Disputed Statements

Karmapa, Religious Offices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Current Status

Currently States Since the early 1990s, two candidates, Ogyen Trinley Dorje and Trinley Thaye Dorje, have each been recognized as the seventeenth Karmapa by different factions within the Karma Kagyu leadership.

Camps: the two recognitions each carry the backing of senior Karma Kagyu lamas and, respectively, differing regental lineages within the school; the division has not been resolved by the school's own institutions. Neither claim is adjudicated here.

Source Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, John Powers tier 1

Kartarpur Bir, Textual Witnesses

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Authenticated

Currently States Whether this volume is the 1604 original compiled by Guru Arjan, or a later copy standing in its place, has been argued since the late nineteenth century. Sikh tradition and many scholars hold that it is the original; others have questioned it on the evidence of erasures, insertions, the index, and its relation to the earlier Goindval Pothis.

Camps exist and both are held by serious scholars in print. The atlas reports the disagreement and does not settle it. The manuscript is in private hands and has undergone no material analysis, so the argument rests on descriptions taken during a small number of supervised examinations.

Source The Guru Granth Sahib: Canon, Meaning and Authority, Pashaura Singh tier 1

Kartarpur Bir, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Date Attributed

Currently States Compiled 1604 CE at Amritsar (by tradition)

Gurinder Singh Mann's Canon Formation in the Sikh Tradition, published in his research on early Sikh scripture (2001), examines the Kartarpur Bir manuscript against the tradition identifying it as the original 1604 compilation of the Adi Granth overseen by Guru Arjan and scribe Bhai Gurdas. Mann's method is manuscript and textual history, comparing the surviving volume's physical and textual features against what the tradition claims for the 1604 original, and finds the identity of the surviving Kartarpur volume as that specific original compilation, rather than an early copy, remains contested among scholars of Sikh scripture.

Source Canon Formation in the Sikh Tradition (Gurinder Singh Mann), Gurinder Singh Mann tier 1

Karuna, Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Taught within the earliest strata of the Pali Canon, whose own compilation and dating remain debated among scholars, ranging from oral transmission at or near the Buddha's own lifetime through committal to writing centuries afterward; fixed as the second brahmavihara in Buddhaghosa's fifth century CE Visuddhimagga.

Source Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification), Buddhaghosa tier 1

Kasb (Acquisition), Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether acquisition resolves the difficulty or only names it. Traditionalist Hanbali writers objected to the whole exchange as speculative theology imported into a question the texts had already answered, and later Muslim philosophers treated the term as a label for the problem.

Source Islamic Creeds: A Selection, W. Montgomery Watt tier 1

Kasb: God Creates Every Act and the Human Being Acquires It, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States What acquisition actually adds. Its critics on both sides have called it a form of words, the Mutazila reading it as determinism and the traditionists as an evasion, and the question is unresolved.

Kasb is the Ashari school's attempt to hold together two claims: that God alone creates every act including human acts, and that human beings are genuinely answerable for what they do. On this account, God creates the act and the human being acquires it, and responsibility is said to attach to the acquisition rather than to authorship of the act itself. W. Montgomery Watt's translated selection of classical creeds, a mid-twentieth-century rendering later scholarship has refined, records that the formula satisfied neither side of the wider debate it was meant to settle: Mutazila theologians read it as determinism wearing different words, since acquisition without authorship does not obviously differ from having no real choice at all, while traditionist critics called it an evasion that avoids stating plainly whether the human being's will is free or determined. Ashari theology became doctrinally dominant across most of the Sunni world despite this criticism, which is why kasb remains the operative formula in mainstream Sunni theology even though what acquisition actually adds beyond bare determinism has never been agreed.

Source Islamic Creeds: A Selection, W. Montgomery Watt tier 1

Kashyapa, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Also an ordinary Sanskrit word for a tortoise. The identification of the sage's name with that word is old.

Kashyapa's name resembles the Sanskrit word for tortoise, kashyapa, and later tradition identifies the sage with the cosmic tortoise that supports creation. Arthur Anthony Macdonell's Vedic Mythology (1897) records that the identification is attractive because the tortoise already appears elsewhere in the same literature as a creation figure, where the creator god Prajapati himself takes tortoise form, so the resemblance fits a pattern the tradition already has. Macdonell's philological method treats the identification as insecure rather than confirmed, because the sage's name and the tortoise's name may simply be homonyms rather than one word revealing the other's true nature, and a resemblance that happens to flatter a later theological synthesis is exactly the kind of coincidence a later theology is liable to seize on rather than evidence the two were always understood as one figure. Because the corpus supplies the resemblance but not a passage confirming the identification was original, the attested meaning remains argued rather than settled.

Source Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell tier 1

Kava, Plants

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Toxicity

Currently States Herbal extracts were linked to severe liver injury around 2000 and banned in several countries

Subsequent review found most implicated products used solvent extraction or included peel and aerial parts, which the traditional water extraction of peeled root excludes. Most bans were later lifted or narrowed. The traditional preparation appears safer than the industrial one sold in its name.

Source Kava: The Pacific Drug, Vincent Lebot, Mark Merlin and Lamont Lindstrom tier 1

Kegare, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historical Note

Currently States Scholar Bernard Scheid argues the exclusion of death from Shinto religious rites became possible only once Buddhism could take charge of handling death.

A scholarly interpretation offered by Bernard Scheid, not an established consensus on when the death taboo entered kami worship.

Source Kegare (Wikipedia)

Kenosis, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Nineteenth century kenotic theologians proposed that divine attributes such as omniscience were genuinely set aside at the incarnation, a stronger claim than most patristic writers made, criticized for risking the Son's full divinity.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) tier 1

Kentucky, States & Territories

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States No single derivation is agreed. Proposed Iroquoian and Shawnee roots have been read as meadow, prairie, or land of tomorrow, and historians treat none of these as certain; the popular nineteenth century gloss of the name as dark and bloody ground is now regarded as frontier folklore rather than an attested translation.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference), Encyclopaedia Britannica editors tier 2

Ketheric Body, Aura Layers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1987

According To Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016), which traces the aura and chakra literature through to Brennan, dates Barbara Ann Brennan's Hands of Light, the same book credited elsewhere on this page with fixing the seven named aura layers and their pairing with the seven chakras, to 1987 by its publisher's catalogue record, while some other library catalogues list the same first edition as 1988. Leland notes the one-year discrepancy without resolving it; it most likely reflects the ordinary gap between a book's stated copyright year and its public release the following year, a common source of one-year catalogue disagreements. The atlas's own articles on the aura layers follow 1987, and this property records that year while flagging the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Ketheric Body, Aura Layers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1987

According To Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016), which traces the aura and chakra literature through to Brennan, dates Barbara Ann Brennan's Hands of Light, the same book credited elsewhere on this page with fixing the seven named aura layers and their pairing with the seven chakras, to 1987 by its publisher's catalogue record, while some other library catalogues list the same first edition as 1988. Leland notes the one-year discrepancy without resolving it; it most likely reflects the ordinary gap between a book's stated copyright year and its public release the following year, a common source of one-year catalogue disagreements. The atlas's own articles on the aura layers follow 1987, and this property records that year while flagging the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Ketoret, Incense

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The Talmud's eleven spice enumeration at Keritot 6a cannot be fully reconstructed with confidence today, because at least one of the eleven, onycha, is not securely identified with any known substance.

Scholars agree on most of the eleven from the philology and the trade record, but not all. Where an ingredient's identity is itself unsettled the atlas records that as its own unknown on the ingredient's page rather than smoothing over the gap here.

Source The Babylonian Talmud, Anonymous (multiple authors) tier 1

Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 619

The source gives this year as about, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.) tier 1

Khai ϧ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Greek letters wrote Egyptian from about the first century CE, settled by the fourth

According To The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) surveys the small corpus of Old Coptic texts, pre-Christian magical and astrological papyri in which Egyptian was first written out using Greek letters plus a few signs borrowed from Demotic, against the standardised Coptic used in Christian scripture translation from around the third century CE onward. Comparing the two corpora, its contributors find the evidence thin enough to support two readings: that the Old Coptic magical texts already fixed the practice of writing Egyptian in Greek-based letters, or that the Christian translation project, needing a stable and teachable orthography for scripture, was the decisive act that standardised the script that survives. Because both readings draw on the same handful of surviving texts and no source describes an official act of decision, the volume treats the question as open rather than favouring either camp.

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

Khai ϧ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Grouped with the letters taken from Demotic, but its derivation is not settled

According To The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt

Khai is conventionally listed among the seven Coptic letters taken from Demotic, but its origin has been read in more than one way. One position derives it from a Demotic sign in its own right, on the pattern of the other six. Another treats it as bound up with hori, the Coptic letter for h, rather than as an independent borrowing. The atlas records that the readings differ and does not choose between them; nothing about how the letter is used in the Bohairic liturgy depends on the answer.

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

Khakkha ਖ, 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

Khakkha ਖ, 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

Khamsa, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Reformist and Salafi scholars class protective amulets as attaching power to a created thing and therefore as forbidden, while popular use has continued

According To Islam

The khamsa, a hand-shaped amulet widely worn and displayed across North Africa and the Middle East by both Muslims and Jews as protection against the evil eye, sits in tension with Islamic legal opinion that treats amulet use as bordering on or constituting shirk, associating protective power with an object rather than with God alone. Roel Meijer's edited volume Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement (2009) records that reformist and Salafi religious opinion, working from a strict reading of tawhid, divine unity, holds such amulets doctrinally impermissible, while long-standing popular practice across the same Muslim-majority societies continues to produce, wear and give khamsa amulets regardless of that ruling. The method is comparative religious sociology, reading published Salafi legal opinion against ethnographic and market evidence of continued popular use in the same communities. Because the reformist position is a minority theological stance within societies where the popular practice remains widespread, neither has displaced the other, and the doctrinal status remains disputed within the same populations.

Source Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement, Roel Meijer (ed.) tier 1