It is important to recognize that there was a Western ideological interest in ensuring that Indian philosophy was not seen as in direct competition with Western philosophy. Treating its categories as theological ones accomplishes this.
There's a fine chapter in The Nay Science about how the first Western readers of Indian philosophy were engaging with it *as philosophy*, and how this got shut down, largely under the influence of Hegel.
The post-Hegelian historicization of non-Western philosophies was also, and essentially, their *theologization*. So Indian and Chinese philosophies are treated, with some exceptions (i.e., where they have no metaphysics at all) as religious movements or sects.
This has the additional ideological advantage of making these nations' polytheistic religious traditions appear to have been superseded already domestically, making recognition of their intellectual achievements incumbent upon completing this supposed process.
The result of all this, from the viewpoint of a philosopher, is that we don't read the Upanishads or the Dao De Jing the way we read Kant or Hegel; we read them in a religious framework, often specifically as reactions against their indigenous religious traditions.
Now, nobody would make the claim that Kant or Hegel is not a Christian. They are simply trying to figure out how their philosophical ideas about the nature of Being interface with their Christianity.
But if the religious tradition to which a philosopher belongs is polytheistic, then it goes virtually unquestioned today that an essential part of their philosophy, if not *the* essential part of it, must be the rejection of that tradition at least insofar as it is polytheist.
So, when we speak of the ignorance or avoidance of non-Western philosophies in the West, we need to understand how that comes about, namely through theologization, and that the latter is inseparable from the monotheist mission.
