Separate streams, one river
A Roman emperor, an Indian poem, and an English atheist all landed on the same answer. None of them ever met.
That keeps happening. Traditions separated by oceans and by thousands of years keep arriving at the same handful of insights, with no contact between them and no way to have borrowed. Sometimes they agree exactly. More often they rhyme, and the places where they diverge turn out to be even more interesting.
Tributary is a daily look at those convergences. Three teachings a day, drawn from numerous traditions and traced back to real texts you can go and read yourself. Then some questions to sit with. No streaks, no points, and no dogmas.
Some things are up to us and some are not. Our judgments, our impulses, our desires are ours. Our bodies, our reputations, our positions are not.
Epictetus · Nicopolis, Greece · c. 108 CE
Let your concern be with the action itself, never with its fruits. Do not act for the sake of reward, but do not therefore fall into inaction.
Bhagavad Gita 2:47 · India · c. 50 BCE
Fate has power over what happens to us, but no power over what we make of it.
Bertrand Russell · England · 1903
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