The Aryans came to India between 2000 and 1500 B.C.E and the two main religions in India are Hindu and Buddhism. Hindu is the more dominant.
It is difficult to put all the events of India’s early history in order because the two schools of thought started at the same time and because who wrote it and when was of little importance. What was important was that the teachings were conveyed. Not how they were.
Indian ways of thinking are split into two sections: Hindu and non-Hindu. Hindu respect and follow the veda, the earliest teachings. The schools that teach the Veda are Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa, and Vedanta. The schools that resent the Veda are viewed as heterodox. And they include Buddhism, Jainism, and Carvaka.
In just the last few years floods , earthquakes and other natural disasters have killed over 30,000 people. This has brought around many of the philosophical questions pertaining to suffering. Such as why is this happening and who are we, why are we here.
In Hindu thought, reaching Moksha is enlightenment. For Buddhists this is called nirvana.
In this culture philosophy is not just a way of thinking but a way of living as well. They don’t want to find truth they want to live it as well.
In India the thing they are seeking for is liberation from all of the suffering in life. All of the schools in Hindu are bound by one thing and that is that the are all trying to find deliverance into ones true identity.
Darshana is the closest meaning to philosophy in Sanskrit. And it means seeing or viewing. Darshana has two sides of it: prajna is wisdom, karuna is love or compassion.
The Vedic Age (1500-1700B.C.E) was when the Aryans overran India. It is a good guess that they would have had influence on the philosophies of the culture. Dravidian is the language that was originally spoken throughout India by the farmers. After 1500 B.C.E the sacred teachings were passed around by mouth before being written down. When written down they became the Veda.
The Rig Veda is the oldest part of the Veda 1500-900B.C.E it consists of over 1000 hymns, used for sacrifice as well as celebration.
The Upanishads are another section of writing in the Veda from between 800-300B.C.E. There are 108 of these and of those 108 11 are considered to be the oldest.