You make a lot of unsubstantiated assumptions in your views of Eastern philosophy. First, Pre-modern African and pre-Colombian American would not qualify as Eastern philosophy.
There was an empiricial school in ancient Hinduism (B.C.) but it has for centuries been only studied by scholars and has had no adherents since then.
Swami Prabhavananda says in his book The Spiritual Heritage of India (p 201):
...we should call the attention of Western readers to the fundamental difference between the psychology of India and the psychology of the West. This difference is in the fact that Western psychology identifies consciousness with mind, being with thought, and thought with the soul, or the Self; whereas Indian psychology distinguishes mind from consciousness.
The distinction is due to the fact that Western psychology recognizes
only one plane of experience, and gives no consideration to what
Hindus call the pure cit, the supreme unconditional consciousness,
the Being, which they regard as the real Self, or the soul, different
from the rationalizing mind and realized in the superconscious, or
transcendental, state. Pure unconditional consciousness cannot be
the property of the mind, they believe, for it is the source of
the mind’s apparent consciousness. Mind is said by the Hindu
psychologist to be the ‘veiling power’ of the pure consciousness, the
Self, and it is associated with the Self only as a necessary condition of
world experience. All systems of Indian philosophy recognize a Self
separate from the mind, and this poses an important problem in each
of them...
It should be emphatically stated that all six schools believe in the law of karma, in pre-existence, in rebirth, and in the attainment of moksha as the highest goal of human endeavour. All of them are concerned with the nature of the true Self, immediate experience of which makes one free.
and further on the Samkhya school (whose differences from the modern Vedanta school are not important here) (pp 211-12):
Purusa, the unchanging principle of intelligence, is distinct from the
physical and mental universe and independent of it. The term mind,
as used in the West, corresponds to the Samkhya antahkarana, which
is composed of the intellect, the ego, and the manas (receiver of
sense impressions). The antahkarana (the mind stuff), the senses, and
matter (the objective universe) are all products of the same material
cause, the uncaused cause, prakrti.
The relation of mind to matter forms one of the most important
and intricate problems in Western philosophy. Theories that explain
the universe in chemical, mechanistic, or biological terms ignore a
conception of mind as a separate entity, for according to Western
materialistic conceptions of substance, mind is but a product of
matter. Subjective idealism, on the other hand, ignores matter and
And regards thought or mind as the only reality. Realism regards mind and matter as separate substances and both as real. These Western schools of materialism, idealism, and realism pivot round this central problem of the mind-matter relationship. Indian philosophy, on the contrary, has not this particular problem, simply because it places mind and matter in the same category, neither of them exclusively mind nor exclusively matter but both products of one and the same substance.
To give Eastern philosophy Western names, such as idealism or
realism, is fundamentally misleading. To the philosophical Indian
mind the only problem is that of the soul. What is the real Self? How
is it distinguished from mind and body? What is its nature? How can
it be known? These are the only issues and concerns of Hindu schools
of thought.
It was stated just above that mind in the West corresponds in
Samkhya to antahkarana, or mind stuff. Strictly speaking, however,
such a statement is hardly justified. Western psychology regards mind
as intelligent by its inherent nature; the mind is, therefore, considered
to be the thinker, the knower, and to know its own thoughts. But
according to Samkhya the antahkarana, or mind stuff, comprising
intellect, ego, and manas, is in itself nonintelligent. It is the product
of prakrti, which is nonintelligent in character, and it is the instrument
which Purusa, the unchanging principle of intelligence, the Pure Consciousness, illumines, so that it appears intelligent. In brief,
the consciousness of mind is a reflected intelligence, borrowed from
Purusa, whose inherent nature is pure consciousness.
Empiricism means what is called from an Eastern perspective the waking state. You accept the waking state, only one of the modes of consciousness that we all experience, as the only reality - despite the fact that you also experience the dream and the dreamless states of consciousness. Eastern philosophy is an analysis of these 3 states and also a fourth state known as Turiya, which is the pure cit, Pure Consciousness.
These states are explained in the Mandukya Upanishad and explained in detail using rational logic by Gaudapada in his Karika.