DUALISM. As a category within the history and phenomenology of religion, dualism may be defined as a doctrine that posits the existence of two fundamental causal principles underlying the existence (or, as in the case of the Indian notion of maya as opposed to atman, the painful appearance of the existence) of the world. In addition, dualistic doctrines, worldviews, or myths represent the basic components of the world, or of humans, as participating in the ontological opposition and disparity of value that characterize their dual principles. In this specific religio-historical sense, dualism is to be distinguished from the more general philosophical doctrines of transcendence and metaphysical irreducibility, which are opposed to monistic or pantheistic doctrines of immanence. This article will examine dualism only in the former sense, as a religio-historical phenomenon. It begins with a systematic overview of the nature and types of dualism, then proceeds to a...