If you travel to Vietnam, you can go to MySon and see Hindu temples there which are over 1000 years old. Images of Shiva, Vishnu, Lakshmi— there are Hindu images, but the gods do not wear the sacred thread associated with Brahmins. Similar images of Hindu gods are found in Cambodia’s Angkor Vat and in Java island’s Prambanan temple. There are images of war: Ram fighting Ravana, Krishna fighting Bana, Indra fighting Asuras. Yama sits on a buffalo. Shiva sits atop a mountain. There are also Buddha’s images, especially of Avalokiteshwara, popular with sailors. Tamil merchants even built a Shiva temple in Quanzhou, China, around 700 years ago.

But then, the sea-merchants of India outsourced all travel to Arab merchants. And a new form of Buddhism spread after the 10th century, not from India, but from Sri Lanka. The Theravada school, with its Pali canon, had images of Buddha sitting, standing and lying down. These images of the Buddha and his stupa (now called pagoda as they reached to the sky) became popular in Myanmar and Thailand. Both these states resisted Islamisation and later, Christian missionaries.