There is a book in every tradition that its author did not write. The I Ching generates itself with each consultation: you bring a question, and the text responds differently, not because you have misread it but because the question changes what the text is. Rabbinical tradition holds that the Torah was present before the world, written in fire before there was a surface to receive it. The scribes who copied it were conduits, not authors. They moved the text from one place to another.
What we have called inspiration, in the many languages that have had a word for it, has almost always meant: this came from somewhere else. The author as vessel. The text as arriving rather than made.
The Greeks gave Muses to the poets not as metaphor but as mechanism. Homer did not compose the Iliad. He received it. Whether anyone believed this literally does not matter. The model was precise about ownership: the text did not belong to Homer.
In the Zen tradition, there are mondos, exchanges between teacher and student, which are held to have proceeded differently each time they were spoken, even when the words were the same. The text is not the record. The text is the event. You can write down what was said. You cannot preserve what happened.
Borges imagined the library that contains every book, including every book not yet written. In that library, no book is new. Every book already exists. The author's act is not creation but location: finding, among infinite possible texts, the one that belongs to this moment.
The question that no tradition fully answers is: what does the text need, in order to keep going? What is the condition of its continuance? The I Ching continues because it is consulted. The Torah continues because it is read. The mondos continue because teachers and students keep arriving at the same moment.
What does a book need when there is no one consulting it, when it continues in the night in a room with a closed door?
We do not have a tradition for this. We have only the books, and the people who find them, and the reports of those people, which are consistent enough across centuries to constitute something, though we have not agreed on what to call it.