Limits of religious diffusion

node

The observation that the historical edges of religious traditions correspond closely to physical and political discontinuities rather than to the intellectual persuasiveness of competing claims: the Sahara and the Taklamakan, the open Pacific and the Atlantic before ocean-capable shipping, the Himalaya, and the frontiers of organised rival states. Where a route ended, or where a state was strong enough to refuse, diffusion slowed or stopped. Buddhism's contraction in India, the disappearance of the Church of the East from China after the ninth century, and the long decline of Zoroastrianism in Iran are the cases used here — and each of them is causally contested, which is precisely the point: the limits are visible in the record while the reasons for them are not.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.