The Six Schools at a Glance

Ask a hundred Hindus what the Self is, whether God made the world, or how one is freed from rebirth, and you will hear many answers — and most of them have a pedigree. For two thousand years Indian thinkers argued these questions in public, in writing, and with great precision. Out of those arguments grew a set of classical schools, each with its own founding text, its own methods and its own picture of reality. They are called darśanas, and this page is the doorway to them.

What “darśana” means

Darśana comes from the root dṛś, “to see.” In temple life it is the blessed act of seeing and being seen by a deity. In philosophy it means a way of seeing: a viewpoint, a considered vision of how things are. The word is a good reminder that these are not merely theories to be filed away. Each school offered a vision meant to change the one who sees — and nearly all of them promised that the right vision would end suffering.

The English word “philosophy” fits only partly. The darśanas include logic, theory of knowledge, physics, psychology, ethics and the interpretation of scripture, all bound up with a practical goal. Most classical authors would have called their work a śāstra, a disciplined science, or an ānvīkṣikī, “investigation by reasoning.”

Āstika and nāstika

The schools are traditionally sorted into two families. The usual English renderings, “orthodox” and “heterodox,” or worse, “theist” and “atheist,” mislead. The grammarian Pāṇini, explaining how such words are formed, gives the oldest sense:

Commentators explain that the āstika says “there is” another world beyond this one, and the nāstika says “there is not.” Over time the words came to turn on a different question: does a school accept the authority of the Veda? The Manusmṛti (2.11) already calls the nāstika a “reviler of the Veda” (see On difficult texts). In that later, standard sense:

• Āstika schools accept the Veda as a valid source of knowledge — whatever they make of God.
• Nāstika schools — Buddhists, Jains, the materialist Cārvākas and the Ājīvikas — do not.

Six schools in three pairs

The classical āstika schools are counted as six, grouped in three pairs that share a great deal. Tap each spine for a one-line summary; the cards below give each pair in more detail and link to its own page.

The dates are historians’ estimates. Tradition places the founding sages in a far older past, and often identifies Bādarāyaṇa with Vyāsa. Either way, every sūtra text reached its classical form through commentaries written centuries later (see The Sutras).

The conversation partners

The six never argued alone. Their sharpest opponents stood outside the Veda — and some of India’s greatest philosophers were among them:

For their own voices and the great debates, see In Dialogue: Buddhism, Jainism and Cārvāka.

Four questions, six answers

One way to hold the schools in mind is to put the same four questions to each. Seeker’s synthesis This grid is our arrangement for learning; each answer is compressed, and each school’s page gives the full picture.

The rules of the argument

What makes the darśanas a single conversation is a shared way of arguing. A classical treatise rarely just states its view. It first sets out the opponent’s case, the pūrvapakṣa (“prior position”), as strongly as it can — often more forcefully than the opponent had managed. Only then does it refute it and give the siddhānta, the “established conclusion.” A good student had to be able to argue the other side.

Knowledge grew in layers. A terse sūtra was explained in a bhāṣya; the bhāṣya was defended and extended in a vārttika (critical gloss); and these drew ṭīkās (sub-commentaries), each answering the latest rivals. An Advaitin of the 10th century might be replying to a Buddhist of the 7th through a commentary on a text of the 2nd. Writing a commentary was the normal way to say something new.

The Nyāya Sūtra even classifies debate. In honest discussion (vāda) both sides seek the truth; in wrangling (jalpa) each tries to win; in cavilling (vitaṇḍā) one only attacks, defending nothing. Debates before kings and assemblies were famous events. The Upanishads remember Gārgī Vācaknavī pressing Yājñavalkya at Janaka’s court (see The Principal Upanishads), and Popular tradition the hagiographies of Shankara have the learned Ubhaya Bhāratī judging his debate with her husband Maṇḍana Miśra — a story told on Vāda: The Art of Debate.

These were also exclusive worlds. The classical śāstras were studied almost entirely by men of the upper castes, above all Brahmins, and Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta both held that women and Śūdras could not study the Veda. The arguments were open to anyone with reasons; the schoolroom was not.

Why “six”?

It can seem that there were always exactly six schools. In fact the list of six is a later convention, and earlier surveys counted differently:

• The Jain scholar Haribhadra (often placed in the 8th century) wrote a Ṣaḍdarśanasamuccaya, “Compendium of the Six Views” — but his six are Buddhist, Nyāya, Sāṃkhya, Jaina, Vaiśeṣika and Mīmāṃsā. Vedānta and Yoga are not on the list, and two nāstika schools are.
• The 14th-century Sarvadarśanasaṅgraha, “Compendium of All Views,” attributed to Mādhava Vidyāraṇya, surveys sixteen systems, from Cārvāka through Buddhism, Jainism, Ramanuja, Madhva, several Shaiva schools and even grammar, arranged as a rising ascent towards Advaita.
• Historians such as Andrew Nicholson have argued that the neat grouping of six āstika and several nāstika schools took firm shape in late medieval doxographies, and the modern textbook form was fixed by works like Max Müller’s The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy (1899).

The six-fold map is still useful. But it leaves out living schools that matter enormously to Hindus today — among them Shaiva Siddhanta, the Tamil Shaiva philosophy followed in many Malaysian temples, and Kashmir Shaivism — and it hides how much the schools changed over time.

Finding your way

A suggested order through this section: start with How We Know, since every school begins with its means of knowledge; then Nyāya & Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Yoga as Philosophy and Mīmāṃsā; then Vedānta and its Schools with Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita and Other Vedāntas; then the Shaiva philosophies, Shaiva Siddhanta and Kashmir Shaivism; and finally In Dialogue, with the Buddhists, Jains and Cārvākas.

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Sources & further reading

• M. Hiriyanna, Outlines of Indian Philosophy (George Allen & Unwin, 1932).
• Satischandra Chatterjee and Dhirendramohan Datta, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy (University of Calcutta, 1939).
• J. N. Mohanty, Classical Indian Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
• Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri, Classical Indian Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2020).
• Andrew J. Nicholson, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (Columbia University Press, 2010).
• E. B. Cowell and A. E. Gough (trans.), The Sarva-Darśana-Saṃgraha, or Review of the Different Systems of Hindu Philosophy, by Mādhava Āchārya (Trübner, 1882).
• F. Max Müller, The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy (Longmans, Green, 1899).
• Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (SUNY Press, 1988).