Home›Southeast Asia and Oceania›Sacred ToBrowse BySacred ToThis page groups sacred regions by the specific worship they were built to hold. Wikipedia notes that "the Temple in Jerusalem ... was the central place of worship for Israelites and Jews and serves as the namesake of the Temple Mount." Browsing by sacred-to lets a visitor find every region built to hold the same worship.FactsSacred ToSourcesComments (0)Reader Challenges (0)FactsDirectoryCategoryWell-attestedRegions 1Sacred ToFilter Results2 entriesAdherents TodayAllPew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report puts the global Hindu population at nearly 1.2 billion as of 2020, up 126 million from 2010, with about 99 percent of the world's Hindus living in the Asia-Pacific region and roughly 95 percent in India alone. (1)Adherents Today MaximumAll1,200,000,000 (1)Adherents Today MinimumAll1,200,000,000 (1)Basis of the Membership FigureAllIndependent Survey (1)Scholarly or Demographic Estimate (1)Establishment StatusAllVaries by Province (1)Form of the ConfessionAllHinduism has no single creed and no central authority to issue one. Adherence centers on orthopraxy, correct ritual and social practice, rather than a shared confession, and schools agreeing on almost no metaphysical claim, including atheistic Samkhya and materialist Charvaka, are still counted within the tradition. A formula such as the Gayatri Mantra marks a school, not the whole of Hinduism. (1)FounderAllNone; Hinduism has no founder and no founding event (1)How the Expectation Is EnforcedAllCustomary Norm (1)Membership Figure As OfAll2010-01-01 (1)2012-12-18 (1)2020-01-01 (1)Membership Over TimeAllBy 2020, the same Pew study found the global Hindu population had grown 12 percent to nearly 1.2 billion, remaining stable as a share of world population since non-Hindus grew at about the same rate; 99 percent of Hindus worldwide live in the Asia-Pacific region and about 95 percent in India alone. (1)In its December 2012 Global Religious Landscape study, Pew Research Center estimated about 1 billion Hindus worldwide as of 2010, 15 percent of the global population, while noting a lack of census or survey data on Hindu subgroups in most countries. (1)Pew's June 2025 update put its own 2010 Hindu estimate at a little under 1.1 billion, close to but modestly higher than the 2012 report's figure for the same year, a mild revision rather than the sharp divergence seen in the same pair of studies' Buddhist figures. (1)Origin AccountAllHinduism has no single founder or founding event; scholars trace its roots to the blending of Vedic religion, brought by Indo-Aryan migration, with indigenous religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent over more than a millennium. (1)Origin PeriodAllNo founding event (1)Origin Period End YearAll500 BCE (1)1300 (1)Origin Period Start YearAll1500 BCE (1)1000 BCE (1)Place of OriginAllThe Indian subcontinent, chiefly the Indo-Gangetic plain (1)The islands of Polynesia, from Aotearoa to Hawaii and Rapa Nui (1)Practice StatusAllPartly restricted: some elements are closed to outsiders (1)Standing Giving ExpectationAllDana, giving, is not a single uniform rule in Hindu tradition but a textual category examined at length across dharmashastra literature. Maria Heim's academic study Theories of the Gift in South Asia traces how thinkers writing across roughly 1100 to 1300 CE debated whether a gift is fully voluntary or carries an obligatory dimension, a live question precisely because the dharmashastra sources themselves classify gifts along a spectrum running from daily, expected household giving to occasional, circumstance-bound giving and freely chosen giving, without resolving which end of that spectrum binds an ordinary householder. Dakshina, the gift or fee traditionally owed an officiating priest at the close of a ritual, sits at the more expected end of the same spectrum: its Vedic root, traced to a fee due the priest, originally a cow, makes it read as more customary and completion-bound than a purely charitable dana, though its scale is set by custom and the giver's own means rather than by any stated rate. Hinduism has no single hierarchical body, no synod and no magisterium, that could codify either dana or dakshina into a binding rule with a stated percentage or a stated penalty for falling short; what the textual and scholarly record shows is a customary norm of long standing, carried by tradition and ritual expectation rather than by institutional enforcement. (1)Status TodayAllLiving tradition, practised today (2)Supreme BeingAllHindu theology ranges from devotion to a single supreme deity, most often Vishnu or Shiva depending on the tradition, to a broader vision in which many deities are held to be manifestations of a single underlying reality, Brahman. (1)TheologyAllAncestor-centred (1)Monistic: one ultimate reality behind all appearance (1)Panentheistic: the divine both within the world and beyond it (1)Polytheistic: many gods (2)Transgression CategoryAllAdharma, action contrary to one's dharma or to cosmic and moral order, is the broad Hindu category of wrongdoing. (1)BrowseCompareHinduismSacred To1 entryPolynesian ReligionSacred To1 entrySources1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category TreeComments (0)No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.Sign in to join the discussion.Reader Challenges (0)No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.