Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Rules and Codes gathers five texts that set out, in ordered and binding form, how a religious community or its members are to live.

Two are codes of Jewish law. The Mishneh Torah, completed around 1178 by Moses Maimonides, sets the whole of halakhah across fourteen books, written so a reader could know the entire Oral Law from the written Torah and this code alone. The Shulchan Aruch, first printed in 1565 by Joseph Karo, distills his own earlier commentary into four practical sections; the added glosses of Moses Isserles brought Ashkenazic practice into the same text, and printed together they became the most widely accepted code in Jewish legal history.

Two are Christian monastic rules. The Rule of Saint Augustine, likely adapted from a letter to a community of nuns around 400 AD, prescribes communal property, shared prayer and mutual charity in a text short enough that its brevity was itself valued, becoming the foundation for later orders including the Augustinians and Dominicans. The Rule of Saint Benedict, written for Benedict's own community at Monte Cassino in the sixth century, is longer and more detailed, ordering the day around prayer, reading and manual work across seventy three chapters, and remains the standard rule of Western monasticism.

The Sikh Rehat Maryada, adopted in 1945 by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee after two decades of consultation across the Panth, sets out personal conduct, gurdwara worship and the ceremonies of birth, initiation, marriage and death that living Sikh institutions still cite as their reference.

Each code answers the same question for its own community, in its own genre: not what to believe, but how to live.