Disputed Statements

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

De Jing, Scripture Portions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether the eighty-one chapter division belongs to the text

The division into eighty-one chapters, a number that is nine squared and carries its own numerological weight, is not present in the Mawangdui manuscripts and has no counterpart in the Guodian slips, where the material appears in three bundles with different groupings and no chapter marks. One position treats the division as a Han period editorial imposition on an anthology of independent sayings. Another holds that many of the units are genuine and that the received arrangement preserves older groupings. The atlas records the number because every citation uses it, and records that it is editorial.

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

De 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 De Jing, the second of the Tao Te Ching's two traditional divisions, is ascribed by tradition to Laozi alongside the Dao Jing, but the Guodian bamboo slip manuscripts, excavated in 1993 and studied in Robert G. Henricks's Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching: A Translation of the Startling New Documents Found at Guodian (Columbia University Press, 2000), are the earliest surviving physical witnesses to the text and do not preserve it in the received two-part division. The method is manuscript-based textual criticism, comparing the material and ordering of the third century BCE Guodian slips against the received text's De Jing material to determine how much of it existed, and in what form, at that early date. Because the Guodian find shows only a partial selection arranged differently from the received text, whether the De Jing existed as a distinct, complete unit attributable to one author at the time reflected in the earliest manuscript evidence is not settled by the manuscript record Henricks studies.

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

De Praestigiis Daemonum, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States Nineteenth century psychiatry adopted Weyer as a founder of the discipline and republished him as an early textbook of mental illness.

Historians of medicine are divided on the reading. One position holds that Weyer's clinical observation of melancholy and delusion is a genuine forerunner of psychiatric description. The other holds that the diagnostic vocabulary of 1563 is not that of 1860, and that reading him as a proto-psychiatrist removes him from the theological argument he was actually having and flatters the book by mistaking its purpose.

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

Dead Sea, Bodies of Water

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Region

Currently States Bordered by Israel, the West Bank and Jordan. What the settlement at Qumran on its northwestern shore was is argued: a sectarian community with ritual pools, probably Essene, or a fortified farm or villa with the scrolls brought from Jerusalem for safekeeping

Magness defends the sectarian settlement reading; the farm and villa proposals are the standing alternatives. The dispute concerns the site, not the significance of the manuscripts.

Source The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jodi Magness tier 1

Deborah, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historicity debated

Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman's The Bible Unearthed (Free Press, 2001) examine the two accounts of Deborah in Judges, the prose narrative of Judges 4 and the archaic poem of Judges 5, the Song of Deborah, which most philological reckoning places among the oldest passages in the Hebrew Bible. Their method is comparative literary and archaeological, and they find historians divide over how much the underlying conflict with the Canaanite king Jabin and his commander Sisera reflects an actual battle fought before Israel had a monarchy, for which the old poem is sometimes read as contemporary or near-contemporary evidence, against how much of the developed prose narrative built around that older poem is later literary composition.

Source Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, Israel Finkelstein, Neil Asher Silberman tier 2

Deer, 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

Deetman Commission Report, Abuse Inquiries and Response Policies

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Victim Estimate

Currently States 20000

A population survey extrapolation (34,000 respondents), not a count of individually verified victims, and scoped to a narrower sub-period, 1945 to 1981, than the commission's own wider 1945 to 2010 investigation window. Kept distinct from the 800 accused figure above, which is the commission's own direct-complaint count.

Source Sexual Abuse of Minors in the Roman Catholic Church (the Deetman Commission report), Commission of Inquiry into Sexual Abuse of Minors in the Roman Catholic Church (Wim Deetman, chair) tier 1