Indian philosophy
Indian philosophy carries a name that barely hints at its scope. The word darśana, used to describe these traditions, means simply "to see" or "looking at." But what Indian thinkers looked at, across thousands of years and hundreds of competing schools, was nothing less than the nature of reality, the status of the soul, and the possibility of liberation from suffering.
The philosopher Chanakya, writing in the Arthaśāstra, preferred a different word: ānvīkṣikī, meaning "critical inquiry" or "investigation." That tension between revelation and rigorous questioning runs through the entire tradition. Some schools accepted the ancient Vedas as the foundation of all knowledge. Others rejected them entirely and built their own systems from scratch.
The major schools were formalised chiefly between 500 BCE and the late centuries of the Common Era. Six orthodox schools took shape on one side of this divide: Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mīmāṃsā, and Vedanta. On the other side stood five major non-Vedic schools: Jain, Buddhist, Ajivika, Ajñana, and Charvaka. Some of these traditions survived into the modern world. Others, like the Ajñana and the Ājīvika, did not.
What all these traditions shared was a common problem. How does a person escape dukkha, the suffering bound up in samsara, the cycle of birth and rebirth? Their answers diverged sharply, producing one of the most sustained philosophical arguments in human history.
Sāṃkhya, one of the six orthodox schools, holds that the universe consists of two independent realities: puruṣa, the perceiving consciousness, and prakṛti, which includes mind, perception, and matter. Liberation, on this view, comes from discerning and disentangling puruṣa from the impurities of prakṛti. Sāṃkhya included atheistic authors alongside some theistic thinkers, and it forms the basis of much of subsequent Indian philosophy.
Yoga stands close enough to Sāṃkhya that scholars have debated whether it is simply a branch of it. Where Sāṃkhya is largely theoretical, Yoga accepts a personal god and centres its soteriology on yogic practice.
Nyāya, the Logic school, built its system around epistemology. It accepted four valid means of knowledge: perception, inference, comparison or analogy, and word or testimony. Nyāya defended a form of direct realism and a theory of substances called dravya.
Vaiśeṣika was closely related to Nyāya but pared down its epistemology to just two pramanas: perception and inference. Its distinctive contribution was a sustained defence of a theory of atoms.
Pūrva-Mīmāṃsā concentrated on interpreting Vedic ritual and on the philology of the Vedas themselves. Vedānta, sometimes called Uttara Mīmāṃsā or "the end of the Vedas," focused on the metaphysical and soteriological ideas of the Upanishads, particularly those concerning Atman and Brahman.
These six were often grouped in pairs for historical and conceptual reasons: Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, and Mīmāṃsā-Vedānta. Vedānta itself fractured into at least six sub-schools, ranging from Advaita non-dualism to Dvaita dualism to Achintya Bheda Abheda, which holds that the relationship between the divine and the individual soul is inconceivably both different and non-different. The philosopher Vidyāraṇya, writing around 1374-1380 CE, extended the list further in his Sarva-darśana-saṃgraha, adding traditions such as the Raseśvara school, which advocated the use of mercury as a path to enlightenment.
Parshvanatha, recognised as the 23rd Tirthankar of the Jain tradition, provides one of the earliest anchors for the non-Vedic currents of Indian thought. Historians place him in the 9th century BCE. The Śramaṇic traditions he helped to inspire became especially prominent in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, and grew further during the Mauryan period, roughly 322-184 BCE.
Jain philosophy is distinguished by its insistence on separating body from soul completely. Each soul, on this account, is inherently endowed with infinite knowledge and boundless bliss, but that nature remains veiled by ignorance, which causes the soul to identify with the physical body. This misidentification generates karma, binding the soul to the cycle of birth and rebirth. Liberation requires reaching the three jewels: Samyak Darshan, right perception; Samyak Gnana, right knowledge; and Samyak Chàritra, right conduct.
Mahavira, the 24th Tirthankara, revitalised and unified these teachings in the 6th century BCE, roughly contemporaneous with the Buddha according to historians outside the Jain tradition. Jainism placed the strongest emphasis of any Indian school on ahimsa, non-violence, and on anekantavada, the relativity of viewpoints. Both ideas went on to influence traditions far beyond Jainism itself.
Buddhism, also a Śramaṇic religion, traced its origins to Siddhartha Gautama, the "awakened one." Its most radical departure from other Indian systems was the doctrine of anatta, not-self: the denial of any eternal soul. Buddhism shared with Jainism and the Hindu schools a belief in karma and samsara, but rejected the Vedic concepts of Brahman and Atman at the foundation of Hindu thought.
After the death of the Buddha, competing systems called Abhidharma emerged to systematise Buddhist philosophy. These eventually divided into Mahayana and non-Mahayana branches, with Nagarjuna founding the Madhyamaka school and its doctrine that all phenomena are empty of any intrinsic essence. The Yogācāra school held that only consciousness exists. The Dignāga-Dharmakīrti tradition focused on epistemology. These Indian Mahayana traditions became the main source of both modern Tibetan Buddhism and modern East Asian Buddhism.
Charvaka, also known as Lokāyata, took a position that set it apart from virtually every other Indian school. It accepted only direct perception and conditional inference as valid sources of knowledge, rejected ritualism and supernaturalism, and dismissed the idea of rebirth entirely. The Charvaka epistemology held that inferred knowledge is always conditional: whenever one draws a conclusion from observations, doubt must be acknowledged.
The name Charvaka carries uncertain origins. The grammarian Hemacandra, cited by the scholar Bhattacharya, derived it from the root carv, meaning "to chew": a Cārvāka chews the self. Hemacandra linked this derivation to his own grammatical work, Uṇādisūtra 37. The name may also allude to the philosophy's hedonistic precepts of "eat, drink, and be merry."
Brihaspati is traditionally named as the founder of Charvaka, though some scholars dispute this. The primary literature of the school, the Barhaspatya sutras, has been lost. Teachings have survived mainly through hostile summaries in the shastras, sutras, and Indian epic poetry, and in the dialogues of Gautama Buddha and in Jain literature. One text that may belong to the Charvaka tradition is the Tattvôpaplava-siṁha, written by the skeptic philosopher Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa.
The Ajñana school pushed skepticism further still. It held that knowledge of metaphysical matters was simply impossible to obtain, and that even if such knowledge were possible, it would be useless for salvation. Ajñana thinkers were sophists who specialised in refutation without advancing any positive doctrine of their own. Their ideas survive only as recorded in Buddhist and Jain texts, which were hostile to their position.
The Ājīvika school, founded by Makkhali Gosala, staked out a doctrine of absolute determinism. Everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen is entirely preordained by cosmic principles, on this view. Ājīvikas denied free will and rejected the karma doctrine as a fallacy. They were atheists who rejected the Vedas, yet they did affirm the existence of an ātman in every living being. Their original scriptures have been lost.
The Arthashastra, attributed to Chanakya, the Mauryan minister, is one of the earliest Indian texts devoted to political philosophy. Dated to the 4th century BCE, it discusses statecraft and economic policy alongside the philosophical framework of ānvīkṣikī.
The Kural text, attributed to Valluvar and dated to around the 5th century CE, extended ahimsa and morality into political philosophy. Nearly a thousand years later, these same ideas found a new context when Mahatma Gandhi popularised the political philosophy of ahimsa and Satyagraha during the Indian struggle for independence. Gandhi's approach went on to shape the later independence and Civil Rights movements, including those led by Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.
Integral Humanism, a set of concepts drafted by Upadhyaya, was adopted in 1965 as the official doctrine of the Jan Sangh. Upadhyaya argued that India needed an indigenous economic model centred on the human being, distinct from both Socialism and Capitalism. The doctrine's openness to other opposition forces made it possible for the Hindu nationalist movement to form an alliance in the early 1970s with the Gandhian Sarvodaya movement under the leadership of J. P. Narayan. This was described as the first major public breakthrough for the Hindu nationalist movement.
Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar's Progressive Utilization Theory also emerged as a major socio-economic and political philosophy within the Indian tradition.
T. S. Eliot wrote that the great philosophers of India make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys. Arthur Schopenhauer drew on Indian thought explicitly to develop his own work beyond Kant. In the preface to The World As Will And Representation, Schopenhauer stated that a reader who has received and assimilated the sacred primitive Indian wisdom is the best prepared of all to understand what he has to say.
The 19th-century American philosophical movement known as Transcendentalism was also influenced by Indian thought. Many of the Buddhist philosophical traditions were carried beyond India to Central Asia and China. After Buddhism disappeared from India, these traditions continued to develop within Tibetan Buddhism, East Asian Buddhism, and the Theravada tradition of Southeast Asia, with the Theravada maintaining the orthodox positions traceable to the Vibhajyavāda school and its surviving text, the Kathavatthu.
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Common questions
What are the major schools of Indian philosophy?
Indian philosophy comprises six major orthodox (āstika) schools: Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mīmāṃsā, and Vedanta. There are also five major non-Vedic or heterodox (nāstika) schools: Jain, Buddhist, Ajivika, Ajñana, and Charvaka. The philosopher Vidyāraṇya identified sixteen schools in total by including Śaiva and Raseśvara traditions in his Sarva-darśana-saṃgraha.
What does the word darśana mean in Indian philosophy?
Darśana is the traditional Vedic term for Indian philosophical traditions and means "to see" or "looking at." Classical Indian philosophers such as Chanakya preferred the term ānvīkṣikī, meaning "critical inquiry" or "investigation," used in the Arthaśāstra.
What is the difference between āstika and nāstika schools in Indian philosophy?
Āstika schools accept the Vedas as a valid source of knowledge, believe in the premises of Brahman and Atman, and generally affirm afterlife and Devas. Nāstika schools reject the authority of the Vedas; they include Buddhism, Jainism, Ajivika, Ajñana, and Charvaka. The orthodox-heterodox distinction is a scholarly construct found in later Indian sources, and not all sources agree on which systems belong in which category.
What is the Charvaka school of Indian philosophy?
Charvaka, also known as Lokāyata, is an ancient school of Indian materialism that accepts only direct perception and conditional inference as valid sources of knowledge. It embraces philosophical skepticism, rejects ritualism, supernaturalism, and rebirth, and is associated with hedonistic precepts. Brihaspati is traditionally named as its founder, though the primary literature, the Barhaspatya sutras, has been lost.
How did Indian philosophy influence Western thinkers?
Arthur Schopenhauer drew on Indian thought to develop his philosophy beyond Kant, writing in the preface to The World As Will And Representation that a reader who has assimilated the sacred primitive Indian wisdom is best prepared to understand his work. T. S. Eliot wrote that the great philosophers of India make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys. The 19th-century American Transcendentalist movement was also influenced by Indian thought.
What role did Mahavira and Jainism play in Indian philosophy?
Mahavira, the 24th Tirthankara, revitalised and unified Jain teachings in the 6th century BCE, roughly contemporaneous with the Buddha. Jain philosophy is distinguished by its complete separation of body from soul and its strong emphasis on ahimsa (non-violence) and anekantavada (the relativity of viewpoints). Jainism placed the strongest emphasis on non-violence of any Indian school, and these ideas influenced traditions far beyond Jainism.
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