This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Asian Studies is the interdisciplinary study of the societies, languages, history and cultures of Asia, its method combining history, philology and area specific fieldwork focused on the continent's own societies studied on their own terms. The field gained an academic home in 1784, when William Jones founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta to study Indian and wider Asian civilization directly rather than through an outside observer's assumptions.
For an atlas of religion and belief, Asian Studies underlies its own regional branches, already named elsewhere in this collection, which study Chinese and South Asian textual and religious traditions specifically, and the parent field supplies the historical and philological context those narrower disciplines draw on. A tradition native to Asia, or an Asian form of a wider tradition, is read here against the continent's own history and languages rather than against a framework built for another region.
That grounding is why the field matters here specifically. Jones's own founding purpose, studying Asian civilization on its own terms, is the same standard this atlas applies wherever an Asian religious tradition's origins, texts or living practice are described.