Source Library · 113,276 records · 21,019,616 pages
Maps of the inner life, drawn from the sources themselves
Ask a question of the whole of recorded thought. What did people think wisdom was? How did they pray, sacrifice and initiate? How did they still the mind? What did they believe awareness to be? Each map answers with originals, not summaries: every canonical work across thirty traditions and four thousand years, placed in time, linked to a readable edition, and honest about what is still missing.
Timeline · 31 traditions
A Map of Wisdom
Instructions, proverbs, mirrors for princes, maxims and consolations: what people have said about how to live, from the scribes of the Middle Kingdom to the moralists of the nineteenth century.
Timeline · 29 traditions
A Map of Meditation
The practice of contemplation: manuals of breath, stillness, prayer, visualisation and absorption, from the Upaniṣads and the desert fathers to Zen, Hesychasm, Sufi remembrance and the modern revival.
Timeline · 31 traditions
A Map of Consciousness
What people across traditions thought the mind is: soul, self, perception, dreams and trance, from the Egyptian ba and the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad to Avicenna, Descartes, the Abhidharma and William James.
Timeline · 28 traditions
A Map of Dreams
Dream books and oneirocritica, theories of sleep and dreaming, incubation and dream oracles, and the visionary dream narratives of every tradition, from the Chester Beatty papyrus to Freud.
Survey · 8 traditions
A Map of Ritual
Liturgy, sacrifice, initiation, ceremonial magic, funerary and calendar rites, monastic rules and sacraments: what the library holds on how people have acted together before the sacred.
Document · original beside translation
Techniques of the Body
One level down again: not what a tradition said about the body but what it told a body to do. A year of seated exercises from a Ming encyclopedia with the woodcut for each fortnight, the Sanskrit seat as its commentary measures it, the drawn āsanas of the Śrītattvanidhi, and the counted breath as it appears in Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic and Latin — every passage in the language it was printed in, with the translation beside it.
Passages · phenomenology of the record
A Map of Experience
One level down from books: what people wrote about what happened to them when their consciousness changed, in vision, contemplation, fever, bereavement, intoxication. Every point is a verbatim quotation checked character for character against the scanned page, with a working paper, a Visuddhimagga comparison and ten subtle-body systems reconstructed from the sources.
What this demonstrates
Source Library is a digital library of historical primary sources, transcribed and translated with AI so that the originals become readable and quotable. The catalogue is large enough now that a theme can be traced across every civilisation that wrote about it.
Each map here was produced in a day. Seven researchers, one per tradition, read the entire catalogue for one theme, matched every held book to the canonical work it carries, and named a public-domain source for every canonical work the library lacks. The result is a survey of the whole tradition, not a reading list: what is readable today, what is already on the shelf waiting for transcription, and what has yet to be acquired.
The same pipeline runs for any theme. Wisdom, ritual, meditation and consciousness are the first four; law, medicine, cosmology, love, death and dreams are next. The experience atlas shows the layer beneath: once the pages are transcribed and translated, the map can descend from books to the passages themselves, each one a verified quotation.
How a map is madeWhy the gaps matter
Every map carries three colours. Filled marks are readable now. Rings are works the library already holds but has not yet transcribed or translated: the cheapest expansion there is, a compute cost rather than an acquisition. Dashed rings are canonical works not held at all, each with a named public-domain source. The rings and the dashes are a costed to-do list for the tradition.
See what comes next