Disputed Statements

Ramanuja, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1017

Sri Vaishnava tradition places Ramanuja's life from 1017 to 1137 CE, a traditional span of 120 years; modern scholarship drawing on temple inscriptions and regional literary records suggests he may instead have lived from about 1077 to 1157 CE.

Source Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.) tier 1

Ramanuja, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1137

Sri Vaishnava tradition places Ramanuja's life from 1017 to 1137 CE, a traditional span of 120 years; modern scholarship drawing on temple inscriptions and regional literary records suggests he may instead have lived from about 1077 to 1157 CE.

Source Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.) tier 1

Rama's Exile and the War With Ravana, Myths & Sacred Narratives

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Note

Currently States The Ramayana narrative of Rama's exile, Sita's abduction by Ravana and her recovery after Rama's alliance with Hanuman and the monkey forces exists in numerous regional and linguistic retellings across South and Southeast Asia rather than as a single fixed text, and those retellings differ sharply on Rama's final treatment of Sita after the fire trial that publicly tests her fidelity on their return to Ayodhya. Paula Richman's edited volume Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (University of California Press, 1991) is the standard scholarly study of this regional divergence across the tradition's many versions.

Source Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, Paula Richman (editor) tier 1

Ramlila, Performance Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Year

Currently States 1625

Ramlila as a staged devotional dramatization of the Ramayana is usually dated to 1625, when Tulsidas's disciple Megha Bhagat is credited with staging the first performance in Varanasi, drawing on Tulsidas's own Ramcharitmanas, completed roughly half a century earlier. The specific Ramnagar cycle, the tradition's most celebrated living instance, is a distinct and much later foundation begun around 1830 under the patronage of Maharaja Udit Narayan Singh of Benares, so a single origin year cannot honestly stand for both the wider tradition and its most famous instance.

Source Kapur, Actors, Pilgrims, Kings and Gods: The Ramlila of Ramnagar, Anuradha Kapur tier 2

Rangtong and Shentong (Self-Emptiness and Other-Emptiness), Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether an ultimate that is not itself empty is precisely what emptiness was formulated to deny, which is the Gelug objection, or whether denying it leaves nothing for buddha-nature to name, which is the Jonang reply.

Source The Buddha from Dolpo: A Study of the Life and Thought of the Tibetan Master Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen, Cyrus Stearns tier 1

Ransom Theory of the Atonement, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within the tradition

According To Christianity

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005) sets out the camps on the ransom theory of the atonement. One line of patristic writers, examining the New Testament's own ransom language, named the devil as the price's recipient, holding that a rescue by force alone would be a seizure rather than a redemption requiring payment. Gregory of Nazianzus, in the fourth century, refused both the devil and the Father as recipients as equally absurd. Anselm of Canterbury later held in the eleventh century that no such claim existed to be bought out at all and that the whole transaction had been misdescribed. Gustaf Aulen argued in his 1931 study Christus Victor that the serious content survives under the name Christus Victor once the literal ransom payment to the devil is set aside.

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

Ransom Theory of the Atonement, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Doctrinal Status Detail

Currently States The ransom theory reads Christ's death as securing humanity's release from a captivity, whether to sin, death or a personal adversary, on the model of Mark 10:45's saying that the Son of Man came to give his life a ransom for many. Origen is usually named as the patristic writer who pressed the metaphor into asking who receives the ransom, with some early writers naming the devil as its recipient; Gregory of Nazianzus objected within the same century that paying the devil was an outrage and paying the Father scarcely better, and Anselm of Canterbury later denied outright that any such claim existed to be bought out. No formulation of the recipient has ever obtained general assent, which is why the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd revised edition, Cross and Livingstone, eds., Oxford University Press, 2005) records the theory as no longer the dominant Western position and today held chiefly within Jehovah's Witnesses teaching.

According To Christianity

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

Ṛaṛa ੜ, 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

Ṛaṛa ੜ, 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

Rara ਰ, 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

Rara ਰ, 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

Rarohenga, Realms

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States The name combines Maori raro, below or beneath, with a second element less securely glossed, so scholars read the name as naming the underworld's position beneath the world of light without full agreement on its precise construction.

Maori dictionaries and scholarly glosses agree that raro, below, anchors the first element of Rarohenga, situating the underworld beneath the world of light, but differ on how confidently to parse the remainder of the compound, and no single authoritative breakdown of the full word is treated as settled.

Source Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, Manatu Taonga, New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage tier 1

Ras Lila, Performance Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Year

Currently States 1535

Wikipedia's own account credits the tradition's start to the Nimbarka Sampradaya saint Uddhavaghamanda Devacharya in the early fifteenth century at Vamshivata in Vrindavan, while the standard scholarly account instead dates the developed Braj rasa lila to the later sixteenth century, tying its consolidation to Narayan Bhatta, who settled in Braj in 1535 and incorporated rasa lila performances into the pilgrimage circuit of Krishna's sacred sites, with further growth credited to Vallabhacharya and his son Vitthalnath in the same century. No single founding performance or text survives to settle which account is correct, and the two traditions disagree by more than a century.

Source Raslila (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Rashidun Caliphate, Empires & Polities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Associated Religion

Currently States Islam, at the point before it divided. Whether the succession of Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman was legitimate or whether Ali had been designated at Ghadir Khumm is the founding disagreement between Sunni and Shia, and Madelung reads the Sunni sources as supporting Ali's claim more strongly than the later consensus allowed

The Sunni consensus on the rightly guided caliphs and the Shia doctrine of designation are two long-established and opposed positions; Madelung's reading is a third, argued from within the Sunni source tradition.

Source The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate, Wilferd Madelung tier 1

Rat, Animals & Totems

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The words spirit animal and totem are used in popular Western practice for a personal animal ally. Native scholars and communities object to both usages, on the ground that they take the vocabulary and the authority of particular Indigenous traditions and apply them to a generic and commercial practice.

Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum, 2008) documents the objection Indigenous communities in North America raise, ongoing and in the present tense, against the commercial "spirit animal" genre. Owen's study examines how the practice borrows specific Indigenous terms and claimed lineages, presenting them as licensing a service sold to outside customers, and sets that use against the communities' own accounts of what those terms and practices mean within their traditions. What is disputed, on Owen's reading, is not that people generally feel a kinship with animals, a widely attested feeling that belongs to no one tradition, but the specific commercial borrowing of Indigenous vocabulary and claimed authority. The atlas records the animal, records that the modern commercial practice exists, and records that this documented objection is made, without adjudicating between the parties.

Source The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Suzanne Owen tier 1

Ravana, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States A minority devotional current, most visible in parts of Uttar Pradesh, honors him as a devoted worshipper of Shiva and a scholar king rather than reading him as pure villain.

Mainstream Vaishnava-derived retellings of the Ramayana read him unambiguously as the antagonist; the Shaiva-devotee reading is a real but minority current within Hindu tradition, not a consensus revision of the epic.

Source Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.) tier 1

Raven, Animals & Totems

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The words spirit animal and totem are used in popular Western practice for a personal animal ally. Native scholars and communities object to both usages, on the ground that they take the vocabulary and the authority of particular Indigenous traditions and apply them to a generic and commercial practice.

Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum, 2008) documents the objection Indigenous communities in North America raise, ongoing and in the present tense, against the commercial "spirit animal" genre. Owen's study examines how the practice borrows specific Indigenous terms and claimed lineages, presenting them as licensing a service sold to outside customers, and sets that use against the communities' own accounts of what those terms and practices mean within their traditions. What is disputed, on Owen's reading, is not that people generally feel a kinship with animals, a widely attested feeling that belongs to no one tradition, but the specific commercial borrowing of Indigenous vocabulary and claimed authority. The atlas records the animal, records that the modern commercial practice exists, and records that this documented objection is made, without adjudicating between the parties.

Source The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Suzanne Owen tier 1

Ray Hyman, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States One of the two reviewers commissioned for the 1995 American Institutes for Research evaluation of the government remote viewing programme; he agreed the effects were not chance and attributed them to shared methodological flaws

Ray Hyman's Evaluation of Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena (Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1996) was Hyman's own contribution, as a psychologist and long-time critic of parapsychology, to the same government-commissioned review of classified remote-viewing research that Jessica Utts also reviewed. Hyman's method, applying standard psychological methodology critique to the same underlying experimental data Utts examined, led him to a statistical evaluation reaching the opposite conclusion from hers: where Utts found the evidence met an ordinary scientific standard, Hyman found the same data did not support a paranormal explanation. Both reviewers' reports were published as part of the same official assessment, preserving the disagreement rather than resolving it.

Source Evaluation of Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena, Ray Hyman tier 2

Recapitulation, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States A permitted theological opinion, never defined

According To Christianity

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005) sets out the camps on recapitulation, the patristic theory associated with Irenaeus that Christ retraces and reverses Adam's disobedience stage by stage. Those who prefer recapitulation hold that it keeps creation and salvation inside one continuous story and that transactional models such as satisfaction or penal substitution answer a narrower question than the one the biblical sources ask; those who prefer the transactional models hold that recapitulation gives a strong reason for the incarnation and a weaker one for the crucifixion specifically, since a life fully lived does not by itself require a death. Both positions are argued by working historians of doctrine from the same patristic texts.

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

Recapitulation, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Doctrinal Status Detail

Currently States Recapitulation, the reading of Christ's death and resurrection as Christ passing again through every stage of human life and succeeding where Adam failed so that human nature is repaired rather than merely paid for, was first developed at length by Irenaeus of Lyons in Against Heresies, written around 180 CE against teachers who separated the maker of the world from the Father of Christ. It draws its name from Ephesians 1:10, where God is said to gather up all things in Christ, and is held today particularly within Eastern Orthodox theology alongside other accounts of the atonement rather than displacing them. No council has ever defined which account is correct, so the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd revised edition, Cross and Livingstone, eds., Oxford University Press, 2005) records it as one permitted theological opinion among several.

According To Christianity

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