Is early Indian thought more interested in salvation than in truth?

In ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of the European Man’, while aiming at characterising the intellectual attitude of the primeval European thinkers in contradistinction with other wise men of the same time in India and China, Edmund Husserl attributes the concept of ‘philosophy’, understood as the quest for the firm basement of any future science, only to the Greek Pre-Socratics. Of course both Indian and Greek thinkers consider the universe as a whole and they try to explain it from a single principle inasmuch as it constitutes a whole. They both care about what is universal, and might have expressed true assertions about it. But, according to Husserl, the purpose of such global explanations is different on each side, and therefore Indian thinkers still belong to the so-called ‘mythical-religious’ mentality whereas only Greece reaches the pure philosophy that implies the autonomy of rational thought. With the word ‘autonomy’ Husserl does not only mean that the individual mind thinks by itself, without considering tradition or sacred revelation, but also and mainly that rational thought has rational goals. In Husserl's view rationality did exist in the mythical-religious mentality of India and China, but not in a sovereign way. Only the early Greek thinkers would be concerned with the research for truth for the sake of truth. This love of truth would be independent from the benefits that the possession of truth may bring to the lover, for example immortality. Thus, thanks to the Greek starting point, the discovery of truth can appear as the main task of all mankind, progressing generation by generation, step by step in infinitum. Europe would be responsible for this spiritual inheritance of a continuous progress in pure knowledge. By contrast Indian thinkers would be mainly interested in personal salvation. In India knowledge could be useful, and even necessary to escape death and every evil, but it is not the highest goal by itself and in itself. It is just a means to release the soul from the bounds of body, disease, fear and death.