Since I didn't have anything to post right now :)
For a westerner to understand Eastern religion(s), I think, the best way to start with would be grasping certain Western writers with pantheistic approach (or perversions?). They've existed over time, and have always wanted to say, though in a suppressed tone, that God might be inherent in the surroundings, constituted in the environment, and not someone allpowerful-separate-purest away from our world.
God is not a being, but rather a law, diffused through everything as a divine principle. Thus, for him there does not exist a personal god, just as there does not exist any personal immortality.
-L. Tolstoy
And then try to imagine that the Eastern religion started with the very assertion that God is constituted in the nature. The idea that God created the world that we reside in is not how religion in the East started. It was based on the concept that He resides in the continuum of the creation, and keeps changing itself every moment, at every instant of time. That voice of pantheism is heard aloud in Eastern religion(s), reverberating in the Sanskrit chants, or the Pali quotes. The way to reach God includes your love for nature, your parents, and probably much more. So, even the animal sacrifices and ancestral worship were compatible with the Eastern religion, if not, a direct consequence of Eastern philosophy. There is even a god for violence and retribution.
Because of this inherent value of tolerance in there, the religion in East never showed any eagerness to spread a truth that was seen by a few; and so it didn't have to destroy statues of Nature's worship, neither did it associate the numerous (practically infinite) pagan gods with Devil, nor did it replace the pagan worship of goddesses with a more solemn and integrated one. Worship itself was a not so serious business; it was constituted in what Rumi (a Muslim Persian poet, with pantheist perversions) calls a 'sweet blasphemy’
In fact, taking religion in a literal sense, there was never such thing as religion in East either. There were practices, traditions. dharma (sans) or “dhamma” (Pali) doesn’t translate very well as ‘religion’ in English. It is one word for duty and religion. Duty here, however, isn’t governed by a scripture, or a set of rules. All what is said is that what you do is what makes you; what you are is because of what you did in past lives. There is never an external entity defined, which governs this process, nor an exact way, which has to be followed. Once you feel yourself to be part of the nature, then doing good for yourself, would mean doing good to everyone. Accordingly, Hurting others, hurts yourself, not because it’s a sin that you would be punished for, but because the one you hurt constitutes ‘you’. That is what they call Karma.