Optional and voluntary

A practice, as distinct from a formal rite, is an ongoing discipline of religious or spiritual life: prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, almsgiving, meditation, chant, study, asceticism. This category gathers such practices, recording what each involves, which traditions keep it, and in what form.

Where a ritual is performed on an occasion, a practice is sustained over time and often woven into daily or seasonal life. Many practices recur across very different traditions (some form of prayer, fasting, meditation and charity is found almost everywhere), though the form and meaning each gives them differ.

The recurrence of practices across traditions makes them a natural point of comparison: fasting in Ramadan, in Lent, on Yom Kippur and in Hindu vratas can be set alongside one another, as can the meditative disciplines of Buddhism, Hinduism and Christian contemplation. The atlas describes each in its own tradition's terms while making such comparison possible.

The practices group by kind (devotional, ascetic, meditative, ethical, purificatory, ecstatic and the rest), so a browser can move through, say, the meditative practices of many traditions together. Set rites are treated as rituals; sustained practices are treated here.