Hinduism
Symbol · Symbols of the Religions
Om
The Imperishable Syllable
Held to be the sound of ultimate reality itself — one syllable, and continuous with the self who says it.
What it meansThe Mandukya Upanishad takes it apart: A, U and M are waking, dream and deep sleep, and the syllable's fourth part is the silence after it — turīya, which is not a state but the reality the other three occur in. The teaching is in the stopping, not the sounding.
Book · around 200 BCE
The Bhagavad Gītā
An Episode Made Scripture
A claim on the action, none on its fruit; it has tended to return to each reader the duty he brought.
SignificanceIts most quoted verse gives a right to the action and none at all to its fruit — and it is spoken to a man who wants to leave the field. The teaching is not detachment from the work but detachment from the outcome, which is the harder half and the one that permits acting at all.
The FindingCommented on as a book in its own right since Śaṅkara in the eighth century, the Gītā became the Hindu book about duty in action — and the one most outsiders meet first — through a modern chain of readers: Wilkins 1785, Tilak 1915, Gandhi 1929-30.
Teaching · 8th century
The Chakra System
Six Wheels, Seven Colours
A meditation map, not anatomy; the rainbow colours are a twentieth-century addition, not ancient India.
What it isA map for meditation, not a description of the body: each lotus carries a number of petals, a seed syllable, an element and a deity, and the practice is to move attention upward through them. It is an instrument for directing awareness, and it works whether or not anything is there.
The FindingThe rainbow seven is a Western assembly completed in 1977; the six-plus-crown scheme beneath it is one tantric lineage among others that counted five, nine or twelve — and older than the 1577 Bengali text through which the West received it.