Philosophy & Darshanas
Hindu philosophy is not one system but six, the darshanas, each a rigorous way of asking what is real, what the self is, and how a person is freed.
Indian philosophy is a record of arguments, not a set of conclusions. Six orthodox systems developed, and they disagree with each other about the number of things that exist, whether God is required, whether the world is real, and what a person fundamentally is. They also share opponents, and the Buddhists, Jains and materialists sharpened all of them.
The debate had rules. A philosopher was expected to state the opponent’s position, in its strongest form, before answering it. The result is that the atheist Charvaka case survives mainly in the words of the people refuting it, and it survives because they refuted it fairly.
Vedanta became dominant, and immediately split. Shankara held that only Brahman is real. Ramanuja held that the world and individual selves are real and are Brahman’s body. Madhva held that the difference between the soul and God is eternal. All three read the same verses.
These pages cover the systems, the great commentators, and what exactly they were fighting about.
Karma as the tradition actually built it: how a deed is stored, what carries it past death, and who keeps the books.
In a short life that tradition counts at thirty-two years, he gave Advaita Vedanta its definitive form, wrote the commentaries that anchor the school, and ringed India with monasteries. The most influential philosopher the tradition produced.
Three of the greatest philosophers India produced read the same handful of sacred texts and reached three opposite conclusions about the one question that mattered most: how is your soul related to God? Shankara said they are one. Madhva said they are eternally two. Ramanuja said they are one as a body is one — really many, yet a single living whole. This is the plainest, best-sourced guide to the difference.
Charvaka, also called Lokayata, was India's bold materialist school: no soul, no afterlife, no karma, only this body, this world, and the evidence of the senses.
The great dissenter of Vedanta. Where others sought oneness, Madhva insisted on difference: God, souls and matter are eternally and really distinct, the world is no illusion, and liberation is loving service to a God who remains forever other.
The teacher who answered Shankara by making the personal God of devotion the heart of Vedanta. For Ramanuja, souls and the world are real, the body of a God who can be loved, and surrender is a path open to all.
How a treatise on stagecraft became a theory of the soul: the rasa-sutra, the eight flavours, the long debate over where beauty happens, and Abhinavagupta's claim that watching a play is kin to tasting Brahman.
The tradition counts action of three kinds: of the body, of speech, and of the mind.
On whether God administers karma, the tradition splits.
The tradition rejects fatalism.
The Hindu view of karma sharpens against its Indian neighbours.
Runanubandha, also spelled Rinanubandha, from rina (debt) and anubandha (binding sequel), is the idea that the people in a person's life are bound to them by karmic debts carried from past births.
The tradition treats the debt to the ancestors, pitri-rina, as primary among a person's obligations, discharged through progeny and through shraddha, the rite of offering to the dead.
Whether karma justifies caste is one of the most contested questions in Hinduism.
Set aside scripture, and ask whether there is evidence a person lives more than once.
The tradition offers three great paths out of the round of karma, and the Bhagavad Gita holds them together.
Even for the liberated, the prarabdha karma that shaped the present body is not burned; it must be lived out until the body falls, as a potter's wheel keeps turning after the potter lifts his hand (Chandogya 6.14.2).
The moral doctrine of karma, that a person's deeds shape the life they are reborn into, first surfaces clearly in the early Upanishads, around the seventh and sixth centuries BCE.
Karma presupposes a lawful universe.
According to Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, action does not bind by itself.
A later Vedanta teaching tradition sorts the store of karma into portions.
The tradition explains how a passing act becomes a lasting disposition through two linked ideas.
The tradition holds that what carries karma across death is the sukshma sharira, the subtle body, made of mind, intellect, ego, the subtle senses and the vital breath.
The tradition answers the question of where karma first began by denying the question a footing: karma and the cycle of rebirth are anadi, beginningless.
The Indian philosophical schools agreed that action bears fruit and disagreed sharply on the mechanism.
Three of India's greatest philosophers read the same four Upanishadic words, tat tvam asi, and built three different universes: identity, qualified oneness, and difference.
The other Gita: a dialogue between a crooked sage and a philosopher-king that dismisses action, practice and even liberation itself. Advaita stripped to a single blade — you were never bound, so there is nothing to be freed.
A weaver, a princess, an outcaste, a blind beggar: the poet-saints of bhakti sang the love of God in the languages of the people, and over a thousand years reshaped the Hinduism most Indians actually live.
The monks of the 'ten names', the renunciate order that carries Advaita, organised around four monasteries at the corners of India, each holding a Veda and a great saying. The institutional spine of non-dualism.
Vaishnava tradition holds that in this dark age four authorized lineages carry valid devotion to Vishnu, each begun by a divine source, brought to earth by a great acharya, and built on its own reading of Vedanta.
Beyond the postures and the breath, Yoga is one of the six schools of Hindu philosophy: Samkhya's austere map of reality, given a method to walk it and a single God to walk it toward. Its charter is the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali.
Hindu philosophy is not one system but six, the saddarshana: six disciplined ways of seeing the same reality, grouped in three allied pairs, all aimed at liberation through right knowledge.
A teaching in Sanatana Dharma is not just a set of ideas in a book. It is something handed down, living, through an unbroken chain of teacher and disciple. That chain is the sampradaya, and it is how the tradition keeps itself true.
Advaita Vedanta is the non-dual school of Vedanta: only Brahman is ultimately real, the Self is identical with it, and the world is an appearance through maya.
Kashmir Shaivism is the non-dual philosophy of recognition: there is only Shiva, pure consciousness, and the whole universe is his free self-expression, vibrating as spanda.
Where Vedanta asks about God, Mimamsa asks about duty. The darshana of Vedic ritual and dharma holds that the Veda is eternal and authorless, that the word itself is sacred, and that the rite works by its own power — with the gods almost incidental. From that austere start it built the ancient world's most rigorous theory of interpretation, and the backbone of Hindu law.
The school of logic and right reasoning, Nyaya asks not only what is real but how we can validly know it. Forged in a thousand-year argument with the Buddhists, it built the most rigorous theory of knowledge in Indian thought.
The oldest and most quietly influential of the schools, Samkhya maps reality by counting it: twenty-five principles, two of them irreducible, consciousness and nature, and freedom as the moment one is finally told apart from the other.
The school of nature and categories, Vaisheshika asks what kinds of things ultimately exist, and answers with a tidy ontology and a theory of atoms reasoned out long before the modern one.
The end of the Veda, and the most influential of the six schools. Grounded in the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutra and the Gita, Vedanta asks after Brahman — and splits into rival schools that read the same three texts to opposite conclusions.