Astonishingly, it turns out this is simply not the case. Before the influx of monotheism and later forms of absolutism from the West, the cultural traditions of Asia had no experience of the kind of murderous religious intolerance documented here. While there was competition for patronage between faiths, the notion of heresy as something to be eliminated didn't exist. Hajime Nakamura, a leading crosscultural authority on Asian spiritual traditions, observes that “in India there were no religious wars. Neither Buddhists nor Jains ever executed heretics. What they did to heretics was only to
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