IB World Religions 4.4.5. Schools of Thought: the Six Darshanas and the Great Interpreters Notes

4.4.5. Schools of Thought: The Six Darshanas and the Great Interpreters

The six darshanas in pairs

1. A darshana is a viewpoint or a way of seeing, and Hindus use the word for the six classical systems of philosophy that accept the authority of the Vedas.
2. Calling them viewpoints rather than doctrines matters. Hindus have generally treated them as complementary angles on one reality rather than as six positions from which a person has to choose.
3. They are conventionally listed in three pairs, each pair sharing a method or a subject: Nyaya with Vaisheshika, Samkhya with Yoga, and Mimamsa with Vedanta.
4. Nyaya is the school of logic and of what counts as valid knowledge, and it supplied the rules of argument that all the other schools then used against each other.
5. Vaisheshika is its partner in the analysis of the world, breaking nature down into atoms and into categories of being.
6. The remaining four have shaped Hindu belief far more directly, and the sections below follow them, because their vocabulary is the vocabulary ordinary Hindu practice still uses.

Samkhya and Yoga

1. Samkhya, meaning enumeration, is probably the oldest of the six, and it works by counting out the components of reality rather than by appealing to a god.
2. It divides everything in two: purusha, pure consciousness that only witnesses, and prakriti, unconscious nature out of which every material and mental thing evolves.
3. Samkhya analyses prakriti into the three gunas, namely sattva or clarity, rajas or activity, and tamas or inertia, whose shifting proportions account for everything nature does.
4. Bondage on this account is a case of mistaken identity. The purusha takes itself to be the mind and body that prakriti has produced, and liberation is simply the correcting of that error.
5. Classical Samkhya makes no use of a creator god at all, which shows how much room Vedic orthodoxy left for disagreement about God.
6. Yoga, its partner school, accepts almost the whole of that analysis, but adds Ishvara, a lord who serves as an object of devotion, and supplies the practical method Samkhya lacked.

Patanjali and the eight limbs

1. Patanjali compiled the Yoga Sutras in the early centuries of the common era, and the text is still the standard manual for the Yoga darshana.
2. Its second aphorism states the whole aim as the stilling of the movements of the mind, and everything else in the text serves that one end.
3. The method is set out as ashtanga, the eight limbs, running from ethical restraint through posture and breath to states of deep absorption.
4. The first two limbs are moral: yama, the restraints, which include ahimsa, truthfulness and non-stealing, and niyama, the observances, which include purity, contentment and study.
5. The middle limbs are the ones best known outside India: asana, posture, and pranayama, control of the breath, which classical Yoga treats as preparation rather than as the point.
6. Pratyahara then withdraws the senses from their objects, and the final three limbs are dharana, concentration, dhyana, sustained meditation, and samadhi, absorption in which the sense of a separate observer falls away.

Mimamsa and Vedanta

1. Mimamsa and Vedanta both take the Vedas as their subject, and they divide over which part of the Vedas they treat as decisive.
2. Mimamsa, the earlier inquiry, concentrates on the ritual portions and holds that the Vedas exist in order to prescribe action.
3. Its thinkers produced the sharpest defence of apaurusheya, arguing that the Vedas are eternal and authorless, and they were largely uninterested in liberation as a goal.
4. Vedanta, meaning the end of the Vedas, concentrates instead on the Upanishads, which stand at the close of the Vedic corpus.
5. Vedanta became the dominant philosophical tradition, and almost every Hindu school with a wide following today is a form of it.
6. Its thinkers work from three shared sources, the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, which is how they manage to disagree completely while quoting the same texts.

Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva

1. Shankara, working in roughly the eighth century, founded Advaita Vedanta, a name that means not two.
2. He taught that Brahman alone is finally real, that the atman is identical with it, and that the appearance of a separate world and separate selves rests on ignorance rather than on fact.
3. Advaita distinguishes two levels of truth, which lets Shankara affirm temple worship and a personal God as entirely valid at the everyday level while denying them the last word.
4. Ramanuja, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, answered with Vishishtadvaita, qualified non-dualism, holding that selves and world are real and together form the body of God, who is their soul.
5. For Ramanuja the world is not an illusion to be seen through, and bhakti is not a lesser path, because a real self can genuinely love a real God.
6. Madhva, in the thirteenth century, went further still with Dvaita, dualism, insisting on a permanent difference between God, selves and matter, and making devotion and divine grace the only route out.

The Gita's three yogas

1. The Bhagavad Gita matters to all these schools because it presents several routes to liberation as legitimate instead of ranking one alone.
2. Jnana yoga, the way of knowledge, is discipline aimed at realising what the self actually is, and Advaita treats it as the decisive path.
3. Karma yoga, the way of action, tells a person to do their duty while giving up attachment to its results, so that acting stops adding to their karma.
4. Bhakti yoga, the way of devotion, offers loving surrender to a personal God, and the closing chapters of the Gita give it the warmest recommendation of the three.
5. Krishna presents these as suited to different temperaments, which is one reason Hindus can hold sharply different views about liberation without accusing each other of leaving the tradition.
6. The schools then argue over the ranking. Shankara reads the Gita as finally teaching knowledge, while Ramanuja reads the same text as finally teaching devotion.