Disputed Statements

Dadda ਦ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Sikh tradition credits Guru Angad, the second Guru, with giving the script its settled form in the sixteenth century

According To The Gurmukhi script

Two reference works give incompatible accounts. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Harbans Singh, editor-in-chief, Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998) carries the Sikh tradition that Guru Angad, the second Guru (1504-1552), devised the script. The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996), surveying the paleography of Indic scripts, holds instead that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Punjab as one of the Landa scripts descended from Sharada, and that comparing those existing Landa forms against the Gurmukhi letters attested from Guru Angad's era shows a fixing and standardising of a repertoire already in circulation rather than an invention from nothing. Neither side has displaced the other because the two accounts read different kinds of evidence, a community's own historical memory against a comparative script lineage, and the atlas records both without adjudicating.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Harbans Singh (editor-in-chief) tier 2

Dadda ਦ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Historians of Indic writing place the letterforms earlier, in the Landa mercantile hands already used across the Punjab

According To The Gurmukhi script

Two reference works give incompatible accounts. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Harbans Singh, editor-in-chief, Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998) carries the Sikh tradition that Guru Angad, the second Guru (1504-1552), devised the script. The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996), surveying the paleography of Indic scripts, holds instead that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Punjab as one of the Landa scripts descended from Sharada, and that comparing those existing Landa forms against the Gurmukhi letters attested from Guru Angad's era shows a fixing and standardising of a repertoire already in circulation rather than an invention from nothing. Neither side has displaced the other because the two accounts read different kinds of evidence, a community's own historical memory against a comparative script lineage, and the atlas records both without adjudicating.

Source The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.) tier 1

Daemonologie, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States Whether James later changed his mind about witchcraft is disputed.

He has a documented later record of intervening in English cases where accusers or supposed victims were exposed as lying. One camp reads a genuine change of view in an ageing king who had seen the machinery produce nonsense. Another reads no change of position at all, only a consistent insistence that the crown and not local enthusiasm decides what is true, which cuts against a false accuser exactly as it cut against a doubter at North Berwick.

Source The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, Brian P. Levack tier 1

Daemonologie, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States An English witchcraft statute followed in 1604, harsher than the Elizabethan act it replaced. A straight line from the king's book to the king's law is easy to draw and easy to overdraw: parliaments legislate for their own reasons and the act had its own drafting history.

James VI and I wrote Daemonologie in 1597, arguing for the reality of witchcraft and for its prosecution, and his 1604 Witchcraft Act, passed after he became king of England, is often cited as a direct legislative expression of the book's argument. Brian P. Levack's The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2016), a scholarly synthesis placing the European witch trials' toll near 60,000 executions from about 100,000 trials, situates the English legislation within the wider continental pattern of witchcraft law. The method is comparative historical, reading the timing and content of the 1604 act against the ordinary parliamentary and legal pressures already present in England, church and secular disputes over witchcraft prosecution predating James's accession, alongside what his own writing shows of his personal engagement with the question. Because both the king's documented conviction and pre-existing institutional pressure for stricter law are independently attested, historians differ on how much of the act's passage to credit to Daemonologie's influence specifically, as against legal momentum already present.

Source The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, Brian P. Levack tier 1

Dakhma Exposure (Tower of Silence), Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Obligation

Currently States Obligatory

According To Zoroastrianism

John R. Hinnells's The Zoroastrian Diaspora: Religion and Migration, Oxford University Press, 2005, documents how the South Asian vulture population collapse of the 1990s, caused by the veterinary drug diclofenac, removed the ecological mechanism the dakhma exposure rite depends on at the Indian Towers of Silence, since the rite requires vultures to consume the exposed body. Hinnells's method is documentary and sociological, tracing the community's response to that ecological failure, and it finds the community divided rather than resolved: orthodox voices hold exposure is the only lawful method regardless of the practical difficulty, while reformist voices accept cremation or burial as alternatives. The debate over which position governs the community remains ongoing, and the atlas records it without adjudicating.

Source The Zoroastrian Diaspora: Religion and Migration, John R. Hinnells tier 1

Dakhma Exposure (Tower of Silence), Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Current Status

Currently States In decline and disputed within the Parsi community following the collapse of South Asian vulture populations from the 1990s; largely abandoned earlier among Iranian Zoroastrians

According To Zoroastrianism

Dakhma exposure, excarnation of the dead atop a Tower of Silence to be consumed by vultures and the elements, is the traditional Zoroastrian funerary practice Mary Boyce documents in Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1979) as resting on the principle that a corpse is ritually impure and must not contaminate earth, fire or water. India's vulture population collapsed from the 1990s due to a veterinary drug toxic to the birds, leaving towers without their traditional means of excarnation and forcing the community to respond. Traditionalist and reform-minded Parsi authorities disagree over the response: some support solar concentrators installed to accelerate decomposition without fire or burial, while others hold that cremation or burial, though contrary to the traditional principle, has become the more practicable accommodation. The method by which this is documented is contemporary religious-community reporting rather than historical reconstruction, since the dispute concerns a live response to a recent ecological crisis. Because the underlying principle is not in question and only the practical response is disputed, the current status is recorded as debated rather than settled.

Source Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, Mary Boyce tier 1

Dakhma Exposure (Tower of Silence), Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Obligation Detail

Currently States Prescribed disposal in orthodox practice; whether exposure can continue, and what may replace it, is debated among Parsis

According To Zoroastrianism

John R. Hinnells's The Zoroastrian Diaspora: Religion and Migration, Oxford University Press, 2005, documents how the South Asian vulture population collapse of the 1990s, caused by the veterinary drug diclofenac, removed the ecological mechanism the dakhma exposure rite depends on at the Indian Towers of Silence, since the rite requires vultures to consume the exposed body. Hinnells's method is documentary and sociological, tracing the community's response to that ecological failure, and it finds the community divided rather than resolved: orthodox voices hold exposure is the only lawful method regardless of the practical difficulty, while reformist voices accept cremation or burial as alternatives. The debate over which position governs the community remains ongoing, and the atlas records it without adjudicating.

Source The Zoroastrian Diaspora: Religion and Migration, John R. Hinnells tier 1

Dalai Lama, Religious Offices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Current Status

Currently States The fourteenth Dalai Lama has stated that any future reincarnation would be recognized outside Chinese government control; the People's Republic of China asserts sole legal authority to approve the next Dalai Lama under its own reincarnation management regulations. The two positions are unreconciled.

Camps: the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration in exile hold that recognition is a religious matter outside state authority; the People's Republic of China holds that its 2007 reincarnation management measures (Order No. 5) give it sole legal authority to approve the next Dalai Lama. Neither position is adjudicated here.

Source Measures on the Management of the Reincarnation of Living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism (Order No. 5), State Administration for Religious Affairs, People's Republic of China tier 3

Daleth ד, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Scholem places Sefer Yetzirah between the second and sixth century CE

According To Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, New York, 1961) surveys the manuscript recensions of Sefer Yetzirah and finds no single stable text: the surviving copies diverge enough in wording and in the letter-to-planet and letter-to-sign correspondences that quoting "the text" requires naming which recension is meant. Comparing the linguistic style, the doctrinal content and the external references made to the work across centuries of citation, Scholem argues the book could have been composed anywhere from the second to the ninth century CE, a span of roughly a millennium, with later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writers each reading it through their own era's overlay. The atlas follows Scholem's range rather than a narrower guess, and does not print the per-letter planet and sign tables at all, because doing so would silently pick one contested recension over the others.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Daleth ד, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Survives in three recensions that do not agree in detail

According To Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, New York, 1961) surveys the manuscript recensions of Sefer Yetzirah and finds no single stable text: the surviving copies diverge enough in wording and in the letter-to-planet and letter-to-sign correspondences that quoting "the text" requires naming which recension is meant. Comparing the linguistic style, the doctrinal content and the external references made to the work across centuries of citation, Scholem argues the book could have been composed anywhere from the second to the ninth century CE, a span of roughly a millennium, with later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writers each reading it through their own era's overlay. The atlas follows Scholem's range rather than a narrower guess, and does not print the per-letter planet and sign tables at all, because doing so would silently pick one contested recension over the others.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Dana (Generosity), Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States The six paramita scheme develops within early Mahayana Prajnaparamita literature, roughly the first centuries BCE and CE; the Theravada ten perfections are systematised later in the Buddhavamsa commentarial tradition.

Source Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, Paul Williams tier 1

Daniel Dunglas Home, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns What Counted as Evidence

Currently States Investigated extensively, including by the scientist William Crookes; unlike most prominent Victorian mediums, no conclusive exposure of fraud was ever documented against him

William Crookes's published investigation of Daniel Dunglas Home, undertaken by the chemist and physicist under laboratory conditions he designed himself, is read in sharply opposed ways in the secondary literature this entry draws on: Home's defenders treat it as the strongest scientific case ever made for genuine physical mediumship within the Spiritualist movement, since Crookes was a credentialed scientist testing a medium who, unusually, was never caught in fraud, while sceptics argue Crookes's own controls were insufficiently rigorous against sleight of hand and that his personal sympathy for Spiritualism compromised his design. Because both readings work from the same published investigation and neither has produced new evidence the other cannot answer, the case remains genuinely contested rather than settled by either side.

Source Daniel Dunglas Home (reference article), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Daniel Dunglas Home, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Test Result

Currently States Contested

Source Daniel Dunglas Home (reference article), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Dant (Da) ደ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Why the script was vocalised in the fourth century CE, after centuries of writing consonants alone, is argued and not settled

According To The Ge'ez script

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) reviews the Aksumite inscriptions that first show Ge'ez written with vocalisation, a fourth-century CE innovation that is not in dispute, and canvasses three explanations for why it happened then: an internal development inside the Aksumite royal chancery seeking a more precise script for administration; a response to the newly Christian court's need for scripture translated and taught with unambiguous vowels after Aksum's conversion under King Ezana; and influence carried by vocalised Indian scripts reaching the Aksumite court through Red Sea trade contact. Comparing the timing, the epigraphic evidence and the trade record for each explanation, the volume's contributors find none conclusive, since Aksum's fourth-century contacts touched all three at once; the dating of the change is settled, its cause is not.

Source The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.) tier 1

Dao Jing, Scripture Portions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether the Dao material stood first

The received text, transmitted through the Heshang Gong and Wang Bi recensions, puts the Dao part first, and that order is what the title Dao De Jing records. The Mawangdui silk manuscripts, the earliest substantially complete witnesses, put the De part first, which is why their editors title them the Te-Tao Ching. Scholars differ over whether the received order is a later rearrangement or one of two orders in circulation from early on. The Guodian slips are too partial to settle it.

Source Mawangdui silk manuscripts of the Laozi, Laozi (attributed) tier 1

Dao Jing, Scripture Portions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Traditionally ascribed to Laozi, though most modern scholars regard the Tao Te Ching as a compilation assembled from older sayings rather than the work of a single author.

The Dao Jing, the first of the Tao Te Ching's two traditional divisions, is ascribed by tradition to Laozi, but the historicity of Laozi as a single identifiable author is itself disputed, and the text's own transmission history complicates the ascription further. Robert G. Henricks's Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching: A Translation of the Startling New Documents Found at Guodian (Columbia University Press, 2000) is a translation and study of the Guodian bamboo slip manuscripts excavated in 1993, the earliest physical witnesses to the text. The method is manuscript-based textual criticism, comparing the Guodian slips, which contain only a partial and differently arranged selection of material, against the received text's fuller version and its traditional two-part division, to see how much of the received arrangement was already fixed by the third century BCE date of the Guodian burial. Because the earliest physical witness does not yet show the received text's full content or arrangement, the traditional ascription to a single author writing the complete work is not what the manuscript evidence is read as supporting.

Source Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching: A Translation of the Startling New Documents Found at Guodian, Robert G. Henricks tier 1

Dao Mau (Vietnamese Mother Goddess Religion), Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1550

Veneration of mother goddesses in Vietnam is old and diffuse with no single founding point, but the organized pantheon and cult centered on Lieu Hanh that gives Dao Mau its present form is conventionally traced to her legend, generally placed in the sixteenth century. 1550 marks that traditional era, not a settled date for the underlying folk veneration, which is older and undocumented.

Source Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam, Philip Taylor tier 1

Daryl Bem, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Notable Publication

Currently States Feeling the Future, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011, reporting nine experiments on retroactive influence

Daryl J. Bem's Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011) reported nine experiments in which participants' present performance appeared statistically correlated with future randomly-assigned events, using conventional psychological testing methods applied in reverse time order. The paper underwent the journal's standard peer review and was published as a real, refereed study; independent laboratories attempting to rerun the same nine experimental protocols have not reproduced the reported effects, and the dispute over what that failure to replicate means, whether the original findings were a statistical artifact, a product of flexible analysis choices, or something the original protocol failed to specify precisely enough to reproduce, remains active among psychologists.

Source Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect, Daryl J. Bem tier 1

Daryl Bem, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States Co-author with Charles Honorton of the 1994 Psychological Bulletin paper presenting the autoganzfeld results to mainstream psychology

Daryl J. Bem and Charles Honorton's Does Psi Exist? Replicable Evidence for an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer (Psychological Bulletin, 1994) reported a meta-analysis of automated ganzfeld telepathy trials meeting the methodological standard the field's critics had set. Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman answered it in the same journal in 1999 with Does Psi Exist? Lack of Replication of an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer, a meta-analysis applying the same statistical method to thirty subsequent ganzfeld studies run after Bem and Honorton's own, and found no effect across that later body of work. Because both papers use comparable statistical methods on non-overlapping sets of experiments and reach opposite conclusions, the disagreement is about whether the original result generalises beyond the specific studies Bem and Honorton reviewed.

Source Does Psi Exist? Replicable Evidence for an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer, Daryl J. Bem and Charles Honorton tier 1

Dasam Granth, Scriptures & Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Canonical Status Detail

Currently States Robin Rinehart's Debating the Dasam Granth (Oxford University Press, 2011), the standard scholarly study of the text's reception, traces the argument over its status: the volume is not the Guru Granth Sahib and does not stand on the same footing, yet three of its compositions, Jaap Sahib, Tav-Prasad Savaiye and Benti Chaupai, are recited daily in the Nitnem and two among the five banis of the Amrit Sanchar initiation, so the text is indispensable to practice even while whether Guru Gobind Singh composed all of it, including the disputed Charitropakhyan, remains argued.

Source Debating the Dasam Granth, Robin Rinehart tier 1