Quote Originally Posted by Han Chan View Post
Actually the concept Indo-European is mostly used when talking about Indo-European languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-european
Languages and cultures are closely linked... How do you make the difference between Italian-speaking people and Italian culture people ?

If you like to include the South Asian cultures/countries into the category of western countries, the concept becomes nonsense. If both east and west is west, then everything is the same....
During the Cold War, Eastern European countries were not considered "Western" because they were in the Eastern communist block. Nowadays this doesn't make sense anymore. I think that India is still closer to Europe than to China or Japan. But it could be the heavy British influence. I think that the Middle East and Africa are neither Western not Eastern. China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, etc. are Eastern. India is in between, but more Western. Europeans who travel to India often say they go to discover "their roots", or "retrace the origins of our ancestors' religions".

To claim that buddhism is a branch of Hinduism is wrong. It had its origin in the same area and some of the concepts are similar, but one is not a branch of the other.
Buddha was a Hindu. The Hindu consider him as an avatar of Vishnu. That is why there are no more Buddhists in India (except Tibetan refugees). They were all "absorbed" into Hinduism.

Shintoism has its origins in animism and shamanism which used to be found all over the world, but shintoism has certainly evolved further and is very much a japanese thing.
When I see Shinto temples and priests, they look very much like the ones in Korea and China (Taoist, Buddhist ?). What concept of shintoism is so unique to Japan ? I am talking of the religion itself, not the traditions that developed around it.