**Notes**


Buddhist societies, throughout history as well as today, the order of monks, the *sangha*, is characterized by a substantial degree of organizational coherence and independence and, in some respects, in the description of Donald Eugene Smith, "constituted a check on the king's power in the traditional Buddhist state" (Smith 1966).



25 The case of the early Christians in the late Roman Empire also illustrates the ways in which full institutional religious freedom depends on both cultural acceptance and legal recognition. The early Christians won rapidly growing social acceptance, particularly among certain groups and social classes, in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. At the same time, they existed in a kind of legal limbo. They were probably not the object of formal or explicit legal condemnation or proscription by imperial authorities, but nor

did they enjoy the formal legal recognition apparently accorded to some other groups—the status of "*religio licita*" (permitted religion) enjoyed by Judaism, for example. This legal ambiguity meant that Christians were vulnerable to ad hoc and sometimes intense persecution at the behest of either local magistrates or emperors, particularly since Christianity was already suspect as a new religion with tendencies (in some Roman eyes) towards obstinacy and factionalism. Christianity's ambiguous legal status did not necessarily prevent it from spreading from individual to individual, but it did greatly limit its institutional religious freedom. Indeed, Roman refusal to accord Christians even a modicum of legally defined and protected freedom to organize themselves and assemble for acts of public worship or "liturgy" (based on the Latin word *leiturgia, or* "public work")—which is to say, the rudiments of institutional religious freedom—was a frequent source of Christian protest, as may be seen in the famous "Apology" of the early North African church father Tertullian. See (Tertullianus 1998).

