Greater India

Greater India, also called the Indian cultural sphere, the Indic world or the Hindu cultural sphere, is the wide area of South Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia that was historically influenced by Indian culture. It is an umbrella term for the Indian subcontinent and the surrounding countries that are linked to it by a gradual cultural gradient rather than by a political border. From about 500 BCE, expanding land and sea trade carried Buddhist and Hindu ideas across Asia, especially into Southeast Asia and the Far East. By the early centuries of the common era most Southeast Asian principalities had taken on Indian religion, administration and the use of Sanskrit and related scripts, and the scholar George Coedes called these states the Indianized kingdoms. In Central Asia the influence was mostly religious and short-lived, while in the Himalayas it merged with local traditions in Tibet and Bhutan. Buddhist monasticism reached Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, Buddhist texts were accepted in China and Japan, and in the west Indian culture met Greater Persia.