Schools of Indic Philosophy

An Illustrated Overview of India’s Intellectual Traditions

This graphic offers a compact, comparative outline of the major schools that shaped the intellectual landscape of India from antiquity through the medieval period. It brings together the heterodox Śramaṇa traditions and the orthodox Brahmana systems, highlights their core doctrines, and situates them within shared debates on metaphysics, epistemology, and liberation. By placing each school within a single visual frame, the chart clarifies how these traditions constellate, diverge, and respond to one another across questions of soul, karma, God, matter, and authority of the Vedas.