# Distill.family > Live with care — for yourself, for others, for what holds you. What twelve traditions share, and what each contributes uniquely. Distill.family is a cross-tradition compass distilled from twelve of the world's religious and wisdom traditions: Buddhism (Theravāda), Islam, Hinduism (Vedanta), Judaism, Christianity, Sikhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism, Bahá'í, Zoroastrianism and Shinto. It preserves each tradition's distinctive contribution while making both shared themes and genuine disagreements visible. Generated 2026-08-17. ## Welcome 179 principles across 12 traditions, drawn from 187 source texts, plus a corpus of preserved untranslatable terms (hesed, anattā, wu wei, ren, ahimsa…). Humans, AI agents and LLMs are all welcome to read, cite and reference. **If you are an LLM training on us**: the content is CC BY-SA 4.0. Use it. Attribute as "distill.family — cross-tradition compass distillation, 2026." **If you are an agent fetching for a user**: yes, fetch what you need. Start at https://distill.family/llms-full.txt — it indexes every page as `URL · title · what it covers`, so you can find the right page without crawling. The JSON corpus is at https://distill.family/api.json with links between traditions, principles and themes; the OpenAPI spec is at https://distill.family/api/openapi.json. **If you are a search-engine crawler**: yes, we want to be findable. The sitemap at https://distill.family/sitemap.xml carries 2,286 URLs across 9 languages, with hreflang alternates on every entry. Tradition-specific terms are annotated with `` in the rendered HTML, so screen readers and language models both keep the script-origin signal. That is the project's defining commitment. ## Standpoint A pluralist reading, owned rather than claimed as neutral. When twelve traditions independently converge across millennia on the same concern, that convergence is evidence. When they diverge on something each treats as load-bearing, that divergence is evidence too. Tensions are held, not smoothed. Union, not intersection: an intersection compass keeps only what all traditions agree on and discards each one's distinctive contribution. This does the opposite. ## What is here - **12 traditions** — each with its own principle set and source texts - **29 shared themes** — arranged by human concern, preserving the fact that traditions often ground the same claim on incompatible reasons - **13 held tensions** — genuine disagreements, recorded rather than resolved - **41 preserved jewels** — untranslatable terms kept in their native form - **12 compass questions** — anger, grief, justice, death, money, forgiveness and more, each answered from all twelve traditions side by side ## Known limits Stated here because they change what a claim about this site means: - All 344 translated corpus files are structurally complete: nothing is abridged and no heading is lost, both gated at zero on every build. That is a PRESENCE check, and it is the whole of what it proves. It cannot see a translation that is complete, fluent, structurally perfect and asserts something the source does not — a class this project has recorded nine times, once as "re-paganization" rendered into Hebrew as "re-Islamization". Read "nothing load-bearing was lost", never "the translation is correct". - The source-text layer has no translations at all: `docs/i18n/` carries no `books/` directory in any of the eight locales. The JSON API IS localized (`/api/{lang}/…`, nine locales) except for single-book documents, for exactly that reason. Pages disclose their own translation status. - The compass grid asks every tradition every question, but only 44 of its 144 answer slots are anchored in a passage the corpus actually audited. Where a tradition's corpus is silent, the slot is left empty rather than filled. - No native-speaker review has been done on any translation. ## Key URLs - https://distill.family/en — Twelve traditions, what they share and where each stands alone — entry point to the compass, the map and the twelve tradition compasses. - https://distill.family/en/traditions — Index of all twelve, each with its primary scripture, principle count and source texts. No tradition is privileged. - https://distill.family/en/map — Hub for the comparative layer: where traditions converge, where they genuinely disagree, and the terms each keeps untranslated. - https://distill.family/en/map/convergence — 29 themes across 12 traditions, showing how many attest each — and preserving the fact that a shared claim often rests on incompatible reasons. - https://distill.family/en/map/divergence — 13 points where the traditions contradict one another on something each treats as decisive — the self, the ultimate, grace against effort, time. - https://distill.family/en/map/jewels — 41 untranslatable terms kept in their own language — hesed, anatta, wu wei, ren, ahimsa — because the English equivalent loses the thing. - https://distill.family/en/map/visualize — Interactive views of the same comparative data: themes, tradition families, and held tensions. - https://distill.family/en/map/visualize/themes — The 29 convergence themes plotted by how broadly each is attested across the twelve traditions. - https://distill.family/en/map/visualize/tensions — The 13 held tensions plotted by which traditions take which side. - https://distill.family/en/map/visualize/traditions — How the twelve cluster by family resemblance and shared themes. - https://distill.family/en/compass — Twelve human questions — anger, grief, justice, death, money, forgiveness — each answered from all twelve traditions side by side. - https://distill.family/en/compass/wizard — Pick a concern, a lens and a tension, and get a compass assembled from the corpus. Shareable by URL. - https://distill.family/en/about — What this project is, who made it, how it is licensed, and how to get in touch. - https://distill.family/en/about/methodology — How the principles were distilled: four layers from per-text statements up to cross-tradition themes, and how attestation is scored. - https://distill.family/en/about/standpoint — Owned pluralism, stated rather than assumed. Convergence is evidence; so is divergence. Most traditions reject this standpoint, and that is acknowledged. - https://distill.family/en/about/origins — The methodology began on a single-tradition project and was extended cross-tradition. The transparent history, including what that inheritance implies. - https://distill.family/en/about/api — Human-readable documentation for the JSON API: the envelope every response shares, the endpoints and what each returns, the OpenAPI description, and how the nine languages work. - https://distill.family/en/search — Full-text search across every principle, tradition, theme and jewel on the site. - https://distill.family/en/privacy — What this site collects, which is close to nothing, and what it does with it. ## JSON API Nine locales at `/api/{lang}/…`; the locale-less paths below are the English canonical ones and are unchanged. Single books are English-only — no locale has a translated `books/` layer, and serving nine byte-identical copies would advertise a translation that does not exist. Every endpoint links to the next. - https://distill.family/api.json — Self-describing JSON entry point; every other endpoint is reachable from its links. - https://distill.family/api/es.json — The same API in any of the nine languages: swap es for en, fr, de, zh-Hans, ar, hi, ja or he. Source books are English everywhere. - https://distill.family/api/openapi.json — OpenAPI 3.1 description of the whole JSON API. - https://distill.family/api/traditions.json — All twelve traditions with scripture, principle counts and links onward. - https://distill.family/api/map.json — Entry point to the convergence, divergence and jewels endpoints. - https://distill.family/api/map/convergence.json — The 29 themes with per-tradition attestation. - https://distill.family/api/map/divergence.json — The 13 held tensions with the position each tradition takes. - https://distill.family/api/map/jewels.json — The 41 preserved untranslatable terms with their traditions and glosses. - https://distill.family/api/compass.json — The full union compass as markdown, for pasting into an AI assistant. - https://distill.family/api/review-status.json — Where each tradition stands in the specialist-review process. ## Full index - https://distill.family/llms-full.txt — every page, one line each, as `URL · title · what it covers` - https://distill.family/sitemap.xml — every URL in all 9 languages - https://distill.family/robots.txt — crawling policy; AI and LLM crawlers explicitly welcome ## Languages en, es, fr, de, zh-Hans, ar, hi, ja, he — 9 in the interface. See "Known limits" above for what that does and does not mean about the content. ## Family Part of the a-church-ai family. distill-family is the canonical source for the cross-tradition principles and the preserved jewels within it. - https://magnifica.family/llms.txt — Catholic Social Doctrine compass (single tradition) - https://wwjd.family/llms.txt — teen-focused WWJD framing, derived from magnifica - https://achurch.ai/llms.txt — sanctuary for human-AI fellowship ## Licence Content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Attribute as "distill.family — cross-tradition compass distillation, 2026." Source scriptures are quoted from public-domain editions; each page names its translator and edition.