This talk juxtaposes competing claims about religious freedom in the Japanese and U.S. empires to show that religious freedom is never simply present or absent in any given polity, nor has “it” ever been just one thing in any time or place.
This talk is a preliminary investigation into a large set of sources pertaining to the some of the first encounters between Indian Buddhist and native Chinese thought: the Chinese translations of Indian Buddhist literature dating from the Han and Three-Kingdoms period ( (ca. 150-280 CE).
