Disputed Statements

Yeshe Tsogyal, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historicity debated

The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (2014) records that the eighth century Tibetan figure Yeshe Tsogyal is thinly documented outside the later treasure literature, terma texts said to have been hidden and later revealed, and that scholars examining that same body of literature hold differing positions on how much of the developed figure can be traced to a historical eighth century woman.

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

Yi (Righteousness), Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States The Five Constants as a formally fixed set of five, correlated with the five phases, wu xing, is credited to the Han dynasty scholar Dong Zhongshu; the individual virtues are independently attested earlier in the Analects and Mencius.

Source Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 1, Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (eds) tier 2

Yiddish, Languages

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Jewish communities in German-speaking Europe. Which region is disputed: the Rhineland, or the Danube basin and Bavaria.

Two camps. Max Weinreich placed the formation of Yiddish in the Rhineland, and his account was standard for decades. Against it, Dovid Katz argued for the Danube basin and Bavaria on dialect grounds, and Alexander Beider has re-examined the dialect evidence and argued for a Bavarian and Bohemian origin for the eastern dialects specifically. Paul Wexler has proposed a more radical relexification account that most Yiddishists reject. The argument is live and turns on how the dialect data is weighted.

Source The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, Gershon David Hundert (ed.) tier 1

Yizkor, Prayers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Yizkor is an Ashkenazi custom of the medieval Rhineland, grown out of the memorial books those communities kept after the massacres of the Crusades, and its communal portion still carries martyrs as a category today. The Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition (Berenbaum and Skolnik, eds., Macmillan Reference USA, 2007) records that while historians agree on this medieval Ashkenazi origin, they differ on how directly and how tightly to tie the prayer's rise to the 1096 massacres specifically, as opposed to the broader pattern of communal memorial-keeping across the period.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition (Berenbaum and Skolnik, eds., Macmillan Reference USA, 2007) examined the origin of Yizkor, the Ashkenazi memorial prayer grown out of the medieval Rhineland communities' own memorial books kept after the massacres of the Crusades. Weighing the prayer's medieval Ashkenazi origin, on which historians agree, against how tightly its rise should be tied to the 1096 massacres specifically, it records the two as separable questions and finds the second undecided even though the first is settled.

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

Yod י, 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

Yod י, 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

Yoga, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lineage

Currently States Modern postural yoga traces largely to Tirumalai Krishnamacharya and his twentieth century Mysore students, including K. Pattabhi Jois and B. K. S. Iyengar.

Modern postural yoga, the asana-centered practice widely taught today, traces largely to Tirumalai Krishnamacharya's early twentieth century teaching in Mysore and to his students K. Pattabhi Jois and B. K. S. Iyengar, who each built influential systems from his teaching. Mark Singleton's Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford University Press, 2010) is a scholarly history of how that practice developed. The method is historical, comparing Krishnamacharya's Mysore-era teaching, itself shaped by contemporary Indian and European physical culture movements, against the older hatha yoga textual corpus and its much smaller repertoire of postures. Singleton finds the modern emphasis on a large, flowing sequence of postures owes more to that twentieth century synthesis than to unbroken transmission from the classical or hatha lineages. Because the twentieth century innovation is documented and extensive while the claimed ancient continuity is not attested in the older texts, the atlas records the lineage as a recent synthesis.

Source Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, Mark Singleton tier 1

Yoga, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Text

Currently States Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is the foundational text of classical yoga philosophy, but neither its author's identity nor its date is fixed by any external record. Edwin F. Bryant's The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary (North Point Press, 2009), a critical scholarly edition with commentary, surveys the range of proposed dates in the field, running from the last centuries BCE to around 400 CE. The method is philological and comparative, weighing the text's technical vocabulary, its relationship to Samkhya and early Buddhist thought, and its layered, compilation-like structure, since the text names no author who can be independently dated and survives only through a later commentarial tradition that itself has to be dated relative to the root text. Because the internal evidence brackets a period of several centuries rather than one moment of composition, the text's date remains debated among scholars working from the same sutras and the same commentarial evidence.

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

Yoga, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States -200

Scholars date the codification of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras anywhere from the second century before the common era to the fourth century of the common era, and the text appears to synthesize older oral and ascetic material rather than originate at a single moment, which is why no single date commands consensus. The postural, gym and studio yoga practiced worldwide today is furthermore a substantially twentieth century synthesis of this older material with European gymnastics, a separate and more firmly dated development.

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

Yoga, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 400

Scholars date the codification of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras anywhere from the second century before the common era to the fourth century of the common era, and the text appears to synthesize older oral and ascetic material rather than originate at a single moment, which is why no single date commands consensus. The postural, gym and studio yoga practiced worldwide today is furthermore a substantially twentieth century synthesis of this older material with European gymnastics, a separate and more firmly dated development.

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

Ýr, Younger Futhark Runes

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Dickins's Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 1915) glosses Yr, the sixteenth and final rune of the Younger Futhark, from both surviving poems: the Norwegian poem praises the yew as the tree greenest in winter and notes it crackles when burned, while the Icelandic poem reads the same rune not as the living tree but as the weapon made from it, a bent bow of brittle iron, shifting the image from wood to war.

Source Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples, Bruce Dickins (ed. and trans.) tier 1

Yu (Courage), Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Nitobe's codified seven-virtue scheme dates to his 1900 book; whether it reflects a continuous samurai ethic reaching back through Edo-period house codes and texts such as the Hagakure, or is substantially Nitobe's own Meiji-era synthesis for a Western readership, is a genuinely contested question among historians of Japan.

Source Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan, Oleg Benesch tier 1

Yu the Great, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historicity debated

According To Chinese Folk Religion

Anne Birrell's Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) examines the Xia dynasty Yu the Great is said to have founded against the archaeological record, comparing it to the directly confirmed following Shang dynasty. Birrell's method is comparative archaeology and textual history, and she finds the Xia is not directly confirmed by archaeology the way the Shang is, on which basis most modern historians treat Yu's own reign as legend rather than confirmed history.

Source Chinese Mythology: An Introduction, Anne Birrell tier 1

Yu the Great, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity Detail

Currently States Anne Birrell's Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) treats Yu the Great, the sage king credited with taming China's flood by channelling its rivers to the sea over thirteen years of labour and founding the Xia dynasty by passing the throne to his own son rather than continuing the old practice of abdication, as a figure who is either wholly legendary or at most only partly historical, a judgment resting on the absence of any record of Yu, the flood or the Xia founding contemporary with the events themselves.

According To Chinese Folk Religion

Source Chinese Mythology: An Introduction, Anne Birrell tier 1

Z, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Chaldean Letter Value

Currently States 7

According To Modern planetary numerology, the scheme called Chaldean

The values recorded here follow Cheiro's Book of Numbers (Cheiro, the pen name of William John Warner, published by Herbert Jenkins, London, 1926), the most widely reproduced version of the so-called Chaldean numerology table. Cheiro's own text names no ancient Chaldean source for the letter values it assigns, and comparing it against other published numerology tables from the same and later periods finds no agreement between them on several letters; no Mesopotamian or Chaldean text has ever been produced that contains a comparable letter-number correspondence. That comparison is why historians of the modern occult treat "Chaldean" as a nineteenth and twentieth century marketing label rather than a checkable lineage claim. The value recorded here is Cheiro's published reading, not a settled fact.

Source Cheiro's Book of Numbers, Cheiro (William John Warner) tier 3

Zafarnama (Guru Gobind Singh), Literary Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Reception

Currently States Scholars including Anil Chander Banerjee and Christopher Shackle have questioned whether the surviving verse text represents Guru Gobind Singh's original composition unchanged: Banerjee proposes an original prose letter was later rendered into poetry, and Shackle suggests a later rewriting deliberately echoing Ferdowsi's Shahnameh to answer Aurangzeb in a literary form the Mughal court itself would recognize as authoritative. Neither scholar disputes that the letter's content and historical circumstance are genuine, only the literal fidelity of the surviving verses to what was first sent.

Source The Zafarnama (Wikipedia and SikhiWiki), Wikipedia contributors; SikhiWiki editors tier 3

Zaotar (Zot), Religious Roles & Titles

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Zoroaster's own lifetime is dated by different scholars anywhere from around 1700 to 1500 BCE on linguistic grounds to around 600 BCE on historical grounds, and the zaotar priesthood is at least as old as the Avestan liturgical tradition itself.

Zoroaster's own dates are unresolved among scholars, so any date for the priesthood's origin inherits that disagreement.

Source A History of Zoroastrianism, Mary Boyce tier 1

Zar, Mythical Creatures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Scholars including I. M. Lewis have read zar possession cults as a socially sanctioned outlet allowing marginalized participants, disproportionately women, a legitimate voice and communal support otherwise denied them, a reading debated against practitioners' own religious framing of the spirits as real.

Source Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, 3rd edition, I. M. Lewis tier 1

Zarathustra, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit

Currently States The linguistic dating of Zarathustra to roughly 1500 to 1200 BCE rests on the language of his own hymns, the Gathas, which linguists place close in form to the earliest layer of the Rig Veda and well before the Old Persian of the Achaemenid inscriptions. Mary Boyce's A History of Zoroastrianism (Brill, 1989) argues for this early, linguistically grounded dating over the later dates preserved in Zoroastrian and Greek tradition.

Source A History of Zoroastrianism, Mary Boyce tier 1

Zarathustra, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit

Currently States Zoroastrian religious tradition and the Greek writers who preserved reports of Zarathustra both place him around 600 BCE, several centuries later than the dating linguists derive from the archaic language of his own hymns, the Gathas. Mary Boyce's A History of Zoroastrianism (Brill, 1989) treats this later, traditional dating as the counterpart the linguistic case must be weighed against, rather than deciding between them outright.

Source A History of Zoroastrianism, Mary Boyce tier 1