ABSTRACT
This chapter places religion and cultural politics in the long historical perspective of their sometimes complementary, sometimes antagonistic, relationships to one another. Buddhism, for example, offered a method, meditation, that made possible psychological insights that freed believers from the traditional constraints the caste system imposed on human lives (Gombrich 2009). Hinduism, in contrast, suppressed and buried Buddhism in the land of its birth, supporting precisely the demands of the caste system that Buddhism had ethically questioned and resisted (Doniger 2009). Early forms of historical Christianity legitimated freedom of religious belief in a way that later forms, after Christianity became the established church of the Roman Empire, denied and indeed aggressively persecuted (Gilligan and Richards 2009, 102–118; Richards 1986, 85–88).
