Eastern religions in the context of "Mandala"

In the Czech Republic, 47.8% of the population is irreligious (atheist, agnostic or other irreligious life stances), while 21.3% of the population are believers. The religious identity of the country has changed drastically since the first half of the 20th century, when more than 90% of Czechs were Christians. As of 2021, 11.7% of the population identified with Christianity (9.3% identifying with Catholicism and 2.4% with all other Christian denominations); 10.8% identified with other religious identities or beliefs. According to sociologist Jan Spousta, not all the irreligious people are atheists; indeed, since the late 20th century there has been an increasing distancing from both Christian dogmatism and atheism, and at the same time ideas and non-institutional models similar to those of Eastern religions have become widespread through movements started by various gurus, and hermetic and mystical paths.

Indian religions, sometimes also termed Indic religions or Dharmic religions, are the religions that originated in the Indian subcontinent. These religions, which include Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism, are also classified as Eastern religions. Although Indian religions are connected through the history of India, they constitute a wide range of religious communities, and are not confined to the Indian subcontinent.

Evidence attesting to prehistoric religion in the Indian subcontinent derives from scattered Mesolithic rock paintings. The Harappan people of the Indus Valley Civilisation, which lasted from 3300 to 1300 BCE (mature period 2600–1900 BCE), had an early urbanised culture which predates the Vedic religion.

The Western religions are the religions that originated within Western culture, which are thus historically, culturally, and theologically distinct from Eastern, African and Iranian religions. The term Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) an is often used instead of using the East and West terminology, as these originated in the Middle East.

Western culture itself was significantly influenced by the emergence of Christianity and its adoption as the state church of the Roman Empire in the late 4th century and the term "Christendom" largely indicates this intertwined history. Western Christianity was significantly influenced by Hellenistic religion (notably neoplatonism) as well as the Roman imperial cult. Western Christianity is largely based on the Catholic Church's Latin Church tradition, as opposed to Eastern Orthodoxy, from which it was divided by the Great Schism of the 11th century, and further includes all Protestant traditions that split with the Catholic Church from the 16th century onward.

In the study of comparative religion, the East Asian religions, form a subset of the Eastern religions which originated in East Asia.

This group includes Chinese religion overall, which further includes ancestor veneration, Chinese folk religion, Confucianism, Taoism and popular salvationist organisations (such as Yiguandao and Weixinism), as well as elements drawn from Mahayana Buddhism that form the core of Chinese and East Asian Buddhism at large. The group also includes Shinto and Tenrikyo of Japan, and Korean Shamanism, all of which combine shamanistic elements and indigenous ancestral worship with various influences from Chinese religions. Chinese salvationist religions have influenced the rise of Japanese new religions such Tenriism and Korean Jeungsanism; as these new religious movements draw upon indigenous traditions but are heavily influenced by Chinese philosophy and theology. All these religious traditions generally share core concepts of spirituality, divinity and world order, including Tao ('way') and Tian ('heaven').

Nondualism, also called nonduality and sometimes monism, is a polyvalent term originating in Indian philosophy and religion, where it is used in various, related contemplative philosophies which aim to negate dualistic thinking or conceptual proliferation (prapanca) and thereby realize nondual awareness, 'that which is beyond discursive thinking', a state of consciousness described in contemplative traditions as a background field of unified, immutable awareness that exists prior to conceptual thought.

The English term "nonduality" is derived from the Sanskrit Hindu term "advaita" (अद्वैत), "not-two" or "one without a second," meaning that only Brahman, 'the one', is ultimately real while 'the world', or the multiplicity of thought-constructs, 'the second', is not fully real; and from the Buddhist term advaya, which is also literally translated as "not two" and has various applications, including the Madhyamaka negation of thinking in opposites such as ordinary, conventional truth versus ultimate truth, and in Yogachara the deconstruction of the "apprehension of sensory objects as separate from the perceiving consciousness."

Conceptions of God in classical theist, monotheist, pantheist, and panentheist traditions – or of the supreme deity in henotheistic religions – can extend to various levels of abstraction:

• as a powerful, personal, supernatural being, or as the deification of an esoteric, mystical or philosophical entity or category;
• as the "Ultimate", the summum bonum, the "Absolute Infinite", the "Transcendent", or Existence or Being itself;
• as the ground of being, the monistic substrate, that which we cannot understand; and so on.

The first recordings that survive of monotheistic conceptions of God, borne out of henotheism and (mostly in Eastern religions) monism, are from the Hellenistic period. Of the many objects and entities that religions and other belief systems across the ages have labeled as divine, the one criterion they share is their acknowledgment as divine by a group or groups of human beings.