Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia, mainland and maritime, from Myanmar and Thailand through Vietnam to the Indonesian archipelago and the Philippines, is one of the world's great religious crossroads, its faiths carried in largely by trade across land and sea and layered over rich indigenous traditions. The mainland (Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos) became the world's heartland of Theravada Buddhism, its landscape defined by the golden stupa, the saffron-robed monk, and the intimate relation of sangha and state, all overlaid on older spirit-cults (the Thai and Burmese veneration of nats and phi).

Earlier, Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms raised the great monuments of Angkor in Cambodia and Borobudur in Java. The maritime world, Indonesia (today the most populous Muslim country on earth), Malaysia, and the southern Philippines, was won over centuries for Islam, carried by Muslim traders and Sufi teachers and blended with local custom. Vietnam followed the Chinese pattern of the three teachings and, in 1926, produced the striking syncretic new religion Cao Dai, which fuses elements of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Catholicism, and spiritism and venerates a diverse gallery of "saints." The Philippines, uniquely, became predominantly Catholic under Spanish rule. Southeast Asia thus holds, side by side, the great Theravada Buddhist cultures, the largest Muslim population in the world, a Catholic nation, and homegrown syncretic faiths, a mosaic assembled from every direction.

Southeast Asia is the region where the atlas most often has to describe several religions occupying the same ground at once, and the evidence is largely monumental and epigraphic rather than doctrinal.

Indic religion arrived by sea and river trade and was adopted by local rulers who found in it a vocabulary for kingship. What survives from that period is enormous in stone and thin in text: temple complexes at Angkor and Borobudur, Sanskrit and vernacular inscriptions recording endowments, and iconography that identifies which deities were being honoured. Very little in the way of local theological writing survives from the earliest centuries, so the religion is read from what was built and what was carved.

Later layers arrive the same way and do not erase what they find. Theravada Buddhism spread through the mainland from around the eleventh century; Islam came by sea to the archipelago from roughly the thirteenth, carried by traders and Sufi teachers rather than by conquest; Christianity followed European powers. In each case the incoming tradition was adopted alongside local practice rather than in place of it.

The layer that runs underneath all of them is the hardest to document. Spirit cults, guardian figures of place and rites for the dead persist across the region under every one of the world religions, and they are mostly recorded in modern ethnography rather than in any older source. That they are recorded late does not mean they arrived late.