ANCIENT WISDOM: A Comparative History of Spiritual Philosophy

Ancient Wisdom is a sweeping comparative history of the ancient world's spiritual and philosophical traditions — from the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and the temples of Egypt to the forest schools of the Ganges, the courts of Confucian China, the groves of Athens, the shrines of Ise, and the ritual calendars of the Maya and the Yoruba. Rather than flattening these traditions into a single "ancient wisdom," this book takes each on its own terms — Zoroastrian dualism, Upanishadic non-duality, Buddhist no-self, Confucian virtue, Stoic tranquility, Gnostic cosmology, Yoruba destiny — before turning, in its final chapters, to what these genuinely different answers to the oldest human questions still have to offer a reader today.