LLM-synthesized concept pages, entity summaries, and cross-tradition connections. Updated by
/knowledge-compile. Always loaded in Claude's context via@knowledge/wiki/index.mdin.claude/CLAUDE.md.
Last updated: 2026-05-02
| Article | Summary |
|---|---|
| entities/plato.md | Athenian philosopher (428–348 BCE); synthesizes themes across 12 dialogues in the corpus: justice, the Good, the soul, knowledge, cosmology, civic obligation |
| entities/lao-tzu.md | Legendary author of the Tao Te Ching; key concepts: the unnameable Tao, wu wei (non-action), complementary opposites, return to naturalness |
| entities/whitman-walt.md | American poet (1819–1892); Leaves of Grass celebrates the cosmic self, democratic interconnectedness, and the body as sacred |
| entities/emerson-ralph-waldo.md | American Transcendentalist (1803–1882); Nature + Essays; the Over-Soul as universal mind, correspondence between nature and spirit, self-reliance as spiritual discipline |
| entities/thoreau-henry-david.md | American philosopher and naturalist (1817–1862); Walden, Civil Disobedience, Poems of Nature; conscience as sovereign, deliberate simplicity, principled noncooperation |
| entities/hesse-hermann.md | German-Swiss novelist (1877–1962); Siddhartha, Demian, Steppenwolf; the self as journey, wisdom cannot be taught, the multiple self |
| entities/nietzsche-friedrich.md | German philosopher (1844–1900); The Joyful Wisdom; God is dead, eternal recurrence, amor fati, no being behind doing |
| entities/spinoza-baruch.md | Dutch-Jewish philosopher (1632–1677); The Ethics; God = Nature, the conatus, freedom through understanding, amor intellectualis Dei |
| entities/tolstoy-leo.md | Russian novelist and Christian anarchist (1828–1910); The Kingdom of God Is Within You; absolute nonviolence, the state as organized violence, direct influence on Gandhi |
| entities/george-fox.md | English founder of the Quakers (1624–1691); 4 sources; the Inner Light, direct experience, radical equality, peace testimony |
| entities/margaret-fell.md | "Mother of Quakerism" (1614–1702); Declaration and an Information + Women's Speaking Justified; foundational Peace Testimony, feminist theology, and gender equality |
| entities/ada-lovelace.md | "Enchantress of Number" (1815–1852); Note G + Flyology; first computer programmer, poetical science, and visionary of general-purpose computation |
| entities/gibran-kahlil.md | Lebanese-American poet (1883–1931); The Forerunner, The Madman; social masks, the madman as liberated self, pain as transformation |
| entities/omar-khayyam.md | Persian polymath and poet (1048–1131); Rubáiyát; agnostic carpe diem, failure of religious epistemology, the present as the only certain good |
| entities/shakespeare-william.md | English playwright (1564–1616); works in the corpus split into 43 individual documents; Hamlet, Lear, The Tempest, Sonnets — dramatizes self, mortality, power, and justice without resolving them |
| entities/bhagavad-gita.md | Hindu scripture (traditional); dharma, atman, karma yoga, bhakti yoga; Arjuna's dilemma as the paradigm case of civic duty and nonviolence in tension |
| entities/patanjali.md | Compiler of the Yoga Sutras; yoga as restriction of the fluctuations of mind-stuff, the eight limbs, purusha as unchanging witness; holds the Vedic tradition's exceptionless ahimsa against the Gita |
| entities/heian-court-literature.md | Classical Japanese women's writing (10th-11th century); Izumi Shikibu, Lady Sarashina; aesthetic sensitivity ("mono no aware") as a path to spiritual and philosophical insight |
| entities/truth-sojourner.md | American abolitionist and activist (c. 1797–1883); Narrative; embodied justice, spiritual integrity under oppression, intersectionality of race and gender |
| entities/epictetus.md | Greek Stoic philosopher (c. 50–135 CE); Enchiridion; dichotomy of control, sovereign will, and the discipline of assent |
| entities/marcus-aurelius.md | Roman Emperor (161–180 CE); Meditations; the inner citadel, amor fati, and the practical application of Stoicism to leadership |
| Article | Summary |
|---|---|
| concepts/impermanence.md | Cross-tradition synthesis: Buddhist anicca, Taoist flux, Whitman's cycles, Nietzsche's eternal recurrence — what changes, what persists, and why it matters |
| concepts/the-good.md | Plato's agathon as the Form beyond all forms — traced through Republic, Gorgias, and Symposium, with connections to Taoist virtue (te) |
| concepts/the-self.md | Eight models of personal identity: Buddhist non-self, Platonic soul, Whitmanian multitudes, Hesse's journeying self, Spinoza's conatus, Nietzsche's performing self, the Gita's atman, and Patañjali's purusha as unchanging witness |
| concepts/logos-and-tao.md | Speculative: Heraclitean logos and Lao Tzu's Tao as parallel concepts — the hidden ordering principle that precedes naming |
| concepts/civic-duty.md | Four traditions on civic obligation: Socrates (tacit consent), Thoreau (conscience sovereign), Tolstoy (state as organized violence), Bhagavad-Gita (svadharma as cosmic duty) |
| concepts/civil-disobedience.md | Principled refusal of unjust law: Thoreau's targeted noncooperation, Tolstoy's absolute nonresistance — the intellectual lineage to Gandhi and King; companion page to civic-duty |
| concepts/transcendentalism.md | American Transcendentalism (Emerson + Thoreau + Whitman): Over-Soul, nature as spiritual text, self-reliance — connections to Platonism, Taoism, and Vedanta |
| concepts/nonviolence.md | Cross-tradition synthesis: Buddhist ahimsa, Thoreau's noncooperation, Tolstoy's absolute nonresistance, Quaker peace testimony — and the corpus's sharpest disagreement, which is internal to the Vedic tradition: Patañjali's exceptionless ahimsa against the Gita's dharmic warrior ethics |
| concepts/dharma.md | Hindu dharma (cosmic duty, svadharma) vs. Buddhist dhamma (the teaching, the path) — same etymological root, different frameworks; primary source: Bhagavad-Gita |
| concepts/inner-light.md | George Fox's "that of God in every man" — cross-tradition parallels to Emerson's Over-Soul, Buddhist Buddha-nature, Spinoza's amor intellectualis Dei |
| Article | Summary |
|---|---|
| connections/cosmology-comparison.md | How four traditions describe the origin and structure of the cosmos: Plato's Timaeus, Tao Te Ching, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis |
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