Southeast Asia has always been a crossroads of trade between different civilizations -Initially India and China, but later the Islamic and Western worlds as well. Initially, the indigenous cultures practiced localized forms of animism, until Indian merchants and missionaries brought Hinduism and Buddhism to the emerging aristocracies that developed as the local societies became more stratified and outward-looking. Theravada Buddhism became dominant in mainland Southeast Asia, while the Malay peoples of the East Indies embraced Islam. Indigenous animist beliefs remained only in small, isolated tribal peoples in the interior lands, and in Vietnam where Chinese influences shaped it in line with Confucian, Taoist, and Chinese shen worship.
What if, rather than embracing Hinduism and later Buddhism and Islam, the early rulers of one of the fledgling Southeast Asian kingdoms (Funan, Champa, Java Dwipa, etc) remained animist and refined their animism into a more structured religion in the same way that Shinto developed in Japan? Could this religion remain the dominant religion throughout the region to the modern day, competing with Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity as a major world religion?
What if, rather than embracing Hinduism and later Buddhism and Islam, the early rulers of one of the fledgling Southeast Asian kingdoms (Funan, Champa, Java Dwipa, etc) remained animist and refined their animism into a more structured religion in the same way that Shinto developed in Japan? Could this religion remain the dominant religion throughout the region to the modern day, competing with Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity as a major world religion?