सनातन पुस्तकालय Sanatan Cultural Library

Darshana means "a seeing" — the same word used for beholding a deity in a temple — and the tradition applies it to philosophy: not speculation for its own sake, but a lens ground carefully enough to see reality as it is, since only right seeing liberates. Six classical schools are counted āstika, orthodox, because all accept the authority of the Veda, the law of karma, rebirth, and liberation as life's goal. From there they diverge freely — on logic, God, matter, even whether the world needs a creator — and they debated each other for centuries, sharpening one another in the process (the nāstika challengers — Buddhist, Jain, Charvaka — sharpened them further from outside). Tradition groups the six into three natural pairs: Nyaya with Vaisheshika, Sankhya with Yoga, Mimamsa with Vedanta — in each pair, one school supplying theory, the other method.

Nyaya, founded on Gautama's sutras, is the school of logic and epistemology: it codified the four valid means of knowledge (perception, inference, comparison, testimony) and the formal five-step syllogism — the debating toolkit every other school, friend and rival, ended up borrowing. Its partner Vaisheshika (Kanada) supplied the ontology: a physics of categories in which the material world is built from eternal, indivisible atoms (paramāṇu) combining and dissolving through time. Sankhya, attributed to the sage Kapila, drew the map of experience: all of reality analysed into purusha, pure consciousness, and prakriti, nature — whose three strands (sattva, rajas, tamas) evolve into the twenty-five tattvas, from intellect and ego down to the five elements. Suffering ends when purusha ceases to mistake itself for prakriti's movements. Yoga is Sankhya put into practice: Patanjali's eight limbs — ethics, posture, breath, withdrawal, concentration, meditation, absorption — as the laboratory in which that disentangling is actually achieved, with Ishvara, the Lord, added as the supreme object of contemplation.

Mimamsa (Jaimini) is the school of the sacred act. Focused on the ritual portion of the Veda, it built a complete science of interpretation — how to read an injunction, resolve conflicts between texts, and understand the unseen potency (apūrva) by which a rite performed now bears fruit later. Its hermeneutic rules outlived the great sacrifices themselves, passing into Hindu law and scriptural exegesis. Vedanta (Badarayana's Brahma Sutras) turns from the Veda's acts to its knowledge — the Upanishads — asking what Brahman is and how the soul relates to it; its internal debate produced Advaita, Vishishtadvaita and Dvaita. History arranged a quiet succession: as the ritual age waned, Vedanta absorbed the energy of the whole system, and it remains the living voice of Hindu philosophy today — but it speaks with Nyaya's logic, meditates with Yoga's limbs, analyses mind with Sankhya's categories and reads scripture with Mimamsa's rules. The six schools are less six rivals than one university.