Glossary

Three tags mark every term below, showing where it came from. A term tagged [coined] is the editors' own choice, sometimes with a note on what it descends from. A term tagged [plain English] is an ordinary word doing its ordinary work, adopted here without being reinvented or dressed up. A term tagged [borrowed: source] is taken directly from a named source, with two further forms used where a plain borrowing does not quite fit the shape of the thing: [adapted: …] for something reworked from an older source, and [structure borrowed: …] for a shape kept while its content is reasoned anew. The full crediting for every borrowing, in both directions, lives on /sources; this page only orients a reader toward it, briefly, before sending them on. Entries are grouped in six clusters rather than alphabetized, in the order the site itself introduces them, and each definition points to the chapter or page where the term actually does its work. A definition here is a door, never a destination, and none of these entries argues a case the linked page has not already made.

The names

• Opanayiko — [borrowed: Pali] The formal name of the tradition, one word from a six-word formula applied to a teaching in the Pali canon. The formula is credited in full on /sources, along with the different ways translators have rendered this particular word over time. "Leading inward" is the editors' own plain-English rendering of the sense an old commentary gives it: a teaching worth taking into one's own mind and testing there, rather than only heard about. This name never titles a page on the site; the everyday name below carries that work instead.

• the Inward Way — [coined] The everyday name for the tradition, used across the site after the formal name has been given once on a page. After its first mention it shortens further to "the Way," capitalized to mark it as this particular name rather than an ordinary road or method. Lowercase "way" elsewhere on the site names only an ordinary path, never this one specifically. The two names are named plainly, side by side, on /sources, rather than left for a reader to discover on their own.

• wayfarer — [plain English] A person trying the practice, at any stage of trying it, for any length of time. The word names someone walking, not someone who has arrived or joined anything, and company on the road is welcome without one wayfarer ever outranking another for having walked longer (see I.65). The site never calls a reader a member, a believer, or a follower; those words assume a group with an inside and an outside, which this practice does not build.

• the editors — [plain English] Whoever curates this site: choosing what a page says, checking it against the site's own standards, verifying every quotation against a printed source, and correcting errors once they are found and reported. The editors claim nothing beyond the texts they have assembled — no attainment, no standing to judge anyone's practice, no authority beyond a signpost's. What they do, what they claim, and how to reach them is set out in full at /editors.

The diagnosis

• the grip — [plain English] The holding-on found at the center of almost any friction, once the friction is traced far enough inward to reach it. A grip can close around an object, a person, an outcome, an opinion, or a picture of oneself (see I.6), and it is named this way because a closed hand is the plainest picture available of what holding on too hard actually costs (see I.5). Nearly everything else in the diagnosis is a way of finding one and watching it (see I.7).

• friction — [plain English] The word this site uses for the ordinary chafing of a day: an unanswered message, a task put off, a small exchange that still stings hours later. Friction is where the looking is meant to begin, since it needs no explaining first — it is simply found, the way a stone in a shoe is found by walking rather than by argument (see I.2).

• the open hand — [plain English] Two related senses share this entry on purpose. Lowercased, it names the site's central image: a hand that carries what it holds — a person, a task, a loss — without clenching around it, feeling the actual weight instead of fighting to keep the thing from leaving (see I.36). Capitalized, "the Open Hand" is the midsummer observance named for that image, kept on the year's longest day (/calendar). The capital letter is the whole difference between the two senses: lowercase everywhere the image itself is meant, capitalized only for the one day named after it.

• the Three Marks — [structure borrowed: Buddhism] Three observations kept as this site's diagnosis and restated in testable language rather than in the words of the texts they descend from: everything changes; grasping at what changes chafes; and the one doing the grasping is changing too. Each has its own entry below, naming the Pali word it descends from — anicca, dukkha, anattā — and each is credited to its Buddhist ancestor at length on /sources.

• anicca — [borrowed: Pali; used only where Buddhism is being credited] The first Mark: nothing held stays put — a mood, an object, a person, an opinion, even the sense of a fixed self — it keeps moving whether the day happens to notice or not (see I.3). Weather is the plainest place to watch it, and the chapter linked here uses weather for exactly that reason.

• dukkha — [borrowed: Pali; used only where Buddhism is being credited] The second Mark: gripping something that will not hold still is where a day's friction actually starts, not in the thing itself but in the hand closed around it (see I.14). The cost is paid in attention, in breadth, and in warmth, all three spent keeping the hand shut.

• anattā — [borrowed: Pali; used only where Buddhism is being credited] The third Mark: turn attention on whoever is doing the holding and no fixed holder is ever found there — only more holding, a process caught inside the processes it was trying to grip (see I.10). This is offered as a report to test for oneself, not as a fact handed down about the reader.

• the Four Noticings — [coined; descendant of the Four Noble Truths] Four observations framed as claims to test rather than truths to accept, on purpose, and named to keep that difference visible: friction is present somewhere; the friction can be traced to a specific holding-on; that holding-on loosens once it has been looked at steadily; and the capacity to look this way can be trained (see I.2, I.7, I.34). The renaming away from "truths" is admitted plainly on /sources.

• the Five Undertakings — [coined; descendant of the five precepts] The whole of this site's ethics: five undertakings a person renews rather than a code enforced from outside. In order they are care with harm, with taking, with appetite, with speech, and with clarity, each answering to one finger of a hand, and a broken undertaking is simply seen and renewed on the far side of it rather than confessed (see I.56). No enforcer stands behind any of them.

• the Six Qualities — [adapted: the six epithets of the teaching, Buddhism] The admission test a teaching must pass before it enters the canon: plainly said, visible now, non-expiring, open to inspection, leading inward, and verifiable by each person alone. The six are named in full at /philosophy/knowing, credited there to the same formula Opanayiko is taken from, and shown at work on an actual claim.

The practice

• sitting — [plain English] The first practice: settle onto a chair or the floor for a few minutes and rest attention on the breath already happening, nothing more elaborate than the plain word suggests (see I.18). No posture is required and nothing is chanted; the instruction is the whole of it.

• settling — [plain English] The first of the four stages of the progression: the body brought still, the breath found, nothing further asked of either one yet. What settling looks like in practice, day to day, is written out in full at /practice/settling.

• looking — [plain English] The first of the three trained faculties, and the second stage of the progression: attention aimed at one ordinary thing and kept there well beyond the instant it takes to recognize what it is (see I.17, I.21). What some older traditions call mindfulness or sati is credited under those names on /sources; this site calls the same faculty looking.

• loosening — [plain English] The second faculty and third stage: what a grip does once attention has rested on it steadily rather than being argued with or forced open (see I.34, I.35). Loosening is not indifference and it is not dropping what is held — the cup stays in the hand; only the clench around it eases, sometimes only a little.

• tending — [plain English] The third faculty: the Undertakings carried outward into how another person is actually treated, not only felt about. Tending is the same looking and loosening already trained on one's own grips, aimed now at what a grip does to whoever happens to be standing nearby (see I.50).

• carrying — [plain English] The fourth and last stage of the progression, where a loosened hand is carried into whole days rather than kept only for the sitting — into mornings, queues, sickbeds, and gladness alike (see I.80). Nothing here is described as finished; the carrying is renewed daily along with everything else.

• the progression — [plain English] The four stages in order: settling, looking, loosening, and carrying. The full instructions for moving through them, and for returning to an earlier one when a day calls for it, are given at /practice/progression.

• the daily form — [plain English] A short sit kept morning and evening, about ten minutes each time, built for an ordinary day rather than a special occasion. The instructions are given in full at /practice/daily.

• the weekly form — [plain English] One longer sit each week, paired with one deliberate act of tending chosen in advance rather than left to chance. The instructions are given in full at /practice/weekly.

• the inward test — [coined] The four-part method used to check any claim made in this tradition, including its own: say in advance what a claim predicts will be seen; give the claim its stated hearing, no more and no less; write down honestly what actually turned up, not what would be convenient; and hold on to whatever survived while setting the rest down without penalty (see I.22).

The year and the thresholds

• observance — [plain English] One of the eight days of the calendar: something looked at and something small done with the hands, kept alone at a table or a window, or kept with others, and never owed either way. A missed observance is simply missed, not a debt carried forward (/calendar).

• the eight observances — [coined names] The eight days of the calendar, named here in year order from the shortest day, by their sky-anchor alone and with no month attached, since the same eight fall on opposite halves of the ordinary year depending on which hemisphere a reader stands in: the Longest Night, the Turn of the Light, the Level Light, the Reaching, the Open Hand (see the entry above), the Gathering, the Level Dark, and the Remembering. Each is described in full, with its own small form, at /calendar.

• threshold — [plain English] A lifecycle rite marking a door a life passes through once or a few times, rather than a day that recurs every year: naming, coming of age, marrying, and a death. Each threshold is scripted in full, and left open to being adapted, at /thresholds.

• the farewell — [coined] The name of the fourth threshold, held after a death for the people left holding the loss rather than for the person who died. The name is deliberately not a name for death itself — the rite is not the loss, only the gathering that follows it and gives it a shape (/thresholds).

The book and the stories

• Book I — [coined] The tradition's canon, titled in full The Book of the Inward Way: eighty-one chapters arranged in five movements. The count of eighty-one is borrowed from the Tao Te Ching and named as a borrowing rather than left unexplained, plainly, on /sources.

• movement — [plain English] One of the five named parts of Book I, in order: the Grip, the Looking, the Loosening, the Tending, and the Carrying. Each movement's chapters build on the ones before it, and the order is meant to be read in, at least the first time through.

• I.n — [plain English] The citation form used everywhere on this site to point at a single chapter of Book I: the book letter and the chapter number, nothing more attached to it. A hyphenated pair of these citations names every chapter falling between the two, not only the two endpoints themselves.

• the Wayfarer Cycle — [coined] Twelve teaching-stories sharing one fictional geography and one internal chronology, moving through a single year on the road they share. Every story is fiction, labeled as such on its own page, and the whole cycle is gathered at /stories.

• teaching-story — [coined] The genre the Wayfarer Cycle is written in: fiction built to carry the diagnosis rather than to report anything that actually happened, anywhere, to anyone. Every story page closes with the standing label, given here in full, in italics, without quotation marks: This is a teaching-story. It happened nowhere, and it happens all the time.

• the Long Road — [coined] The one fictional setting shared by every story in the Wayfarer Cycle, along with its river and its inn, returned to from a different angle in each story. It is set nowhere in particular and at no particular time, on purpose (/stories).

The site

• Kept and Left — [coined] The method behind /sources: every borrowed item named and credited in the terms it is borrowed in, every left item named honestly rather than softened into agreement, and the reasoning for both given in the open, source by source.

• the long view — [plain English] The practice of stepping back from a life far enough that the day's urgencies shrink to their actual size — a river looked at from a hill rather than from inside the water (see I.78). The image is credited to its Stoic ancestor at length on /sources.

• corrections — [plain English] Errors reported to corrections@ are corrected in the open, on the record, rather than smoothed over and left unremarked. The policy and the running record of what has actually been corrected so far are kept at /editors.