| Indian Philosophical Systems |
| | Yoga
The Yoga of Patanjali is a meta-psychological technique based upon the philosophy of the Sankhya. Its metaphysics is metapsychology based upon the principle that the outward reality has its roots in the inward and that the realization of the ultimate truth is, therefore, the...
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| | Vedanta
After presenting the activist tradition of the Mimamsa, which built up its philosophy on the earliest philosophical ideas about life contained in the Vedas, the heterodox traditions of the Carvakas, Jainism and Buddhism, which rose as reactions, though in different forms, ag...
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| | Vaisesika
The Vaisesika tradition, started by Kanada (about 400 BC), is pluralistic, realistic and theistic; it supplied metaphysical theories to the Nyaya and adopted its epistemological and logical theories. The two traditions differ from each other on very minor points, and in time...
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| | Sankhya
The word sankhya means exact knowledge, which involves exact discrimination. The word sankhya, in which the first 'a' is shortened, means number; and the Sankhya philosophy counts a definite number of categories, which are generally twenty-five. The philosophy that is usuall...
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| | Nyaya
Gautama (about 400 BC) was the founder of the logical tradition in India. It may be that there were others who developed logic earlier for we come across words denoting logic in much earlier literature. But he seems to have been the first to have systematized logic and insis...
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| | Mimamsa
The Vedas were interpreted as teaching two basic philosophies, the philosophy of a life of unceasing activity and that of contemplative life, although in the tradition of philosophical ideas created by the Vedas, a number of other interpretations sprang up, some of which bec...
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| | Introduction
Like any other philosophy, Indian philosophy grew out of religion. But to say so is to oversimplify and even to mislead, because the words philosophy and religion do not mean exactly the same to the Indian and to the western student. It may be interesting to note that even i...
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| | Carvaka
The first, strongest and the extremist reaction against the Mimamsa school was expressed by Carvaka, who belonged to the later Vedic (Brdhmana, about 600 BC) times. He seems to have been called Lokayata and Brhaspati also. Lokayata literally means 'one who goes the worldly w...
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