This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Asia gathers forty nine nations, second only to Africa among the atlas's continental groupings, running from the birthplaces of four living religions to states that make one faith law and others that suppress every faith at once.
Three countries claim living origin stories no other continent can match. India gave rise to Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism together, its regional variety from Sufi and Hindu Kashmir to Sikh Punjab too wide for one description to flatten. Nepal is the Buddha's own birthplace at Lumbini and was a Hindu kingdom by constitution until 2008. China braided Confucian ethics, Daoist cosmology and Mahayana Buddhism into what its own tradition calls the three teachings, on top of folk temple worship older than any of them.
Coexistence takes different shapes elsewhere. Japan moves between Shinto and Buddhism without treating them as exclusive, Shinto for rites of passage and Buddhism for funerals in the same household. Indonesia holds the world's largest Muslim population over a deeper layer of Hindu Bali and the Buddhist monument at Borobudur, and its constitution recognizes six official religions at once. Israel packs Judaism, Christianity and Islam into one contested Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock within a few hundred metres of each other.
Some states organize around a single faith by law. Saudi Arabia holds Mecca and Medina and bars non Muslims from entering either. Bhutan is the last country where Vajrayana Buddhism runs the state directly, its dzongs still combining monastery and government seat. North Korea sits at the opposite extreme, enforcing state atheism since 1948 over a peninsula that once earned Pyongyang the nickname the Jerusalem of the East for its churches.