This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A spread event entry in this atlas records one documented episode in which a religious tradition, practice or text reached a population or region it had not previously reached, together with its approximate date and the route or mechanism by which it arrived. Buddhism Reaches Sri Lanka and Buddhism Reaches China are examples already in this atlas: each names a specific, sourced episode of arrival rather than restating Buddhism's own founding, which belongs on Buddhism's own entry, not here.
A spread event entry records the mechanism of arrival wherever it is documented, since traditions have historically spread by more than one route: along established trade corridors, through missionary activity deliberately organized by a sending community, through conquest and the political sponsorship a new ruler sometimes extended to a tradition, and through migration, where a diaspora community carried its own tradition to a new home region rather than converting a new population to it. These mechanisms are not mutually exclusive within a single spread event; a tradition often reached a new region by trade contact well before any organized missionary effort followed.
Distinct spread events for one tradition are linked to each other chronologically wherever the record allows it, which lets a reader trace a tradition's documented reach across regions and centuries as a connected sequence rather than as isolated, unrelated facts. This is comparative history rather than an origin story: a spread event entry is deliberately silent on whether the tradition's own claims about itself are true, and records only what can be documented about when and how it reached a given place.