The Present-Day Map, 1900–2026

Lanes are interpretive strands in this modern view. They group Advaita, Sikh/Udāsī/Nirmalā/Sant, Tibetan, Zen/Daoist, Śaiva, Sufi, Indigenous, scientific, scholarly, comparative and global-hybrid developments so readers can follow twentieth- and twenty-first-century transmissions without pretending that these strands remained geographically sealed.

Dating is layered. A mark's evidence type says whether its date comes from composition, redaction, a surviving manuscript, an inscription, archaeology, a traditional attribution, later hagiography, an attested lifespan, a publication, or modern documentation. For traditions that transmitted orally, traditional antiquity, probable historical antiquity, earliest textual documentation, earliest manuscript evidence, and modern ethnographic documentation are five different things, and the map never treats them as interchangeable.

Lines carry their own evidence. Every connection is one of six kinds: documented transmission; strongly supported contact with uncertain doctrinal transmission; plausible contact seriously discussed by scholars; philosophical parallel with no demonstrated transmission; contested connection; and traditional lineage claim. The last two are the most common places where popular accounts of this history overreach.

Structure is provisional. The eleven categories used here are a working instrument, not a result. Several of them failed on contact with the sources, and where they failed the map says so in the entry rather than forcing a fit. The category devotional non-separation was added specifically to test whether some Sant, Sikh, Bhakti and Sufi material works through a structure in which lover and Beloved remain relationally distinguishable while separation is overcome — different from both Śaṅkara's identity claim and Dzogchen's empty-luminous knowing.

Absence of a line is information. Two traditions sitting in the same century in adjacent lanes are not thereby connected. Co-occurrence in time is not evidence of contact, and this map draws nothing it cannot source.

Contested is not a euphemism. Where scholarship is genuinely divided — over Buddhist influence on Gauḍapāda, over Śaiva–Buddhist tantric borrowing, over Chan and early Dzogchen, over whether Buddha-nature is a disguised self, over whether Guru Nanak's teaching is monotheist, monist, or neither — both sides are named in the entry and the dispute is left open.