Today
The ten questions
See them all →The same ten, put to every tradition. One answer on each card, a different one each time.
Yours
Free translations · nobody's verdict · works offline once opened
The same ten, put to every tradition. One answer on each card, a different one each time.
Millions of people have shaped their whole lives around one of these books, and most of us have an opinion about them without ever having opened one. This is the place to open one.
The one rule: every tradition here is presented the way its own people present it, at full strength, in a real translation with the reference on every line. No critics, no rankings, no verdicts. You read it, and the opinion you form is your own.
Almost every shelf below is a book. Tap it for what it is, which free translation to read and why, how long it takes, how its own people read it, and the same ten questions every book is asked, answered in plain words the way its own believers would answer, with the book’s own passage under each where it has one: how the world began, who made it, what a person is, what has gone wrong, what we are here for, before and after, the key figures, the moral code, what a good life looks like. Then how many belong, how you would join, and the great rites of a life. One shelf has no books on it at all — traditions that never wrote their teaching down, where what stands in place of a book is a person: an initiated priest, a trained reciter, a carved house, a belt of shell, a song that is also a map. They get the same questions, and one more: how is it held? For today gives you eight different takes every morning, each from a different tradition: a passage, how one of them answers one of the ten questions, how their book actually reached us and when it was dug up, a word of theirs that English has no equivalent for, something about them that is not what you would think, two traditions on the same question side by side, one of the rites that marks a life, and the book itself.
Where the texts come from. Every quotation on this site is a real passage from a named English translation, checked against the printed text, with its reference. Wherever a public-domain translation exists it is the one used, so the whole book can be read, downloaded and listened to free; where the only good translation is still in copyright, it is linked and not copied. Two books, Scientology's and the Kolbrin, are held closely by their owners and are described here in their own terms and linked out. For the traditions that never had a book, a quotation is used only where a real public-domain English text exists and the tradition is willing for it to be read; where the material is restricted by the tradition's own law, or where the only records were made by outsiders trying to suppress it, that is said plainly on the page and nothing is reproduced. Hours to read are worked out from the word count at an ordinary reading-aloud pace; hours to listen are the length of the free LibriVox recording where one exists. Facts about when and where a book was first printed are given because they are facts; nothing here is a judgement on what is in it.