Traditions

Brahmo Samaj

Rabindranath Tagore—the reformed monotheism of Bengal and the song of the offering.

The Brahmo Samaj, founded in Calcutta by Ram Mohan Roy in 1828, is a reform movement that draws from the Upaniṣads a purified monotheism, rejects idolatry and the caste system, and engages with European modernity. Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), from a prominent Brahmo family, extends its spirit in a poetic work: Gitanjali ("Song Offerings") speaks of an intimate God, present in nature and the labor of men, to whom one surrenders. The collection earned Tagore the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

Buddhism

Pali suttas, the Buddha—the cessation of thirst.

The teachings of the Buddha (Siddhārtha Gautama, c. 5th century BCE) were first transmitted orally before being recorded in Pali several centuries after his death. The Pali Canon (Tipiṭaka) remains the closest source to these original teachings. The doctrine sets out the Four Noble Truths (suffering, its origin, its cessation, the path) and the Noble Eightfold Path. Several traditions have since developed from it: Theravāda (Southeast Asia), Mahāyāna (East Asia, with its own sūtras), and Vajrayāna (Tibet).

Bushido

The Hagakure—the way of the warrior, or the art of living having mourned oneself.

The bushidō, "the way of the warrior," refers to the code of honor and ethics of the samurai class. It blends loyalty to one's lord, self-mastery, a sense of honor, and acceptance of death, shaped by Confucianism, Shinto, and above all Zen. The Hagakure ("In the Shadow of Leaves"), a collection of Yamamoto Tsunetomo's sayings recorded in the early 18th century—when the Tokugawa peace had rendered war obsolete—offers its most radical expression: its most famous phrase states that the way of the samurai lies in death. Paradoxically, mourning one's own life each morning liberates one to act fully.

Christian mystique

Eckhart, John of the Cross, Weil, Pascal.

The Christian mystical tradition runs from the Desert Fathers (4th century, Egypt) to Simone Weil (20th century), passing through Saint Augustine (4th–5th centuries), the Rhenish mystics (Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, 13th–14th centuries), the Spanish Carmelites (John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, 16th century), and Jansenism (Pascal, 17th century). It weaves together purification ("dark night"), illumination, and union with God through self-emptying. Always in tension with dogmatic orthodoxy—Eckhart was condemned in 1329, John of the Cross imprisoned by his own order.

Confucianism

Confucius, Mencius—ritual, study, and humanity (rén) as the path to self-governance.

Confucianism (rújiā, "school of the scholars") dates back to Confucius (Kǒngzǐ, 551–479 BCE), who did not claim to be its founder but rather a transmitter of the rites (lǐ) and culture of the Zhou. His ethics place humanity (rén) and reciprocity at the heart of communal life: cultivating oneself to order the family, then the state. Mencius (Mèngzǐ, 4th century BCE) deepened the thesis of the innate goodness of human nature. The Analects and the Four Books would form the foundation of the imperial examination system for centuries.

Cross-cutting

Comparative readings: East and West.

The transversal is viasophia’s editorial signature: reading two traditions on the same concept, identifying divergences before convergences, refusing to dissolve the distinct operations of each thought into a universal gnosis. It is a format rather than a corpus—one that draws on all other traditions. The Sunday essay is devoted to it. A few modern Western authors (Watts, Suzuki, Krishnamurti, Osho) are themselves transversal mediators and appear here.

Daoism

Lao-Tzu, Zhuangzi—the way of non-action.

Philosophical Taoism took shape in China between the 6th and 3rd centuries BCE around two texts: the Tao Te Ching (Dào Dé Jīng), attributed to Laozi, and the Zhuangzi, attributed to Zhuāng Zhōu. The tao ("way") is neither a god nor an abstract principle, but the process in which all things participate. Wu-wei (non-action) is not passivity but action that does not force. Later religious Taoism (from the 2nd century CE onward) represents a transformation of this, distinct from classical Taoism.

Devotion

Kabir and the sants—devotion to the formless divine, beyond castes and creeds.

The bhakti is the path of loving devotion, where union with the divine comes through the heart's impulse rather than ritual or exegesis. The nirguṇa ("without attributes") current of the sants of northern India worships an absolute without form or sectarian name. Kabir (15th century), a weaver from Benares raised between Hindus and Muslims, is its sharpest voice: he mocks the outward devotions of both and recognizes only the inner Name. His couplets (dohe) and songs spread by word of mouth long before being written down.

Haiku

Bashō—capturing the moment and impermanence in seventeen syllables.

The haiku is the brief form of Japanese poetry—three segments of five, seven, and five syllables—derived from haikai. Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) elevated it to the rank of spiritual art: nourished by Zen and Taoism, he made the poem the imprint of a unique moment where the poet effaces himself before the thing seen—a bird, a frog, the snow. His travel journals, including The Narrow Road to the Deep North, blend prose and haikus in a meditation on impermanence and austerity (wabi). The capture of the present becomes both a discipline and an aesthetic.

Mohism

Mozi — universal love and common utility against Confucian rites.

Moism is the school founded by Mozi (Mo Di, c. 470–391 BCE), the main rival of Confucianism during the Warring States period. Against the Confucian hierarchy of affections and ritualism, Mozi preaches universal and impartial love (jiān ài) and judges all conduct by its utility for the greatest number. He condemns offensive war, lavish funerals, and extravagant music, and bases his authority on the will of Heaven. His highly organized school disappeared under the Han but bequeathed one of China’s earliest consequentialist and logical thought systems.

Neoplatonism

Plotinus — the return of the soul to the One, beyond intelligence.

Neoplatonism is the last great school of ancient philosophy, founded in the 3rd century by Plotinus (204–270), whose teachings were compiled by his disciple Porphyry in the Enneads (six groups of nine treatises). It hierarchizes reality into three principles: the One, beyond being and thought; the Intellect (noûs), where the Ideas reside; and the Soul, which animates the sensible world. The philosophical life is a movement of conversion and return (epistrophē): through purification and contemplation, the soul ascends toward its source and, in rare moments, knows union with the One. This thought would long nourish Christian, Jewish, and Muslim mystics.

Orthodoxy

The Tales of a Russian Pilgrim—the prayer of the heart and hesychasm.

The Eastern Orthodox Church developed its own contemplative path, hesychasm (from the Greek hēsychia, "quietude"): through the ceaseless repetition of the "Jesus Prayer"—Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me—coordinated with the breath, the one who prays seeks to draw the spirit into the heart and to pray without ceasing. Codified on Mount Athos and gathered in the Philokalia, this tradition found a popular expression in the 19th century in The Way of a Pilgrim, where an anonymous wanderer learns, from encounter to encounter, to make this prayer the very breath of his life.

Philosophy

Ibn Ṭufayl, Averroes, Ibn Khaldūn—Greek reason in the land of Islam.

Falsafa is the philosophy of Hellenic tradition received and extended in the Muslim world from the 9th century, when Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists were translated in Baghdad. Al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and then Averroes developed a thought that linked philosophical demonstration with revealed Law. Ibn Ṭufayl imagined, in Hayy ibn Yaqẓān, a man reaching truth alone through reason; Averroes argued in his Decisive Treatise for the harmony of religion and philosophy; Ibn Khaldūn, in the Prolegomena, established a science of societies and their history. This tradition would transmit Aristotle to the Latin West.

Pure Land Buddhism

Shinran—salvation through trust alone in the vow of the Buddha Amida.

Amidism, or Pure Land Buddhism (jōdo), teaches that no one can awaken through their own efforts in this age of the Dharma’s decline: salvation comes from the "original vow" of the buddha Amida, who welcomes into his Pure Land anyone who entrusts themselves to him by reciting his name (nembutsu). Shinran (1173–1263), a disciple of Hōnen, radicalizes this path of the "other-power" (tariki): it is not the quantity of recitations that saves, but faith received as a gift. He effectively founds Jōdo Shinshū, the "True Pure Land School," today one of the most widely followed forms of Buddhism in Japan.

Russian Philosophy

Chestov—the revolt against rational evidence in the name of freedom.

At the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Russian religious thought (Soloviev, Berdiaev, Frank, Chestov) sought a path between Orthodox faith and European philosophy, often in opposition to rationalism and positivism. Léon Chestov (1866-1938) was its most paradoxical figure: in The Apotheosis of Groundlessness, he attacks the empire of "necessary" truths and rational certainties, which, in his view, stifle freedom and the cry of the individual. Against Athens (Greek reason), he appeals to Jerusalem (biblical faith), for whom all is possible. His revolt foreshadows existentialism.

Seon

Jinul—the Korean Buddhism of sudden awakening and gradual cultivation.

Seon is the Korean branch of direct awakening Buddhism (Chinese chán, Japanese zen), introduced to the peninsula from the 7th century onward. Its great master, Jinul (Chinul, 1158–1210), unified rival currents: against the opposition between the school of sutras and that of meditation, he taught that awakening to one’s true nature is sudden, but its implementation requires gradual cultivation—"sudden awakening, gradual cultivation." He combined study with the practice of sitting and examining the hwadu (the vital point of a kōan). His synthesis founded the Jogye Order, still the majority in Korea today.

Stoicism

Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus—the Stoa and the freedom within.

Stoicism emerged in Athens around 301 BCE with Zeno of Citium, who taught beneath the Painted Porch (Stoa Poikilē) of the Agora. The tradition later unfolded in Rome between the first and second centuries through Seneca (tutor to Nero), Epictetus (a freed slave), and Marcus Aurelius (emperor). It rigorously distinguishes between what depends on us—judgments, desires, actions—and what does not—the body, possessions, reputation, the actions of others. Inner freedom lies in attaching oneself only to the former.

Sufism

Rumi, Ibn Arabi—love as a path.

Sufism (taṣawwuf) is the mystical dimension of Islam. Emerging in the 8th century as a reaction to the worldliness of the Umayyad caliphate, it later took shape in brotherhoods (ṭuruq), which passed down a spiritual discipline (dhikr, samāʿ). Its major classical figures include al-Ḥallāj (crucified in 922 for declaring, “I am the Truth”), al-Ghazālī (who reconciled Sufism with orthodoxy in the 11th century), ʿAṭṭār (poet of The Conference of the Birds), Ibn Arabi (theorist of the oneness of being, 12th–13th centuries), and Rumi (poet and founder of the Whirling Dervishes).

Thiền

The Thiền Uyển Tập Anh—Vietnamese Zen, between mountain hermitage and royal court.

Zen is the tradition of Buddhist meditation (chán/zen) in Vietnam, attested as early as the 6th century and long linked both to mountain hermitages and to the courts of the Lý and Trần kings. The Thiền Uyển Tập Anh ("Eminent Figures of the Zen Garden"), compiled in the 14th century, gathers the biographies and sayings of the masters: this "transmission of the lamp" collection is the main source on Vietnamese lineages. Zen there appears intertwined with popular worship and court Confucianism—less withdrawn from the world than its Japanese counterpart.

Tolstoyism

Léon Tolstoy — the Gospel reduced to non-resistance to evil and the inner Kingdom.

In the late 1870s, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy goes through the crisis he recounts in My Confession and converts to a rational reading of the Gospel. He retains a practical core from it: not resisting evil with violence, not swearing, not judging, loving one’s enemies. He rejects the institutional Church—which excommunicates him in 1901—as well as the state founded on coercion. “The Kingdom of God is within you”: the phrase from the Gospel of Luke becomes the title of his manifesto on non-violence, which will directly inspire Gandhi.

Vedānta

The Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita—non-duality.

Vedānta ("end of the Veda") is one of the six orthodox darśana of Indian philosophy. It rests on three bodies of work: the Upaniṣads (the final layers of the Veda, 8th–5th centuries BCE), the Bhagavad-Gītā (central episode of the Mahābhārata), and the Brahma-sūtra (sūtras systematizing the doctrine). Several schools have developed from it: advaita (non-dualism, Śaṅkara), viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism, Rāmānuja), dvaita (dualism, Madhva). The debate centers on the relationship between Brahman (the absolute), ātman (the self), and māyā (appearance).

Western philosophy

Spinoza, Montaigne, Marx, Morin, Deleuze.

Under this heading, viasophia brings together Western thinkers who belong neither to classical Stoicism nor to Christian mysticism—from Greek ethics (Aristotle) and the Renaissance (Montaigne) to contemporary thought (Morin, Deleuze). Here, the ethics of happiness and friendship (Aristotle) sit alongside skeptical humanism, modern rationalism (Spinoza), political critique (Marx), German pessimism (Schopenhauer), genealogy (Nietzsche), the phenomenology of attention (Weil), the thought of the multiple (Deleuze), and complex thought (Morin). The editorial choice favors works that engage in dialogue with Eastern wisdom or spirituality—not out of syncretism, but through a serious effort at rapprochement.

Yoga

Patañjali—the cessation of the mind’s fluctuations, in eight limbs.

Yoga is one of the six darśana ("viewpoints") of orthodox India. Its Yoga-Sūtra, attributed to Patañjali (2nd century CE), defines it from the outset as the cessation of the mind’s fluctuations (citta-vṛtti-nirodha). The work describes a discipline in eight limbs (aṣṭāṅga)—from ethical conduct (yama, niyama) to posture and breath, leading to concentration, meditation, and absorption (samādhi)—aiming to isolate the spirit (puruṣa) from mental matter. Distinct from Vedānta, it shares with Sāṃkhya its dualist metaphysics.

Zen

The Buddhism of direct awakening—zazen, the kōan, the right gesture.

The Zen (from the Chinese chán, transcribing the Sanskrit dhyāna, "meditation") is the school of Buddhism that prioritizes the direct experience of awakening over the study of texts. Transmitted from China to Japan beginning in the 12th century, it divided there into two main lineages: Rinzai, which uses the kōan (paradoxical riddle) to break mental attachment, and Sōtō, centered on silent sitting alone (shikantaza). Its culture of the sober and present gesture has deeply influenced Japanese arts—tea, ink, sword—up to the warriors' ethics as presented by Nukariya.

Achuar

Carlos Nangkitiar Kunchim Tsanim—tsungki, the master of waters: a world of domains, each with its own owner.

The Achuar are an Amazonian people of the Jivaroan language family (which they now call Aents Chicham, “the people’s speech”), settled on both sides of the border between Peru and Ecuador, along the Huasaga, Manchari, and Huitoyacu rivers, tributaries of the Pastaza. Their understanding of the living world regards the forest and waters as a society of dueños—invisible masters, each governing their own domain: Tsungki, master of fish and waters; Mana, master of game; Nungkui, mistress of the garden. Nothing is taken without addressing these owners through a “discourse” (discurso). Carlos Nangkitiar Kunchim Tsanim recounted this in the first person in El ojo verde. Cosmovisiones amazónicas—a collection of worldviews written and illustrated by Indigenous people themselves, published by the bilingual teacher training program of the Peruvian Amazon (FORMABIAP) and AIDESEP: a named, accountable voice (level 2). One says “according to Nangkitiar,” never “the Achuar say.”

Territory Haute Amazonie, frontière Pérou–Équateur

Ainu

Chiri Yukie, Shigeru Kayano—kamuy, the world understood as a society of persons.

The Ainu are the Indigenous people of Hokkaidō, the Kuril Islands, and Sakhalin, long denied by the Japanese state, which only recognized them as an Indigenous people in 2008. Their oral literature—the yukar, sung epics—carries a vision of the living world in which every being (bear, owl, fire, water, boat) is a kamuy, a person endowed with speech and will who visits the human world. In 1922, at nineteen, Chiri Yukie became the first Ainu to transcribe and translate these songs; in the 20th century, the elder Shigeru Kayano passed down their language and memory. Sources are copyrighted: we limit ourselves to brief attributed quotations and the knowledge these voices themselves made public.

Territory Hokkaidō, Kouriles et Sakhaline

Apalech

Tyson Yunkaporta—ngal, "we-two": we never think alone, knowing is an act of relation.

The Apalech clan belongs to the peoples of the western coast of the Cape York Peninsula, in northeastern Australia, where Wik-Mungkan is spoken. Scholar and artist Tyson Yunkaporta, long adopted into this clan under Aboriginal Law, lays bare its thought in Sand Talk: knowledge is not something possessed in an isolated mind, but a relationship that flows between beings, places, and their guardians. The word ngal—the dual first person absent in English and French—holds the key: "we-two," the pronoun through which thinking is shared.

Territory Péninsule du cap York, nord-est de l'Australie

Asháninka

Eusebio Laos—breath of the living Sun: water is the breath of a living Sun, and air its spirit, inhaled together by plants, beasts, and people.

The Asháninka are the largest Amazonian people in Peru, part of the Arawak linguistic family, settled in the central jungle—along the Perené, Ene, Tambo, and Pichis rivers, as well as the upper Ucayali. Their name means "the one who is like us." Their understanding of the living world holds the Sun as a living being, el Sol vivo, from which humans are detached particles; water is the breath of this Sun, which it set spinning around the earth so that birds, beasts, and people might live, and the air is its spirit—so that to breathe is to share the same water-breath. Eusebio Laos Ríos (Oshipiyo Ararooshi Iriooshi), an Asháninka scholar born in the San Carlos mountain range, recounted this in the first person in El ojo verde. Cosmovisiones amazónicas—a collection of worldviews written and illustrated by Indigenous people themselves, published by the bilingual teacher training program of the Peruvian Amazon (FORMABIAP) and AIDESEP: a named, accountable voice (level 2). One says "according to Laos," never "the Asháninka say.

Territory Selva centrale, Amazonie péruvienne

Aymara

Fernando Huanacuni Mamani—suma qamaña, the good life: living in fullness with every form of existence.

The Aymara are an Andean people of the highlands around Lake Titicaca, spanning Bolivia, Peru, and Chile, heirs to the high-altitude cultures of Tiwanaku. Their language, Aymara, carries the term suma qamaña—often translated as "living well"—which denotes a life of fulfillment, in harmony and balance with the broader community: humans, but also Mother Earth, the cosmos, and all forms of existence. Fernando Huanacuni Mamani, an Aymara jurist, writer, and diplomat from Bolivia, synthesized this concept for the Andean Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations (CAOI) in Buen Vivir / Vivir Bien (2010): an Indigenous voice articulated through an accountable Andean Indigenous organization (level 2). One says "according to Huanacuni / the CAOI," never "the Andeans say.

Territory Hautes terres andines du lac Titicaca (Bolivie, Pérou, Chili)

Bóóraá

Manuel Mibeco Ruiz—the world is the Creator’s representation, and His hair is the roots planted in every thing, by which He holds the world.

The Bóóraá (Bora) live along the tributaries of the upper Amazon, between Peru and Colombia, organized into clans each named after a being—the Aguaje, the Pijuayo. For them, the world is the very representation of the Creator, Píívyéji Niimúhe ("Creator of the earth and the things that exist within it"): he is rooted in all the things he has made, and each of his hairs is one of these roots. Through the strength of his hair he protects the world, and it is through these same roots that the Bora people communicate with him. The earth first appeared in the form of a woman’s breast, and it was through the nipple, Mújpañe, that the first foods emerged. Manuel Mibeco Ruiz (Bora name Lliíhyo, "heart of the aguaje palm"), curaca of the Brillo Nuevo community, along with Gerardo del Águila Miveco (Íjkú Nuubúmu), shared this account in El ojo verde. Cosmovisiones amazónicas—a collection of Amazonian cosmovisions written and illustrated by Indigenous people themselves (FORMABIAP/AIDESEP): named voices, accountable (level 2). One says "according to Mibeco," never "the Bora say.

Territory Haut Amazone, Pérou–Colombie

Dakota (Sioux)

Vine Deloria Jr.—sacred geography: the sacred is tied to places, not to a story.

The Dakota, along with the Lakota and Nakota, make up the great Sioux nation of the northern plains (Dakotas, Minnesota). Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005), a Sioux from Standing Rock of Yankton Dakota descent, was a jurist, theologian, and one of the most influential Indigenous thinkers in the United States. In God Is Red (1973), he contrasts Western religion’s conception of time—linear history moving from origin to destiny—with a religion of space: for many First Nations, the sacred has a center in a precise place, and every part of the ancestral territory carries the stories that shaped the people. It is this binding of land and narrative that he calls sacred geography. A voice from within, writing in English, his language of expression: he thinks across nations, but his articulation is always—“according to Deloria,” never “the Sioux say.” Sources are copyrighted: we limit ourselves to brief attributed quotations.

Territory Plaines du Nord (Dakotas, Minnesota), États-Unis

Kanaka ʻŌiwi

George Kanahele—aloha ʻāina, the love of the land that nourishes: the ʻāina is not a resource but a living ancestor.

The Kanaka ʻŌiwi (or Kānaka Maoli) are the Indigenous people of the Hawaiian archipelago, at the heart of the Pacific—Polynesian navigators who turned the volcanic islands into a cultivated world of taro valleys and fishponds. Their understanding of life names the land ʻāina, “that which nourishes” (from ʻai, food, the act of eating): not a mere surface or a stock of resources, but a living body born of the union of Papa (Earth Mother) and Wākea (Sky Father), an ancestor from whom they descend. From this comes aloha ʻāina, love of the land, and its counterpart mālama, care—“to care for with love.” George Huʻeu Sanford Kanahele (1930–2000), a Kanaka ʻŌiwi scholar and a key figure in the Hawaiian renaissance, mapped this out in Kū Kanaka—Stand Tall: A Search for Hawaiian Values (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1986): an Indigenous scholar named who restores the values of his people (level 1). One says “according to Kanahele,” never “the Hawaiians say.” The spelling (ʻokina and macrons) follows the source.

Territory Archipel d'Hawaiʻi, Pacifique

Kandozi

Usi Kamarambi (José Hernando Zipina)—his soul is tiger: a transformation of the soul, won through grief and visionary fasting.

The Kandozi (Kandozi-Chapra; formerly referred to as "candoshi" in colonial literature, distinct from the present-day Candoshi people) live along the Pastaza River, around Lake Musa Karusha (Rimachi), in the Peruvian Amazon. Usi Kamarambi (José Hernando Zipina)—Kamarambi, named after a fish that swims straight—shared his people’s cosmogony and a story in which mourning leads to a real transformation: the man who fasts alone in the forest after a loved one’s death may acquire a tiger-spirit, su alma es tigre, his soul becomes tiger—not an inherited totem, not a metaphor for courage, but a mutation of being that passes through death. A named voice, collected and published by an Indigenous organization (AIDESEP/FORMABIAP) in El ojo verde. Cosmovisiones amazónicas. It is said "according to Usi Kamarambi," never "the Kandozi say.

Territory Río Pastaza, Amazonie péruvienne

Kiowa

N. Scott Momaday—the remembered earth, the land held by memory and word.

The Kiowas are a people of the southern Great Plains of the United States (present-day Oklahoma). Having descended from the highlands of Montana in the late 17th century, they became, with the horse and the bison, one of the great cultures of the Plains—an age of gold barely a century long, shattered by the extermination of the herds and the prohibition of the Sun Dance. N. Scott Momaday (1934–2024), the first Native American writer in the United States to receive the Pulitzer Prize (1969, House Made of Dawn), wove myth, history, and personal memory together in The Way to Rainy Mountain to keep this world “still within reach of memory”—an inner voice, in English, his language of writing. Copyrighted sources: only short, attributed quotations are used.

Territory Grandes Plaines du Sud (Oklahoma), États-Unis

Kogi (Kággaba)

Organization Gonawindúa Tayrona — the Law of Origin, a law inscribed in the earth, not in words.

The Kággaba—known externally as the Kogi—live on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a coastal mountain range in northern Colombia, and consider themselves the heirs of the Tairona civilization. They call themselves the "Elder Brothers," guardians of the world’s balance, and their sages, the mamos, uphold its order from sacred sites. An oral culture: the lone Indigenous voice is rare, and the knowledge of the mamos largely closed. Work thus proceeds from a collective and accountable voice, the Organización Gonawindúa Tayrona (OGT), which the Kággaba have established to speak on their behalf before the Colombian state. In its public and dated documents—such as the 2012 territorial management proposal—the OGT invokes the Ley de Origen, the law of origin inscribed in the earth’s own codes. We adhere strictly to what the Kággaba themselves have made public, in brief attributed citations; never "the Kogi say," but "according to the OGT.

Territory Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, nord de la Colombie

Kombumerri

Mary Graham — The Land Is the Law: the land, a sacred entity, mother of all humanity.

The Kombumerri are an Aboriginal people from the east coast of Queensland, Australia, with historical ties to the Wakka Wakka of the inland regions. Philosopher Mary Graham, a Kombumerri elder and academic (University of Queensland), has articulated two axioms that she says underpin much of Aboriginal cosmologies: the land is the Law (not a possession to be held, but the sacred entity from which all meaning flows), and no one stands alone in the world (the kinship system extends to the land itself). She in turn quotes Bunitj elder Bill Neidjie: « white man’s law keeps changing; Aboriginal Law never changes, and applies to all. »

Territory Côte est du Queensland, Australie

Krenak

Ailton Krenak—life is not useful: enjoyment against the reduction of the living to productivity.

The Krenak (Borún) live in the Rio Doce valley—which they call Watu, "the grandfather"—in Minas Gerais, in southeastern Brazil. Their territory was struck in 2015 by the collapse of a mining dam that poisoned the river; rather than being displaced, they chose to remain on its banks. Ailton Krenak (born in 1953), a writer, journalist, and activist, has been one of the leading voices of Brazil’s Indigenous movement since the 1970s: a co-founder of the Union of Indigenous Nations, his struggle influenced the "Indigenous Chapter" of the 1988 Constitution, and he became the first Indigenous person elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. His thought—vibrant, polemical, contemporary—rejects measuring life by its usefulness: life is fruição, a dance to be savored. A voice from within, in Portuguese, his language of writing. Sources are copyrighted: we limit ourselves to brief attributed quotations.

Territory Vallée du rio Doce (Watu), Minas Gerais, Brésil

Lakota (Oglala)

Black Elk—the sacred hoop: a people holds together like an unbroken circle, not as a sum.

The Lakota, along with the Dakota and Nakota, make up the great Sioux nation of the northern plains; the Oglala are one of its seven bands, in what is now South Dakota (the Pine Ridge Reservation). Black Elk—Heȟáka Sápa (1863–1950)—was an Oglala medicine man, cousin of Crazy Horse, a child witness to Little Bighorn and, in his old age, to Wounded Knee. In 1931, he entrusted his account to the poet John G. Neihardt: Black Elk Speaks (1932) is a two-voiced work—words dictated in Lakota, translated by his son Ben, shaped into prose by Neihardt. In it, Black Elk speaks of the sacred hoop, the living circle by which a people endure—a camp pitched in a ring, a flowering tree at its center—and which dies if broken. “There can be no power in a square,” he says of the colonial house with its right angles. A voice from within, mediated: “according to Black Elk, as transcribed by Neihardt,” never “the Lakota say.” Copyrighted source: brief attributed quotations only.

Territory Plaines du Nord (Dakota du Sud), États-Unis

Māori

Hirini Moko Mead—whakapapa, the genealogy that places a person and, traced back to its source, descends from Sky and Earth.

The Māori are the Indigenous people of Aotearoa (New Zealand), having arrived by sea from eastern Polynesia and organized into hapū (sub-tribes) and iwi (tribes) linked by genealogy. Their understanding of the living world holds all things as connected through whakapapa, the lineage that places each person within their kinship and, traced back to its source, leads to the gods—through Tāne, son of Rangi (the Sky) and Papa (the Earth), the primordial parents of the Māori cosmos. Hirini Moko Mead (Sidney M. Mead, Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa), an elder, scholar, and one of the foremost voices on tikanga (the right ways of doing inherited from the ancestors), set out its values in Tikanga Māori: Living by Māori Values (Huia, 2003)—an elder who speaks, as an academic, of his own world (level 1). One says “according to Mead,” never “the Māori say.” Spelling (including macrons) follows the source.

Territory Aotearoa (Nouvelle-Zélande)

Matsés

Luis Dunu Jiménez Dësi—sinan and dayac, the life-force that flows from one body to another without lessening the one that gives it.

The Matsés (formerly known as the Mayoruna) are an Amazonian people of the Panoan language group, settled on either side of the Peru-Brazil border, in the forest between the Yavarí and Gálvez rivers. Contacted late (1969), they have remained hunters and experts in plants. Their understanding of life populates the forest and waters with espíritus and dueños—masters of trees, rivers, and "supay chacras"—and regards vital energy as a substance that is transmitted: dayac, the energy of labor possessed by women and men, and sinan, the energy of the shaman, the warrior, and the hunter. It is passed to another by blowing tobacco smoke or applying toad venom—and those who have much give to those who have little, without their own diminishing. Luis Dunu Jiménez Dësi, a hunter and healer from the Ibama community, recounted this in the first person in El ojo verde. Cosmovisiones amazónicas—a collection of cosmovisions written and illustrated by Indigenous people themselves (FORMABIAP/AIDESEP): a named, accountable voice (level 2). One says "according to Dunu," never "the Matsés say.

Territory Amazonie, frontière Pérou–Brésil

Ngarinyin

David Mowaljarlai — Yorro Yorro, the ever-renewing creation.

The Ngarinyin are an Aboriginal people of the Kimberley, in Australia’s northwest. Alongside their Worora and Wunambal neighbors, they share the culture of the Wandjina, the creator spirits whose vast rock paintings mark the shelters of their land. Their law is passed down orally, through song, story, and care for the country. Elder and lawman David Mowaljarlai (c. 1928–1996) chose to share part of it with the outside world in Yorro Yorro: the word expresses creation not as a past act but as an ongoing present—“everything stands, alive,” the world renewed with each dawn.

Territory Kimberley, nord-ouest de l'Australie

Nishnaabeg

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson—biiskabiyang, the return to self through reclaimed acts.

The Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg ("at the mouth of the rivers") live on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, the eastern gateway of the Nishnaabeg nation—which calls itself Kina Gchi Nishnaabeg-ogamig, "the place where we all live and work together." A people of salmon, wild rice, and maple sugar, more travelers than sedentary, they belong to the Anishinaabe family of the Great Lakes—kin to the Potawatomi, yet a distinct nation. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, scholar, and musician, envisions the resurgence of her nation through its own practices (language, fishing, the land): an insider’s voice, in English, her language of writing. Copyrighted sources: we limit ourselves to brief attributed quotations.

Territory Rive nord du lac Ontario, Canada

Potawatomi

Robin Wall Kimmerer—the grammar of the living, puhpowee.

The Potawatomi (Bodéwadmi, "people of the fire") are one of the Anishinaabe peoples of the North American Great Lakes, linked to the Ojibwe and Odawa within the Council of Three Fires. Displaced and scattered by colonization (Oklahoma, Kansas, Wisconsin…), they have seen their language, Bodwewadmin, reduced to a handful of speakers. Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, reexamines its "grammar of the living": a language that conjugates plants, waters, and landscapes as animate subjects, not as objects. The word puhpowee—the force that makes mushrooms rise at night—distills its essence.

Territory Grands Lacs, Amérique du Nord

Sámi

Nils-Aslak Valkeapää—land is different once you’ve lived it.

The Sámi (formerly called "Lapps," a term now rejected) are the Indigenous people of Sápmi, which stretches across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula in Russia—the European Arctic of reindeer herding, fishing, and joik. Nils-Aslak Valkeapää (Áillohaš, 1943–2001), poet, joiker, and artist, brought their voice to the highest literary awards in Scandinavia. In his poems, the land is not a backdrop: its very nature shifts depending on whether it has been traversed, inhabited, passed down by ancestors.

Territory Sápmi (nord de la Norvège, Suède, Finlande, péninsule de Kola)

Shipibo-Konibo

Chonon Bensho & Pedro Favaron — akinananti, the work for the good of all; kené, the art that heals.

The Shipibo-Konibo live along the Ucayali River in the Peruvian Amazon. Their worldview holds beings as interconnected subjects—“no one is alone”—and their art, kené, inscribes geometric patterns on skin, ceramics, and fabric, believed to be healing. The artist Chonon Bensho, descendant of Onanya sages, and her husband Pedro Favaron, who joined her family through marriage, carry this living tradition forward: the word akinananti describes work done together, with love and joy, seeking the good of all. ⚠ The ayahuasca tourism industry has overrun the field—we stick to the words the Shipibo themselves have shared, never to the closed knowledge of healing songs.

Territory Fleuve Ucayali, Amazonie péruvienne

Tikuna

Humberto Yumbato Bereca and Alberto Coello López—Wone, the lupuna tree that once covered the world; felled, it became the rivers.

The Tikuna (Ticuna, Magüta) are the most numerous people of the western Amazon, settled on both sides of the upper Amazon, where Peru, Colombia, and Brazil meet. Their origin story tells of a world first shrouded in darkness because a great tree, Wone (the lupuna, the giant kapok), covered it entirely; the twins Yoxí and Ípi fell it, and the fallen tree became the rivers, lakes, and streams. Then the twins fished the first humans from the primordial lake Eware, who bit into a bait of cassava and corn—hence, they say, why human teeth do not last. Humberto Yumbato Bereca (Tikuna name Yaurekü) and Alberto Coello López, from the community of Cushillococha, along with Mercedes Serra (Mexkürakü) for the illustrations, recorded this account in El ojo verde. Cosmovisiones amazónicas—a collection of cosmovisions written and drawn by Indigenous people themselves (FORMABIAP/AIDESEP): named, accountable voices (level 2). One says "according to Yumbato and Coello," never "the Tikuna say.

Territory Haut Amazone, Pérou–Colombie–Brésil

Tonga

Epeli Hauʻofa—a sea of islands, Oceania as an ocean that connects, not as a scattering of isolated islets.

The Tongan people are a Polynesian people from an archipelago in the South Pacific, long the heart of a vast maritime trade network linking Fiji, Samoa, and beyond. It is from this memory of the sea that Epeli Hauʻofa (1939–2009), a Tongan thinker, writer, and anthropologist born in Papua and settled in Fiji—where he directed a center for Oceanian arts and culture at the University of the South Pacific—takes his starting point. In Our Sea of Islands (1993), he upends the colonial gaze that reduces the Pacific to tiny, isolated islands: Oceania becomes a sea of islands, a vast world united rather than divided by the ocean, measured by its relationships rather than its landmass. A voice from within, named and situated, writing in English: “according to Hauʻofa,” never “the Oceanian people say.”

Territory Archipel des Tonga, Pacifique sud

Touva

Galsan Tschinag—ovoo, the father-sky and mother-earth of the Altai’s nomadic herders.

The Tuvans are a Turkic-speaking people of Inner Asia. A minority among them, the Tsengel Tuvans, live in the High Altai, at the far western edge of Mongolia: nomadic herders whose understanding of the living world binds the sky (addressed as a father) and the earth (addressed as a mother), honored at sacred cairns—the ovoo—that mark mountain passes and springs. Galsan Tschinag (born around 1943), a Tuvan shepherd, shaman, and German-language writer, drew from this to create a largely autobiographical body of fiction that recounts this world from within, and its erasure under Soviet-Mongolian collectivization. Sources are copyrighted: we limit ourselves to brief, attributed quotations.

Territory Touva, Sibérie méridionale (Russie)

Uitoto

Virgilio López Flores—nimairama, the master of all knowledge, whom the lords of space come to inhabit when he meditates.

The Uitoto (also Witoto, Murui-Muinanɨ) live in the Putumayo and Caquetá river basins, on either side of the border between Peru and Colombia—a people decimated in the early 20th century by the "rubber fever" and its massacres, then rebuilt around the maloca and ritual speech. Their understanding of the living world holds the earth as a soft bubble that the sun Jusiñamui, son of the void, fixed in place with his word and which is upheld by a fire beneath; each species has its "master" (dueño, "mother") who punishes those who take without permission, on a whim. At the summit of knowledge stands the nimairama, master of all knowledge, whom the dead masters, risen into the sky, come to inhabit when he meditates. Virgilio López Flores (Uitoto name Finoratoɨ), son of a nimairama and representative of the Maairidikai community (Putumayo), recounted this in the first person in El ojo verde. Cosmovisiones amazónicas—a collection of cosmovisions written and illustrated by Indigenous people themselves (FORMABIAP/AIDESEP): a named, accountable voice (level 2). One says "according to López," never "the Uitoto say.

Territory Bassin du Putumayo-Caquetá, Pérou–Colombie

Yanomami

Davi Kopenawa—urihi, the living forest-land where humans are but one of its inhabitants.

The Yanomami live in the Amazon rainforest, on either side of the border between Brazil and Venezuela—one of the largest Indigenous peoples of Amazonia to remain relatively isolated until the mid-20th century. Their worldview holds the forest as a living, inhabited expanse, urihi, guarded by the spirits xapiri, which the shamans make dance. Davi Kopenawa, a shaman and spokesperson who has become a leading voice in the defense of the forest, entrusted his words to anthropologist Bruce Albert, his longtime ally: The Falling Sky (2010), a life story and cosmological manifesto spoken in Yanomami and rendered in French—a voice from within, a marked mediation. The closed shamanic knowledge is not to be unearthed: we confine ourselves to what Kopenawa chose to make public, in brief attributed quotations.

Territory Amazonie, frontière Brésil–Venezuela