Atlas · First rooms
Ancient World
Caves, reeds, and early arguments about what a mind is doing when it takes the world for real.
Ancient World
The Fire and the Wall
Men chained in a cave take shadows for the world.
Athens · c. 375 BCE
Ancient World
Once He Dreamed He Was a Butterfly
A sage wakes and cannot tell which side of the dream is home.
The state of Song, traditionally · c. 4th century BCE
Sacred Traditions
A man sits down and vows not to rise until he has seen through the trouble of existing.
Beneath the Fig
Uruvelā, later Bodh Gayā · c. 5th century BCE
Philosophy
Twenty Verses, Not a Simulation
A monk answers the charge that if there are only presentations, nothing could bump into anything else.
Gandhāra, as later tradition seats him · 4th–5th century CE
Philosophy
Smoke, Fire, and the Unseen Mind
A school of Indian logic treats other minds the way it treats fire on a hill: not by looking inside, but by inferring from a sign.
North India, on the page of the sūtras and their commentaries · c. 2nd–5th century CE
Philosophy
The Soul That Can Be Cut
A Roman poem says mind and soul are matter, fine but mortal, and die with the body they are woven through.
Italy, on the page of a poem · c. 50s BCE
Philosophy
A philosopher in Rome writes of a turning inward that is also a going up, until there is no longer a pair of seer and seen.
The Flight of the Alone
Rome, of the seminars Porphyry later edited · c. 250–270
Philosophy
Empty of Own-Being
A verse treatise refuses to let things, including the mind that knows them, stand on their own. The refusal is an argument, not a mood.
South India, on the page of the *Mūlamadhyamakakārikā* · c. 2nd–3rd century CE
Philosophy
The Child and the Well
A Warring States teacher says that anyone, seeing a child about to fall into a well, would feel alarm. That feeling, he claims, is a sprout of the heart-mind.
The courts and dialogues of the *Mencius* · c. 4th century BCE
Art & Literature
A Letter the King Might See
An Andean noble writes and draws a thousand-page letter to a Spanish king: a world, a conquest, a way of seeing that will not arrive in Madrid.
The Andes, on the manuscript now in Copenhagen · c. 1615
Ancient World
A poet leaves a banquet. The roof falls. He names the dead by where they had been sitting. Memory, in the later telling, becomes a house of places.
The Places of the Guests
Thessaly, as Cicero tells it · as told; written 55 BCE