Hinduism once dominated Indochina wherein the Ankor Wat temple complex abounds with Hindu temples. Vietnam was a Hindu country up into the seventeenth century. Afghanistan was dominated by Hinduism into the tenth century. Hindu influence existed in Persia, Central Asia and the Middle East, not only by Hindu traders but with Hindu converts. Even a number of ancient Greeks became Hindus.

The name Hinduism is a misnomer and a foreign invention. It goes back to the ancient Persians who called the land of India, the land of the Hindus as they contacted India through the Indus river, the western most large river of India. The Sanskrit name of the Indus, Sindhu, gave rise to both Indus (and India) and Hindu (the Persians pronounced Sindhu as Hindu). Hinduism is thus a geographical term. It does not define the Hindu religion but simply identifies the region from which Western cultures have contacted it.

The term Hindu cannot be found in any of the classical texts of Hinduism. It is nowhere in the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, or the classical books on Yoga. Hindu texts do not contain the idea of different religious identities but only of a common human religious aspiration. As Sanatana Dharma or the universal tradition, Hinduism does not need to represent itself as one religious identity as opposed to others. If we live in the ocean, for example, do we have to give water a name? It is only those who live on different rivers that must give their water a special name. Hinduism has never separated itself off from the universal truth and formulated itself as one point of view regarded as exclusively true.

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