Hinduism

node · earth · South Asia, with historical extension into Southeast Asia

A family of South Asian traditions with shared textual, ritual and cosmological reference points rather than a single founder or creed; 'Hinduism' as a unified category is substantially a term of nineteenth-century colonial and Indological classification, and scholars disagree about how far it names one thing before that. Its practice travelled the maritime and overland routes to Southeast Asia in the first millennium CE, where temple architecture, Sanskrit court culture and Puranic narrative were adopted by ruling houses in what earlier scholarship called 'Indianisation' — a framing now widely criticised for implying passive reception rather than active local selection.