 7:180 + Q 59:22–24) — the epistemic loop by which tawḥīd is held and taught: the names enumerate aspects of the one God which would be shirk (associationism) if split apart, tawḥīd if revealed together; the corpus's only worked closure between a central foundational claim and the named-enumeration of its aspects; (ii) iḥsān-axis interior depth (P10's "to worship God as if you saw Him; and if you do not see Him, He surely sees you") — the vertical-interior depth axis atop the horizontal radial structure, the structural slot the Sufi (taṣawwuf) tradition fills; (iii) ummah wasaṭ (the witness-community as moral-balance vocation, Q 2:143) — the corporate-identity layer above individual ethics; structurally distinct from the Jewish "covenant people" (narrative membership) and the Christian ekklēsia (eucharistic koinōnia) — Islamic community as called to moral balance and public witness. The ṣawm + ḥajj pair (P16) completes the Five Pillars as a structurally complete daily/yearly worship spine. |
| Sikhism (Gurū Granth Sāhib) | Naam* / *simran; the householder-saint; langar; Hukam; Ik Onkār; Phase 5: Five Khands ladder (P13 component); Phase 5: Five Thieves enumeration (P13 component); Phase 5: Nirbhau / Akāl (P13 component); Phase 5: the effort-and-grace dyad as load-bearing; Phase 5: the householder-only ideal | Remembrance of the immanent formless One; holiness in married, working family life; institutional casteless equality at one table; an order one understands in order to shed ego. Phase 5 adds five structural jewels: (i) the Five Khands (Japjī XXXIV–XXXVII — Dharam Khand → Gyān Khand → Saram Khand → Karam Khand → Sach Khand) — the mystical-ascent ladder that inscribes the effort-and-grace dyad into its rungs (Saram = effort + Karam = grace before Sach Khand); the corpus's clearest worked structure of the karma-grace tension; (ii) the Five Thieves (kām / krodh / lobh / moh / ahaṇkār — lust / anger / greed / attachment / pride) — the canonical haumai-rooted vice inventory subdued by simran and the gracious glance, not by cleverness (per Anand X); (iii) Nirbhau* / *Akāl (the Mūl Mantar's "fearless" + Gurū Gobind Singh's "timeless-deathless") — God's own indestructible nature is the foundation of the Sikh warrant for righteous courage in defence of the helpless and of conscience; (iv) the effort-and-grace dyad as load-bearing (P5 ⇄ P4) — most traditions lean to one pole; Sikhī wires both as co-load-bearing; (v) the householder-only ideal — the gṛhastha-only stance that rejects the monastic-renunciant tier, one pole of the cross-tradition tiered-ethics structural-form finding (Jainism is the counter-pole). |
| Confucianism (principles) | xiao; zhengming; cheng; ren; tian; Phase 5: P13 xin (trust as the binding tissue); Phase 5: P15 wǔlún (the five-bond web); Phase 5: P14 Mencian xingshan + sìduān (innate-goodness anthropology); Phase 5: the triadic metaphysical frame | Filial reverence as the root from which all virtue grows; the rectification of names (language answering reality) as the basis of social order; sincerity as a world-grounding power. Phase 5 adds four structural jewels: (i) xin 信 (the fifth of the Five Constants — trustworthiness as a cross-cutting binding tissue simultaneously interpersonal virtue (Analects 1:4 daily self-examination), political ground (Analects 12:7 "if the people have no faith in their rulers, there is no standing for the State"), friend-friend bond-virtue (the constitutive virtue of the friend-friend wǔlún bond), and naming-fulfilment (zhengming's named role one keeps) — also the anchor of the new shared-grounding concern 14; (ii) wǔlún 五倫 (the five-bond explicit relational web — sovereign-subject yì, parent-child qīn, husband-wife bié, elder-younger xù, friend-friend xìn; Mencius III.A.4 + Doctrine of the Mean 20:8) — also the anchor of the new shared-grounding concern 15; (iii) Mencian xingshan 性善 + the Four Sprouts (sìduān 四端 — commiseration → ren, shame → yi, deference → li, right-and-wrong → zhi; Mencius II.A.6 child-and-well parable + VI.A.2 water-flows-downward) — the innate-goodness anthropology, the positive-anthropology pole of the cross-tradition anthropology axis (held tension #12 below); (iv) the triadic metaphysical frame — tian above (P10) ⟷ innately-good nature below (P14) ⟷ self-completing sincerity within (P12) — the only tradition that holds its central cultivation-root inside an above/below/within triad. |
| Taoism (principles) | wu wei; ziran; the nameless, apophatic, "not benevolent" Dao; R5: P16 Primitivist jī xīn (scheming-mind); R5: P17 Yangist axiology (body over kingdom); R5: P18 zhēn (inner truth / authenticity); Phase 5: P14 xīn zhāi / zuò wàng (mind-fasting / sitting-forgetting); Phase 5: P15 wù huà (death-as-transformation) | Non-forcing action; the self-so grain of things; an impersonal source one accords with rather than obeys — and a wisdom that undercuts its own words ("he who knows does not speak"). R5 surfaces three counter-currents inside Taoism itself — an internal pluralism almost no other tradition makes this explicit: (i) the Primitivist jī xīn — "the tools we adopt shape the mind we become"; technology + cleverness corrupts heart and society together — the sharpest pre-modern articulation in the pool of the claim that technology is not neutral; (ii) the Yangist axiology — the body and life are more valuable than the kingdom; not even universal sovereignty is worth a single hair of the body — a sharp counter-current to acquisitive political ambition; (iii) zhēn — Heaven-given inner truth, authenticity prior to and outranking ritual form, edging toward the Shinto makoto family. Phase 5 adds two more structural jewels: (iv) xīn zhāi / zuò wàng (mind-fasting + sitting-forgetting) — subtractive contemplative practice as a node-type the TTC-only graph lacked: not adding virtue but subtracting interference; (v) wù huà (death-as-transformation — Inner Z-P5 True Man, Outer ZO-P7 basin-drumming, Misc ZM-P5 deathbed) — impersonal cosmic transmutation as direct corollary of the impersonal-Dao framing; the impersonal pole of the cross-tradition mortality-acceptance axis, warrant-divergent from soteriological-release framings even where claims about acceptance of death converge. |
| Zoroastrianism (principles) | cosmic dualism; Asha; Frashō-kereti* / *Saoshyant; daēnā; R5: P13 Mithra-covenant (Yt 10); Phase 5: P14 Amesha Spentas heptad; Phase 5: P15 Yazata class; Phase 5: P16 Chinvat Bridge + daēnā-encounter; Phase 5: the metaphysical-vs-operational dualism distinction | Evil as an independent hostile principle to be fought; truth-as-cosmic-order; the renovation of this world; the conscience-self one literally meets after death. R5 adds Mithra-covenant as the Zoroastrian contribution to the new Covenant shared-grounding (concern 13, above) — Mithra is the divine guarantor of every contract; the keeper is bound irrespective of the other party's merit; the weight of the bond rises through concentric social rings (×20 friend → ×10,000 joined to Mazda's law). The yazata-as-personified-contract form is itself uniquely Zoroastrian even as the broader covenant-claim is shared. Phase 5 adds four structural jewels: (i) the Amesha Spentas heptad (Vohu Manah + Asha Vahishta + Khshathra Vairya + Spenta Armaiti + Haurvatat + Ameretat + Spenta Mainyu) — enumerated, ranked, named divine attributes bound each-to-each to specific ethical principles; "of one thought, one speech, one deed" (Yt 19:15–17) as the divine pattern P6 enacts at human scale; cousin to Trinity, sefirot, 99 Names but enumerated, ranked, named in the distinctive heptadic form; (ii) the Yazata class (Mithra, Sraosha, Anahita, Rashnu, Verethraghna, Tishtrya) — personified divine instrumentalities lower than the one God, each personifying a divine attribute or function; closest cousin in the pool to Hindu devas (shared Indo-Iranian roots) but distinctively a witness-or-contract-bearer class; (iii) the Chinvat Bridge + daēnā-encounter (Yasna 46:10–11 + 51:13 + Vd 19:28–32) — individual post-mortem judgement: the soul meets its own daēnā (conscience-self), Rashnu weighs deeds, the Bridge wide-for-righteous narrow-for-wicked; the structural cousin of the Christian particular judgement, the fork of the narrative spine into individual (P16) + cosmic (P11) termini; (iv) the metaphysical-vs-operational dualism distinction — P3 cosmogonic spirit-dualism is distinctively Zoroastrian; P2 operational Asha-vs-Druj axis is widely convergent with the Didache "Two Ways" + Qumran 1QS "Two Spirits" + every ethical tradition. The separation between metaphysical dualism (cosmic) and operational dualism (ethical) is itself a Phase-4 Atlas finding the Zoroastrian column makes visible. |
| Shinto (principles) | musubi; kegare; matsuri; makoto; Phase 5: the negative-structural-features cluster as positive data | A cosmos born, not made; impurity-as-pollution-to-be-washed (not moral guilt before a judge); festal, non-atoning ritual that restores harmony; the bright, sincere heart. Phase 5 records a structural jewel of an unusual kind: the negative-structural-features cluster as positive Atlas data — what Shinto does not have is itself load-bearing. No creator-above-the-cosmos (musubi generativity is born within nature); no commandment-list / Decalogue-form (ethical content carried by narrative enactment and ritual participation); no salvation-arc / soteriology (the "goal" is simply continued bright, pure, generative life); no eschaton / end-of-time (cosmogony is ongoing musubi); no creedal articles (the tradition is performed, not catechized). The N=8 honest-thinness verdict is itself the finding: a tradition whose principle-graph shape encodes meta-level claim-vs-warrant material the matrix rows do not capture. |
| Bahá'í (principles) | the oneness-of-religion meta-claim; independent investigation of truth; Phase 5: P13 administrative order (the clergyless institutionalized form); Phase 5: P14 two-tier Covenant (Greater + Lesser) | Structurally unique — not a peer concept but a claim about the whole pool (held at arm's length below); and the duty to "see with thine own eyes, not through the eyes of others." Phase 5 adds two structural jewels: (i) the administrative order (P13) — Local Spiritual Assembly + National Spiritual Assembly + Universal House of Justice; clergyless + democratically-elected + globally-supranational + scripturally-instituted (Aqdas ¶30 + ¶57); the most fully institutionalized clergyless tradition in the Atlas, with the constitution-of-institutions written into scripture itself (a 19th-century innovation; also the anchor of the new shared-grounding concern 17); (ii) the two-tier Covenant (P14) — Greater (the recurring-Manifestation pattern: God's covenant with humanity through the succession of prophets) + Lesser (the founder-succession covenant: Bahá'u'lláh's written designation of post-founder institutional continuity; Aqdas ¶121 + ¶174) — the only two-tier covenant structure in the pool; addresses post-founder unity as a separate covenant tier in a way that no other tradition explicitly does. |
Part 3 — The held tensions (do NOT smooth these)
These are the genuine divergences — places where the claims themselves contradict, where one tradition affirms what another denies on the same question. The pluralist standpoint is most strained here: several are not "different facets of one truth" but logical contradictions the traditions regard as decisive. Holding them honestly is the result of the work, not a failure of it. An intersection compass would delete these rows; the union keeps the jewels on both sides.
Plan 013 Phase 5 (2026-05-30) adds two new held tensions — #12 and #13 — surfaced by divergence-map.md §4a and §13 after Phase 4 Atlas re-attestation: Anthropology of the human person (six-way irreducible; the load-bearing axis under dignity / compassion / grace-vs-self-effort) and Locus of moral and political authority (six-way irreducible; where binding moral and political authority sits in each tradition).
| # | The question | The held tension (irreducible) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The self | anattā — there is no abiding self (Buddhism; R5: SN 22.59 the anchor + SN 22.85 Yamaka the anti-annihilation clarifier — the doctrine "the arahant is annihilated after death" is named wicked heresy; anattā is neither annihilationism nor eternalism — both are rejected as malformed because both presuppose the soul-bearing grammar the analysis has already dissolved) · vs · ātman=brahman — the self is the absolute (Hinduism; R5: Chānd 6 tat tvam asi ×9 + Bṛh 1.4.10 aham brahmāsmi — the literal identity claim in first and second persons, not "we are deeply connected") · vs · a created soul distinct from God (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Bahá'í; R5: Gen 1:27 per-verse) · vs · plural eternal jīva (Jainism). "There is an eternal soul" and "there is no abiding self" are flat contradictories (divergence §3). The shared claim "the inner life matters" does not touch this. R5 sharpens the divergence rather than softens it: SN 22.85 forecloses the easy reading that would reconcile anattā with the soul-traditions; the Mahāvākyas foreclose the easy reading that would reconcile ātman=brahman with theistic creator–creature distinctness. |
| 2 | The ultimate | a personal God who wills and loves (the six theist columns) · vs · an impersonal absolute — the brahman, the silent tian, the "not benevolent" Dao (Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism) · vs · no creator God at all (Buddhism, Jainism) · vs · kami-animism (Shinto). Whether the ultimate wills and loves is a mutually-exclusive question (divergence §1). |
| 3 | The ultimate goal | cessation of craving — nibbāna, not a heaven (Buddhism) · vs · union with brahman — "pure water into pure water" (Hinduism) · vs · the soul's own omniscience (Jainism) · vs · communion with a personal God + resurrection (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Bahá'í) · vs · the renovation of this world (Zoroastrianism) · vs · this-worldly harmony (Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto). The goal-states are mutually exclusive (divergence §5). |
| 4 | Grace vs self-effort | release is unearned gift — charis, bhakti, Nadar, raḥma (Christianity, Hindu bhakti, Sikhism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Bahá'í) · vs · liberation is self-won — "no one can purify another," "no savior, no grace" (Buddhism, Jainism, Confucian self-cultivation). Buddhism's "no one can purify another" is the exact negation of "salvation is the gift of God, not of works" (divergence §8). (Note: the grace cluster itself is a beautiful surface convergence — §F — that sits on this hard line. Both halves are kept.) |
| 5 | The incarnation | God became human — kenōsis (Christianity) · vs · explicitly rejected by name (Islam's tawḥīd, Judaism, Sikhism's "unborn"). These cannot both be true (divergence §2). |
| 6 | Time | cyclical rebirth across saṃsāra until liberation (Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism) · vs · linear — one life, a reckoning, a single consummation (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Bahá'í). Incompatible cosmologies of time (divergence §7). |
| 7 | Where holiness is lived | the householder life is the holy life — family the locus (Confucianism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Bahá'í) · vs · the renunciant ideal — the world's bonds transcended for liberation (Buddhism, Jainism, one strand of Hinduism) · vs · accord, not renounce (Taoism). Opposite answers, flagged as a "natural anchor for a family compass" (divergence §6). |
| 8 | The origin of evil | an independent dualist principle (Zoroastrianism) · vs · sin / the Fall (Christianity) · vs · ignorance / māyā (Hinduism, Buddhism) · vs · karma-as-matter (Jainism) · vs · ego, haumai (Sikhism) · vs · innate goodness, mere un-cultivation (Confucian Mencius) · vs · pollution, not sin (Shinto kegare) (divergence §4). |
| 9 | The scope of non-harm | absolute ahiṃsā — to elemental life, no just war, no capital punishment (Jainism) · vs · defensive force / just war permitted by most of the pool (a divergence inside the compassion convergence — divergence §12). |
| 10 | Religion itself | the faiths are chapters of one revealed religion — the Bahá'í oneness-of-religion meta-claim · vs · each tradition's claim to distinct or final truth (the rest, who reject the meta-claim by name) (divergence §11). This compass does NOT adopt the Bahá'í meta-claim as its ground — that would smuggle one tradition's doctrine in as neutral territory. We record it as a Bahá'í principle and hold our own pluralist standpoint as an explicitly contestable, non-revealed methodological choice. |
| 11 | Apophasis — what speech can do at the limit (new in R5) | A convergence of form across a divergence of substance. Buddhist neti — SN 22.85 Yamaka rejects the malformed substantialist "what is X / who has X?" question as presupposing a referent the analysis has dissolved · Vedāntic neti neti — Bṛh 4.4.22 "not this, not that"; the Self "cannot be attained by argument" · Christian and Jewish negative theology — God's nature exceeds every predicate; the Tetragrammaton unspoken · the nameless Dao — TTC 1 "the Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao"; "he who knows does not speak" · Bahá'í Íqán — "in the valley of His knowledge every mystic wandereth astray"; the "Suns of Truth" / "Mirrors" pattern. All five articulate "the ultimate cannot be predicated." But they unpredicate very different ultimates: Buddhist apophasis denies a continuing subject who could be beyond predication (no-self all the way down); theistic apophasis affirms a subject whose nature exceeds predication (a real personal God beyond every name); the Taoist nameless Dao is an impersonal source whose namelessness is its self-so character. Same rhetorical form; opposite ontology underneath. The Atlas holds this as a productive tension, not a resolution (surface §E; structural-analysis Part 5). For the user: a shared way of speaking about what cannot be said is available across traditions whose underlying ontologies remain mutually exclusive — an honest companion to "humility and the limit of human knowing" (concern 6) that does not dissolve the divergence at concerns 1 (the self) and the ultimate. |
| 12 | Anthropology of the human person — the moral starting-point (new in Plan 013 Phase 5) | A six-way irreducible tension on what kind of thing the human is, morally, at the start — and the load-bearing axis under dignity (concern 2), compassion (concern 3), and grace-vs-self-effort (tension 4) (divergence §4a; surface §K). Innately good — Mencian xingshan + the Four Sprouts sìduān: every person already bears commiseration / shame / deference / right-and-wrong; cultivation draws out what is already there; no fall, no original sin (Confucianism, P14) · vs · sound primordial nature — Islamic fiṭra: each human created on the fiṭra, oriented toward God; no inherited sin, no redeemer needed; sin is deviation healed by repentance and raḥma (Islam, P5) · vs · created noble + genuine dual nature — each soul created noble bearing God's image, and dual, bearing both "the Soul of God" and a "base and appetitive nature against which the moral life is the lifelong choice"; neither pure innate-goodness nor pure fallenness (Bahá'í, P11; Jewish yetzer ha-ra + yetzer ha-tov mixed-inclination occupies a structurally similar position) · vs · created good, universally fallen, healed by grace — imago Dei + structural fallenness + Augustinian original sin (the dominant Western reading) + Christological grace (Christianity, P1 + P9; Eastern Christianity softens the inherited-guilt reading while retaining structural-disorder) · vs · kleśa-laden mind, no abiding self, no fall — defilements lobha / dosa / moha are the unliberated mind's default; anattā rules out the substantialist question "is the self good or bad?"; cultivation extinguishes the defilements (Buddhism, P1 + P2) · vs · karmically-stratified plural soul — the jīva is plural, eternal, uncreated, and karmically stratified by past lives; liberation is by shedding karma through ascetic discipline; the kevala-omniscience is the soul's native state, currently obscured (Jainism, P5 + P14). With the secular Hobbesian foil (humans amoral by default, requiring social contract) — a position no tradition in the pool holds, useful only as the empty slot the religious traditions all decline to occupy. Mutually incompatible in pairs. Mencian innate-good directly contradicts Augustinian fallenness; both contradict Buddhist kilesa-default on whether the substantialist question is even well-formed; Jain karmic-stratification contradicts the Abrahamic single-life-no-prior-load framing; Bahá'í dual-nature occupies a third position between Mencian and Augustinian poles; Islamic fiṭra shares Mencian innate-goodness's conclusion but on a creator-grounded warrant. Why this tension matters most for a family compass. The choice of anthropology determines pastoral practice. A family that operates on Mencian xingshan draws-out-what-is-there (positive reinforcement of innate sprouts); a family on Augustinian fallenness names brokenness and points to grace; a family on Buddhist kilesa names defilements as conditions to be extinguished through training; a family on Bahá'í dual-nature treats moral life as the lifelong choice between two real orientations. These are not the same pastoral practice, and the union compass should not paper over which one each family has implicitly adopted. The union does not speak from any one of these — what it can speak is the thin claim that the moral starting-point bears on cultivation, leaving the content of the starting-point to each tradition. |
| 13 | Locus of moral and political authority — where does binding authority sit? (new in Plan 013 Phase 5) | A six-way irreducible tension on the kind of thing moral and political authority is — not just which God commands it (divergence §13). Immanent in named natural/divine presences — authority distributed across the kami who inhabit specific places, families, mountains, rivers, shrines, ancestors; no transcendent-revelation authority axis at all; matsuri renews the relationship; kegare washed by water-purification, not absolved by a transcendent judge (Shinto) · vs · Heaven-grounded but revocable — the Mandate of Heaven (tianming 天命); legitimacy earned and revocable, conditional on virtue + people-welfare (when ren is cultivated and the people flourish, the mandate holds; when it fails, the mandate is withdrawn — Mencius I.A.7 + 1B.8 "the fellow Chou"); rejects divine-right absolutism and social-contract consent in one move (Confucianism, P9) · vs · institutional + democratically-elected + globally-supranational + clergyless — authority held by a constituted body: the Universal House of Justice (Aqdas ¶30) elected democratically through three tiers (Local Spiritual Assembly + National Spiritual Assembly + Universal House of Justice since 1963); no clergy; consultation as the method; the Lesser Covenant (Aqdas ¶121 + ¶174) supplies the doctrinal mechanism for post-founder continuity (Bahá'í, P13 + P14) · vs · prophetic-scriptural + community-of-interpretation — authority rests in the revealed text with a communal ongoing interpretation: Qur'an + Sunnah + tafsīr + fiqh + ʿulamāʾ (Islam); Tanakh + Mishnah + Talmud + responsa + rabbinic community (Judaism); the text finally fixed, the interpretation communal-and-ongoing, no clergy with sacramental authority · vs · Christological + ecclesial / sacramental — authority rests in Christ mediated through the Church: scripture + tradition + Magisterium (Catholic); scripture + ecumenical councils + apostolic succession (Orthodox); sola scriptura (Protestant); the sacramental dimension is distinctive — ordained clergy with the power of orders, an authority-mediation grammar absent from Islam, Judaism, and Bahá'í (Christianity, with the Protestant sola scriptura position itself a sharp divergence from the Catholic/Orthodox sacramental-magisterial position) · vs · textual-Gurū + sangat — authority in the Gurū Granth Sāhib (the eternal Gurū; the human Gurū line closed at the Sāhib) read in the sangat (holy congregation); no clergy with sacramental power — the granthī reads the text but does not absolve; Hukam is the divine order each soul understands, not merely obeys (Sikhism) · vs · self-realized + paramparā-lineage transmission — authority distributed across realized teachers in lineage-transmission: the guru-paramparā in Hinduism, the upajjhāya + preceptor system in Buddhism, the Jain mendicant succession from Mahāvīra; no central institutional body, no global house of justice; authority distributed across many lineages that may differ (Hinduism / Buddhism / Jainism — most strands). Six incompatible structural answers to a single question. The Shinto immanent-kami locus cannot be reconciled with the Bahá'í institutionalized-House-of-Justice locus (one denies a transcendent authority-locus altogether; the other constitutes one explicitly); the Confucian revocable-tianming contradicts both pre-modern divine-right absolutism and modern-secular social-contract consent theory; the Sikh closed-text-as-Gurū diverges from Islamic / Jewish open-text-with-community-of-interpretation; the Catholic sacramental-Magisterium diverges from Protestant sola scriptura; the paramparā-lineage authority of Hindu / Buddhist / Jain traditions diverges from every centrally-institutionalized position. Why this tension matters for a family compass. It determines how the family treats authority — within itself and in relation to broader institutions. A family on the Shinto immanent-kami locus relates to the local shrine and the lineage-kami; a family on the Confucian tianming locus expects rulers to be virtuous and revocable; a family on the Bahá'í institutional locus participates in Local Spiritual Assembly elections; a family on the Catholic locus relates to the parish + diocese + Magisterium; a family on the Protestant sola scriptura locus reads scripture under the Spirit; a family on the Sikh locus reads the Granth in sangat; a family on Hindu / Buddhist / Jain guru-lineage relates to its specific teacher-line. These are not the same authority-structure, and pastoral practice differs accordingly. The union compass does not paper over which locus each family operates from. |
Why holding them is the honest result. If the untranslatability intuition is true — that each tradition genuinely holds something unsayable elsewhere — then "everyone is saying the same thing in different words" is false, and these contradictions are real, not apparent. To resolve them by fiat would be to pretend the jewels are interchangeable when the traditions themselves insist they are not. The union is built by complementarity where it exists and by honest difference where it does not. These rows are the boundary of complementarity, and they are kept lit.
How to use it
This compass has two distinct audiences. Choose the right one for you.
If you live within a tradition → use your ROOTED compass, not this one
A family rooted in a single tradition is best served by that tradition's own compass — anchored in its own source, in its own voice, making no claim about the others. These do not dilute your tradition into a lowest common denominator; each is the full-strength article:
- Buddhist (Theravāda) family compass
- Hindu (Vedānta) family compass
- Jain family compass
- Jewish (Tanakh) family compass
- Christian (Bible) family compass
- Muslim (Quran) family compass
- Sikh family compass
- Confucian family compass
- Taoist family compass
- Zoroastrian family compass
- Bahá'í family compass
- Shinto family compass
If you are drawn to interfaith common ground in the AI age → this compass is for you
For the seeker, the interfaith household, or the family that wants to ground an AI assistant in broadly-attested human wisdom without pretending the traditions are interchangeable:
- Stand on the shared grounding (Part 1). These claims — reciprocity, the inviolable worth of every person, non-harm, truthfulness, mastery of desire, humility and the limit of knowing, justice, honest work, family and community, the good life, restrained speech, reverence for nature, covenant, trustworthiness, role-relational ethics, festival/sacred-time architecture, and administrative-order (Phase 5 additions) — are cross-validated at N≥3/D≥3. They are the firmest ground for instructing an AI: treat every person as of inviolable worth; never deceive; keep your word; do not inflame craving; honor the limit of your own knowing.
- Speak from the claims, never from one warrant. Adopt no tradition's why as "the" reason. The union's authority is breadth-of-attestation, not metaphysics.
- Let the jewels (Part 2) enrich, not flatten. Draw on wu wei, hesed, anattā, ren — and the Phase 5 additions Tisaraṇa, Pañca Sīlāni, pañca-kośa, catur-puruṣārtha, ratnatraya, al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā, Pater Noster, the Five Khands, xin, wǔlún, Amesha Spentas, the Bahá'í administrative order — by name when a concern calls for what only that tradition supplies. The point is the whole elephant.
- Hold the tensions (Part 3) as tensions. On the self, the ultimate, the goal, grace, time, and now anthropology and authority-locus (Phase 5 additions) — point honestly to where the traditions diverge. Do not have your AI pronounce on which is true; that is for the family's own discernment within its own tradition. The Phase 5 anthropology tension is especially load-bearing because it determines pastoral practice: a family on Mencian innate-goodness draws out sprouts; a family on Augustinian fallenness names brokenness and points to grace; a family on Buddhist kilesa names defilements as conditions to extinguish; a family on Bahá'í dual-nature treats moral life as the lifelong choice between two real orientations.
- The AI-age bridge. Tech-is-not-neutral, the limit of human knowing, and the disarmament of words are contemporary applications the ancient spine (epistemic humility, human dignity, mastery of desire) grounds. No ancient tradition addresses AI directly; the union compass carries the ancient convergences forward into the new question.
A closing honesty. This compass cannot tell you what is ultimately true. It can tell you, with evidence, where the wisdom of humanity converges — and, just as importantly, where it does not. That second gift is the one an intersection compass destroys and a union compass keeps.
Cross-links
The Atlas (the instrument that earned this compass):
00-architecture.md— governing rules: non-commensurability, N/D attestation, claim-vs-warrant, the WEAK split, the owned standpointconvergence-matrix.md— the 26 themes × 12 traditions (R5 22 + Phase 4 +4: 6b role-relational, 7a trustworthiness, 12b admin order, 15a festival cycle), with N/D per row (the source of Part 1's bar)surface-vs-foundation.md— the same-claim/different-warrant findings (the source of Part 1's warrant notes); R5 §A–§I + Phase 1 §J + Phase 4 §K anthropology + §L trustworthiness + §M festival cycledivergence-map.md— the genuine, held disagreements (the source of Part 3); R5 §1–§12 + Phase 4 §4a anthropology + §13 authority-locusstructural-analysis.md— hubs, isolated jewels, and structural form (the source of Part 2); Phase 4 adds 19 new WEAK-distinctive jewels + 3 new structural-form findings (F1 virtue-list canonical structure, F2 integrative virtue-triad, F3 relational role-ethics, F4 heptadic divine-multiplicity, F5 tiered ethics vs one-tier-householder, F6 daily-prayer integrator + community-affiliative entry node)gate-2-consistency-check.md— Phase 3 → Phase 4 PASS gate (the baseline against which Phase 4 re-attestation and Phase 5 refresh worked)
Foundational documents:
- Proposal — Cross-Tradition Distillation and the Compass Atlas — the union-vs-intersection distinction this compass embodies
- Plan 010 — Cross-Tradition Distillation
The 12 per-tradition principle distillations (the inputs): Buddhism · Hinduism · Jainism · Judaism · Christianity · Islam · Sikhism · Confucianism · Taoism · Zoroastrianism · Bahá'í · Shinto
R5 — per-tradition Stage-B files that substantively strengthen specific entries above:
- Bible per-verse Sermon on the Mount + Decalogue + Shema + Pauline ethics + deuterocanon — strengthens concerns 1 (Golden Rule, Matt 7:12), 3 (non-harm, Matt 5:38–44), 4 (truth, no false witness), 13 (Covenant, 2 Cor 3:6 + Decalogue), and the apophasis tension (Christian negative theology).
- Buddhism DN 31 Sigālovāda + DN 26 Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda + SN 22.59 + SN 22.85 Yamaka — strengthens concern 1 (six-direction reciprocity), concern 7 (P15 dharmic polity / structural justice), concern 9 (lay family ethic), and the self + apophasis tensions.
- Hinduism — all 13 principal Upanishads (Chānd 6 tat tvam asi, Bṛh 1.4.10 aham brahmāsmi, Bṛh 4.4.22 neti neti) — strengthens concern 2 (dignity-from-identity) and tensions 1 (the self) and 11 (apophasis).
- Islam — al-Fātiḥa + Throne Verse + Q 5:1 + Q 7:172 + Q 17:34 per-ayah — strengthens concern 13 (mīthāq).
- Tanakh — per-verse Decalogue, Shema, prophetic-ethical core — strengthens concerns 1, 4, 7, 13 and the self tension.
- Zoroastrianism — Yt 10 Mithra; Yasna 30/31/43 Asha — anchors concern 13 (the Mithra-covenant addition) and strengthens concern 4 (truth).
- Taoism — full Zhuangzi incl. Primitivist + Yangist chapters — sources the three new jewels (P16/P17/P18).
- Confucianism — per-book Analects — sharpens concern 1 (shu 15:23) and concern 9 (xiao as root).
- Sikhism — five additional compositions (Sukhmani, Anand, Asa di Var, et al.) — strengthens concerns 2, 3, 8.
- Bahá'í — Seven Valleys + Íqán — Íqán anchors independent investigation (concern 4) and the apophasis tension.
Plan 013 Phase 5 (2026-05-30) — Phase-4 Atlas re-attestation drives this refresh; the per-tradition Phase-3 retrofits source the new content:
- Confucianism — Phase 1 pilot N=3 deepening — P13 xin anchors the new shared-grounding concern 14 (Trustworthiness); P15 wǔlún anchors the new shared-grounding concern 15 (Role-relational ethics); P14 Mencian xingshan + sìduān anchors the innate-goodness pole of the new held tension #12 (Anthropology); P9 tianming (revocable Mandate of Heaven) anchors one of the six poles of the new held tension #13 (Authority-locus).
- Buddhism — Phase 3 N=3 deepening (Tisaraṇa, Pañca Sīlāni, paṭiccasamuppāda substrate) — sources three new jewels and contributes the kileśa-laden-mind pole of held tension #12.
- Hinduism — Phase 3 N=3 deepening (pañca-kośa, catur-puruṣārtha, three-method realization) — sources three new structural jewels.
- Jainism — Phase 3 N=3 deepening (ratnatraya integrated quadrad; mahāvrata/aṇuvrata tier) — sources two new structural jewels and contributes one pole of the tiered-ethics structural-form finding + the karmically-stratified-plural-soul pole of held tension #12.
- Islam — Phase 3 N=3 deepening (al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā, iḥsān-axis, ummah wasaṭ, ṣawm+ḥajj) — sources three new structural jewels; fiṭra pole of held tension #12.
- Christianity — Phase 3 N=3 deepening (Lord's Prayer, trinitarian substrate, theological-virtue triad, Beatitudes) — sources four new structural jewels; the created-good-fallen pole of held tension #12; Christological-ecclesial pole of held tension #13.
- Sikhism — Phase 3 N=3 deepening (Five Khands, Five Thieves, Nirbhau/Akāl, effort-grace dyad, householder-only ideal) — sources five structural jewels; one pole of the tiered-ethics structural-form finding; textual-Gurū pole of held tension #13.
- Zoroastrianism — Phase 3 N=3 deepening (Amesha Spentas heptad, Yazata class, Chinvat Bridge, metaphysical-vs-operational dualism) — sources four structural jewels; reinforces concern 13 (Covenant), concern 16 (Festival cycle — Gahanbars), concern 17 (Administrative order — Magi class).
- Bahá'í — Phase 3 N=3 deepening (administrative order P13, two-tier Covenant P14) — anchors the new shared-grounding concern 17 (Administrative order); sources two structural jewels including the only two-tier covenant in the pool; institutionalized-clergyless pole of held tension #13; noble-soul + dual-nature pole of held tension #12.
- Taoism — Phase 3 N=3 deepening (xīn zhāi / zuò wàng; wù huà) — sources two more structural jewels (subtractive contemplative practice + death-as-transformation).
- Judaism — Phase 3 N=3 deepening (coupled sacred-time architecture P15 moadim + warrant-doubling + Noahide floor) — sources three structural jewels; anchors concern 16 (Festival cycle / sacred-time architecture) on the side with most explicit divine ordination ("My appointed seasons," Lev 23:2); prophetic-scriptural pole of held tension #13.
- Shinto — Phase 3 honest-thinness verdict held at N=8 — anchors the negative-structural-features cluster as positive data jewel; immanent-kami pole of held tension #13.
- Atlas — convergence-matrix.md Phase 4 re-attestation, surface-vs-foundation.md Phase 4 §K + §L + §M, divergence-map.md Phase 4 §4a + §13, structural-analysis.md Phase 4 Part 2 + Part 3a — the direct sources of this Phase 5 refresh.
For families
A shared moral floor that can be taught to children, with each tradition's distinctive voice preserved.
For seekers
A map for exploring multiple traditions without flattening or syncretism.
For researchers
Claim-vs-warrant discipline applied across twelve traditions, with verse-level traceability.