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Re: six schools of philosophies
Shrisha Rao wrote:
>
> In article <4htuee$9k8@babbage.ece.uc.edu>,
> Mani Varadarajan <mani@srirangam.esd.sgi.com> wrote:
>
> >There are six orthodox (Astika) schools of Indian
> >philosophy. The only reason they are orthodox is
> >that the accept the validity and preterpersonal
> >nature of the Veda, *not* because they say anything
> >about belief in an Absolute.
>
> I have heard it said that _none_ of these schools is necessarily
> aastika (theistic) or naastika (atheistic). For any given school,
Theistic is not synonymous with Astika. For example, there are two
varieties of sAm.khya, the theistic one which admits ISvara as the 25th
principle and the atheistic one which does not. Both schools are
definitely counted among the Astika darSanas.
Quite often, there was some politics involved in whether a school was
considered Astika or not. Even if it was "atheistic", a school was
usually considered Astika if it was Brahminical (i.e. its leaders were
Brahmins) and nAstika if it was not. On the other hand, theistic schools
like the pASupata, kAlamukha, pAncarAtra and bhAgavata which were not
completely Brahminical were looked upon with disfavor, although not
labelled as nAstika.
> there are aastika and naastika versions. It is said that any
> philosophical point of view about any subject can be expressed as the
> view of one of these schools, or as the mixture of such views. Thus,
> these six systems form a generating set using which one can form any
> kind of philosophy there is.
>
> Each of these systems has its own "Suutra" or text of canonical
> aphorisms. Of these, the Vedanta-Suutra or Brahma-Suutra of
> BaadaraayaNa a.k.a. Veda Vyaasa is most commonly studied; among the
> rest, the Saankhya-Suutra of Kapila, the Miimaamsaa-Suutra of Jaimini,
> and the Yoga-Suutra of Patanjali are still extant.
>
So also the nyAya sUtras and vaiSeshika sUtras. The sAm.khya kArikAs are
by ISvarakr.shNa. I am not aware of any sAm.khya-sUtras by kapila. More
often than not, kapila, pancaSikha and Asuri are just legendary names
associated with the sAm.khya school, no works of these people are
extant.
>
> The six schools are sometimes paired-off as nyaaya-vaisheshika,
> saankhya-yoga, and miimaamsaa-vedanta, because this pairing expresses
> the relative closeness of each system to others in the best possible
> way. However, I don't know if historically, nyaaya and vaisheshika
> have completely coalesced to any greater extent than have the other
> pairs.
>
The yoga and sAm.khya schools have also coalesced to a significant
extent. Yoga is also prominent among Vedantic circles. The lines between
any two schools can sometimes be very fuzzy.
I would say that this classification of six orthodox schools and all
others is somewhat dated now. It doesn't take into account, for example,
a school such as navya nyAya, which is not just a development of the
nyAya school. It also does not have room for schools like the pAncarAtra
and Saiva siddhAnta, although of course these schools have all merged to
some extent with different schools of vedAnta.
S. Vidyasankar
