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Hindu philosophy is divided into six āstika ("orthodox") schools of thought, or darshanas (literally, "views"), which accept the Vedas as supreme revealed scriptures. Three other nāstika ("heterodox") schools do not accept the Vedas as authoritative. The āstika schools are:

1. Sankhya, a strongly dualist theoretical exposition of mind and matter.
2. Yoga, a school emphasizing meditation closely based on Sankhya
3. Nyaya or logics
4. Vaisheshika, an empiricist school of atomism
5. Mimamsa, an anti-ascetic and anti-mysticist school of orthopraxy
6. Vedanta, opposing Vedic ritualism in favour of mysticism. Vedanta came to be the dominant current of Hinduism in the post-medieval period.

The nāstika schools are:

1. Buddhism
2. Jainism
3. Cārvāka, a skeptical materialist school, which died out in the 15th century and whose primary texts have been lost.

In Hindu history, the distinction of the six orthodox schools was current in the Gupta period "golden age" of Hinduism. With the disappearance of Vaishshika and Mimamsa, it was obsolete by the later Middle Ages, when the various sub-schools of Vedanta (Dvaita "dualism", Advaita "non-dualism" and others) began to rise to prominence as the main divisions of religious philosophy. Nyaya survived into the 17th century as Navya Nyaya "Neo-Nyaya", while Sankhya gradually lost its status as an independent school, its tenets absorbed into Yoga and Vedanta.