East Asia

East Asia is bound together by a written language rather than by a spoken one. Chinese characters were adopted for administrative and literary use in Korea, Japan and Vietnam, and what travelled on that script is most of what the atlas holds under this heading.

Buddhism is the clearest case. It reached China from Central Asia and India in the first centuries CE and was translated into Chinese over several hundred years by teams working from Sanskrit and Central Asian languages, a project on a scale with few parallels in the history of translation. It then reached Korea and Japan in the Chinese versions rather than from India directly, which is why Japanese and Korean Buddhists have historically chanted texts in a Sino-Japanese or Sino-Korean reading of Chinese, and why the schools of the region, Tiantai and Tendai, Chan and Son and Zen, Pure Land in its several forms, are a shared inheritance with local developments.

Confucian learning travelled the same way, supplying a vocabulary for ritual, family obligation and government that operated in all four societies regardless of what else people believed. State examinations based on the classics were adopted in Korea and Vietnam.

Daoism travelled less far as an institution but its cosmology, its ideas about the body, and its calendrical and divinatory practices spread widely. The atlas keeps China, Japan and Korea as separate regions and uses this entry for what is genuinely shared.

The phrase three teachings, used across the region for Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism, describes an arrangement that western categories handle badly.

For long stretches of East Asian history a person could participate in all three without contradiction, because they were understood to do different work: Confucian ritual for family and public obligation, Buddhist rites for death and the afterlife, Daoist or local practice for healing, exorcism and calendar. Households sponsored funerals in one idiom and weddings in another. That is why census questions asking for a single religious affiliation have always produced strange results in this region, and why the atlas records participation alongside identification.

Combination went further than coexistence in places. In Japan, kami and buddhas were systematically identified with one another from the ninth century under the honji suijaku framework, in which local deities were understood as manifestations of buddhas; shrines and temples shared precincts and personnel for a thousand years, until the Meiji government forcibly separated them in 1868.

There was also genuine conflict. Chinese states suppressed Buddhism several times, most severely in 845, on grounds that included the removal of land and labour from the tax rolls. Confucian scholars attacked Buddhist doctrine as foreign and antisocial. The picture is neither seamless harmony nor sectarian competition, and the atlas records both the combination and the persecutions rather than choosing an emphasis.