The source texts.

Krishna counsels Arjuna on the battlefield: act fully, release the outcome.

The philosophical core of the Vedas: Atman, Brahman and the nature of the self.

The classic manual of meditation and the stilling of the mind.

The foundational text of Vedanta philosophy, read through Shankara.

The great Indian epic that holds the Bhagavad Gita. Later volumes are on Project Gutenberg too.

Vivekananda's commentary on Patanjali, written for Western readers: the mind as the instrument of freedom.

Work without attachment to results. The path Gradient can't escape: "Karma Yoga doesn't let you pick your dharma."

The speeches that opened with "Sisters and brothers of America" and brought Vedanta to the West.

The Buddha's teachings in short verses on mind, conduct and freedom.

The life and teachings of the Buddha, gathered from early sources.

Laozi's eighty-one short chapters on the Tao, softness and non-action.

Zhuangzi's parables of freedom, perspective and the butterfly dream.

Sayings of Confucius on virtue, learning and how to live among others.

The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in the classic English translation.

The Catholic English translation, including the deuterocanonical books.

Three English renderings of each verse, set next to one another.

A complete 19th-century English translation.

Rumi's great Sufi poem of longing, love and return.

An inward autobiography and one of the first great works of introspection.

A Stoic emperor's private notes on discipline, impermanence and calm.

The best-known modern summary of Hermetic philosophy, including "As above, so below."

The founding essay of American Transcendentalism: spirit read through the natural world.

Includes "Self-Reliance" and "The Over-Soul," the shared mind behind every individual one.

Two years in a cabin, living deliberately. Includes "Civil Disobedience."

The New Thought classic on thought shaping circumstance: the old ancestor of the Manifest YOU spec.

The source of the a priori: the "Kantian cage" Gradient's heart overfit to.

Where "God is dead" first appears. A diagnosis, the book's glossary notes, not a triumph.

Nietzsche's answer to nihilism: create new values from the wreckage of the old.

The novel that brought the word "nihilist" into literature, through Bazarov.

Freud's map of the unconscious and repression: what Arg and Kwarg call "tech debt of the soul."

Jung's break with Freud, and the start of his work on archetypes and the collective unconscious.

The paper that introduced the Transformer. He would like you to know he read it. Loudly.

The bartender's origin story: per-parameter learning rates from the moments of the gradient.

The technique that calmly stabilized deep training. It sends ReLU postcards.

Residual connections: sometimes the most useful thing a layer can do is nothing.

The Chinchilla paper. Not about the forest chinchilla, who was not cited.

The source of the book's refrain: “So it goes.”

The novel behind “Reason died at dawn.”

Why 42 is the random seed in nearly every machine learning tutorial.