The Same Path, Fourteen Times Over
Buddhism's ten perfections, the qualities a bodhisattva cultivates on the path to awakening, are recorded across fourteen schools, from Zen and Soto to Gelug, Kagyu, Nyingma and Vajrayana, and every one of the fourteen holds them as its own account of the same path: the common ground before tantra, the content of one stage of training, or the third of nine vehicles, depending on which school is asked. No one of the fourteen is the version the others deviate from.
Islam plainly affirms tawakkul, reliance on God, as an ordinary point of belief. The atlas separately records a devotional elaboration of the same word, and eleven bodies hold that elaboration as a distinct account of it: the Sufi orders, for whom it names a stage on the spiritual path, and, differently again, their sharpest critics, Salafism and Wahhabism, who fold the same word into a stricter reading of God's oneness. Critic and criticised hold the identical term, and neither holds it the other's way.
The Psalm That Became a Hymn
Presbyterianism and the Church of Scotland do not read Psalm 23 in prose. They sing it, in the sixteenth-century Scottish metrical version, The Lord's My Shepherd, set to the tune Crimond, and for most members that hymn simply is the psalm. Related Reformed churches sing their own metrical versions to other tunes, and Christian Science reads the psalm bound to a spiritual commentary written alongside it. Five traditions, one scripture, several different things a congregation actually hears when it is read or sung.