The six darshanas are the classical philosophical systems that accept the authority of the Vedas. Nyaya is logic and epistemology, concerned with what counts as valid knowledge. Vaisheshika is atomism and categories, an analysis of what kinds of things there are. Samkhya divides reality into consciousness and nature. Yoga supplies the practical discipline that Samkhya’s analysis implies. Mimamsa investigates ritual action and the interpretation of Vedic injunction. Vedanta takes up the Upanishads and the question of the absolute.
The word darshana means a point of view or a way of seeing, not a creed, and the choice of term is doing real work. The six are conventionally paired, Nyaya with Vaisheshika, Samkhya with Yoga, Mimamsa with Vedanta, because each pair covers theory and its application. They disagree with one another substantially and argued in public for centuries, yet the tradition preserved all six rather than resolving them into one, on the understanding that a system is judged by what it illuminates rather than by whether it has eliminated its rivals.
That tolerance had limits and was not vagueness. The systems outside the six, Buddhism, Jainism and the materialist Charvaka, were excluded on a clear criterion: they did not accept Vedic authority. Within the fold, disagreement was expected and formalised, and the standard method of composition required stating your opponent’s position at full strength before answering it. Much of what survives of the losing arguments survives because winners were obliged to record them accurately. All six take the Upanishads and the wider Vedic corpus as the ground they are reasoning from.
Six systems, one canon, and no requirement that they agree, is an unusual settlement for a civilisation to reach. To see the texts they were all arguing about, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 27 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
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