ABSTRACT
Axial Age societies were concentrated in two places: the Mediterranean and Maritime East Asia. In the third Axial zone, the Ganges Basin, Buddhism began. The latter though quickly exported itself to maritime South-East Asia and maritime East Asia. Today it clusters around these two regions. Theravada Buddhism is focused on Thailand, Cambodia, Burma and Laos, and (adjacent to these) South-Western China. Theravada’s more paradoxical cousin, Mahāyāna Buddhism, is mustered in Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and China’s coastal Fujian and Zhejiang provinces near Taiwan. Taoism’s heartland is the southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi, and Guizhou bound by the Pearl (Zhujiang) River system together with Hunan province, an appendage of the Yangtze River system. Confucianism is most densely represented in the northern Chinese provinces that surround Bohai Bay and on the nearby Korean peninsula.
