Disputed Statements

Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1166

The source marks this year circa, 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

Abhidhamma Pitaka, Scripture Portions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Textual Note

Currently States Widely regarded as the latest layer of the Pali Canon to reach its final form.

The Abhidhamma Pitaka is widely regarded among scholars of the Pali Canon as the latest of its three baskets to reach its final closed form. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, edited by Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Princeton University Press, 2014), records this textual-historical judgment. The method is philological, tracking the Abhidhamma's vocabulary and technical terminology for signs of gradual development and comparing its systematic, list-based style against the narrative and dialogue style of the earlier Sutta Pitaka it analyzes, since technical vocabulary that expands and stabilizes gradually across a text's internal strata points to composition over an extended period. Tradition holds that the Buddha taught the Abhidhamma's content directly. Because the internal linguistic and stylistic evidence instead shows the gradual layering expected of composition over several centuries, textual scholarship reads the collection as reaching its final form well after the Buddha's death, in tension with the tradition it belongs to.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. tier 1

Abhidhamma Pitaka, Scripture Portions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Canonical Status

Currently States A systematic philosophical and psychological analysis of the teaching found in narrative form in the Sutta Pitaka; tradition holds it was taught by the Buddha, though most scholars see it as a later systematisation closed some centuries after his death.

The Abhidhamma Pitaka, the third basket of the Pali Canon, presents a systematic philosophical and psychological analysis of the teaching that the Sutta Pitaka gives in narrative and dialogue form. Theravada tradition holds it was taught by the Buddha himself. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, edited by Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Princeton University Press, 2014), an authoritative reference on Buddhist doctrine and textual history, records the scholarly position on the Abhidhamma's formation. The method is comparative and historical, reading the Abhidhamma's systematic, technical vocabulary and its cross-referencing structure against the earlier narrative teachings in the Sutta Pitaka that it analyzes, since a text that systematizes and comments on another body of material is ordinarily later than that material. Because the Abhidhamma's method and content presuppose the Sutta teachings as already established, most scholars read it as a later systematization closed some centuries after the Buddha's death rather than as his own direct teaching.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. tier 1

Abhinavagupta, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 950

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Triadic Heart of Siva: Kaula Tantricism of Abhinavagupta in the Non-dual Shaivism of Kashmir, Paul E. Muller-Ortega tier 1

Abhinavagupta, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1016

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Triadic Heart of Siva: Kaula Tantricism of Abhinavagupta in the Non-dual Shaivism of Kashmir, Paul E. Muller-Ortega tier 1

Abhinivesha, Vices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Named within the Yoga Sutra, a text whose own compilation and dating remain unsettled among scholars: traditional accounts place Patanjali well before the Common Era, while modern philological scholarship has proposed dates ranging from roughly the second century BCE to as late as the fourth or fifth century CE, with the text possibly compiled from older material rather than composed at a single sitting.

Source The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, Edwin F. Bryant tier 1

Abraham, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historicity debated

Lester L. Grabbe's Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? (T&T Clark, 2007) examines the patriarchal narratives against the archaeological and extra-biblical textual record for the second millennium BCE Near East. Grabbe's method is source-critical, checking the biblical account against contemporary Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Levantine documentation, and finds no extra-biblical evidence for Abraham and no secure fit for the patriarchal narratives in any specific second-millennium setting. Judaism, Christianity and Islam nonetheless hold him to be a historical patriarch and the father of their faith, which is why Grabbe records the question as genuinely open between religious tradition and documentary history rather than settled either way.

Source Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?, Lester L. Grabbe tier 1

Abraham Abulafia, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1291

The source gives this death year as approximate (circa), while the birth year is stated without qualification.

Source Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition, Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.) tier 1

Acacia, Plants

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Benny Shanon proposed in 2008 that Moses' burning bush and Sinai revelations could reflect an entheogenic experience from acacia combined with Syrian rue, a hypothesis he labeled speculative himself; critics note the absence of textual or archaeological support and that smoke from burning acacia wood alone is not a pharmacologically credible route to the compound the theory requires.

Source Biblical Entheogens: A Speculative Hypothesis, Benny Shanon tier 3

Ache Lhamo, Performance Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Year

Currently States 1430

The tradition is attributed to Thangtong Gyalpo, but sources disagree sharply on his own lifespan, giving his birth and death years as either 1361 to 1485 or 1385 to 1464, a gap of decades on both ends; no source records a specific year in which he first organized the troupe of seven sisters credited with originating the performance style, only that it happened sometime during his adult life as he raised funds to build his iron chain bridges, so 1430 is used here only as an approximate midpoint of his adult working life, not an attested founding date.

Source Lhamo / Tibetan Opera (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Acupuncture, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States A 2018 individual patient data meta-analysis pooling nearly 20,000 patients across 39 trials found acupuncture outperformed both no acupuncture and sham acupuncture for chronic pain conditions including back, neck, and osteoarthritis pain and migraine, though the margin over sham was small.

Andrew J. Vickers and colleagues published Acupuncture for Chronic Pain: Update of an Individual Patient Data Meta-Analysis in The Journal of Pain in 2018, pooling raw patient-level data from nearly 20,000 patients across 39 randomised trials of chronic pain, including back and neck pain, osteoarthritis and migraine. The method is statistical, combining individual patient records rather than only published summary results, to compare acupuncture against both no treatment and sham needling controls with more power than any single trial. It found a real, statistically significant advantage over sham needling for several conditions, but a small one. Because the effect size is small enough that reasonable clinicians disagree on whether it changes practice, researchers remain divided over the finding's clinical meaningfulness even though its statistical reality in the pooled data is not itself contested.

Source Acupuncture for Chronic Pain: Update of an Individual Patient Data Meta-Analysis, Andrew J. Vickers et al. tier 1

Acupuncture, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Regulatory Status

Currently States The World Health Organization added a chapter on traditional medicine, including acupuncture-related diagnostic categories, to the eleventh revision of its International Classification of Diseases in 2019.

In 2019 the World Health Organization added a chapter on conditions from traditional medicine to the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases, including diagnostic categories drawn from Traditional Chinese Medicine that sit alongside acupuncture's more narrowly studied uses. Nature's 2019 news feature "The World Health Organization's Decision About Traditional Chinese Medicine Could Backfire" reports the scientific criticism the decision drew on publication. The method is journalistic and evaluative, canvassing practicing scientists and public health researchers on the ICD-11 chapter's diagnostic categories against the evidence base for the practices it groups together. Because the same WHO chapter bundles acupuncture's comparatively better-evidenced pain applications with diagnostic categories that have no equivalent evidence base, critics argued the regulatory recognition risks lending all of it the same unearned legitimacy, a bundling problem rather than a verdict on acupuncture's own evidence specifically.

Source The World Health Organization's Decision About Traditional Chinese Medicine Could Backfire, Nature (news feature) tier 2

Acupuncture, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States -100

The earliest surviving systematic account of acupuncture theory, the Huangdi Neijing, is traditionally dated to around the second to first century BCE, but therapeutic needling itself may be older, and historians do not agree on precisely when the practice began.

Source Huangdi Neijing (The Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic), Traditionally attributed to Huangdi; actual authorship unknown tier 2

Ad ࡃ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns A Rival System's Attribution

Currently States The script's ancestry is assigned either to a cursive form of Aramaic, the derivation favored by most script historians, or to the Parthian chancery script used in Sasanian era administrative documents.

According To The Mandaic script

Both derivations are held in the literature and neither has displaced the other. The Aramaic cursive camp points to the letterforms' overall resemblance to other late Aramaic cursive scripts of the region, including Nabataean and Syriac; the Parthian chancery camp points to specific letterforms, including certain medial and final forms, that resemble Pahlavi documentary hands more closely than any Aramaic cursive exemplar. No single find has settled the question, and Mandaic paleography treats it as open pending further comparative work.

Source Iranian Scripts for Aramaic Languages: The Origin of the Mandaic Script, Charles G. Haberl tier 1

Adhab al-Qabr, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Denied or reinterpreted by some Mu'tazila theologians on rational grounds, while affirmed as literal fact by the traditionalist and later Ash'ari Sunni mainstream on the strength of hadith transmission.

Source Encyclopaedia of Islam (Brill), 2nd and 3rd editions, P. Bearman et al. (eds.) tier 1

Adi Shankara, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit

Currently States The dating of Adi Shankara to roughly 700 to 750 CE is the chronology scholars now generally prefer, placing him earlier in the eighth century than the traditional dates. The Encyclopedia of Hinduism (Cush, Robinson and York, eds., Routledge, 2008) records this as the currently favoured scholarly placement.

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

Adi Shankara, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit

Currently States The traditional dates given for Adi Shankara, 788 to 820 CE, are later than the dating scholars now generally prefer, and the Encyclopedia of Hinduism (Cush, Robinson and York, eds., Routledge, 2008) records the chronology as disputed between the traditional dates and the earlier eighth century placement favoured by current scholarship, without resolving it in favour of either.

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

Adi Shankara, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 788

Traditional Advaita Vedanta chronology places Shankara from 788 to 820 CE. Hajime Nakamura argued for an earlier 700 to 750 CE, and Karl Potter placed him in the late seventh to early eighth century; there is no dependable historical record beyond Shankara's own writings to settle the question.

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

Adi Shankara, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 820

Traditional Advaita Vedanta chronology places Shankara from 788 to 820 CE. Hajime Nakamura argued for an earlier 700 to 750 CE, and Karl Potter placed him in the late seventh to early eighth century; there is no dependable historical record beyond Shankara's own writings to settle the question.

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

Advaita Vedanta (nondualism), Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 500

The Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Volume III: Advaita Vedanta up to Samkara and His Pupils, edited by Karl H. Potter, Motilal Banarsidass, 1981, reassesses Shankara's traditional dates of 788 to 820 CE, which come from later monastic lineage records compiled for institutional rather than historical purposes, against the philosophical record of whom he argued with and against. Because Shankara's texts engage directly with Mandana Misra and with Buddhist logicians whose own dates are independently better fixed, the volume's contributors use that exchange to narrow his period to roughly 700 to 750 CE, a method that reads philosophical argument as chronological evidence rather than relying on the lineage's own self-dating. Gaudapada, whom the tradition places a generation or two earlier, is placed in the sixth century on the same comparative basis, and the two figures' dates move together in the dispute.

Source Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Volume III: Advaita Vedanta up to Samkara and His Pupils, Karl H. Potter (ed.) tier 1