The Six Darshanas
The six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy: Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa and Vedanta. Six ways of seeing one reality, each with its method.
There are six classical schools of Indian philosophy, and the tradition calls them darshanas, points of view. The word matters. They were understood as six angles on one reality rather than six competing religions, though they disagreed about almost everything: whether the world is real, whether god exists, whether the self is one or many, and what counts as valid knowledge.
Nyaya built a logic. Samkhya counted the constituents of existence and needed no god to do it. Vaisheshika worked out an atomism. Yoga supplied a method. Mimamsa defended ritual. Vedanta, arriving last and lasting longest, split into three schools that still argue.
And outside the six stood the Charvaka materialists, who held that consciousness ends with the body and that the priests were running a business. The tradition preserved their arguments, mostly in order to refute them.
These pages take each school on its own terms.
What Are the Six Darshanas?
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. Read →More in this topic 11 readings
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.