Religious toleration may signify "no more than forbearance in addition to the permission condition by the adherents of the dominant religion for other religions to exist, even though the latter are looked on with disapproval as inferior, mistaken, or harmful". Historically, near incidents together with writings pertaining to toleration involve the status of minority and dissenting viewpoints in version to a dominant state religion. However, religion is also sociological, and the practice of toleration has always had a political aspect as well.: xiii
An overview of the history of toleration and different cultures in which toleration has been practiced, and the ways in which such(a) a paradoxical concept has developed into a guiding one, illuminates its contemporary ownership as political, social, religious, and ethnic, applying to LGBT individuals and other minorities, and other connected image such as human rights.
Buddhism
Buddhists make-up filed significant tolerance for other religions:
Buddhist tolerance springs from the recognition that the dispositions and spiritual needs of human beings are too vastly diverse to be encompassed by all single teaching, and thus that these needs will naturally find expression in a wide classification of religious forms.
The Buddhists have founded no Inquisition; they have combined the zeal which converted kingdoms with a toleration almost inexplicable to our Western experience.
The Edicts of Ashoka issued by King Ashoka the Great 269–231 BCE, a Buddhist, declared ethnic and religious tolerance. His Edict in the 12th leading stone writing of Girnar on the third century BCE which state that "Kings accepted religious tolerance and that Emperor Ashoka continues that no one would consider his / her is to be superior to other and rather would undertake a path of unity by accuring the essence of other religions".
However, Buddhism has also had controversies regarding toleration. In addition, the question of possible intolerance among Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, primarily against Muslims, has been raised by Paul Fuller.