The earliest teachings where Bhartiya darshan starts are the Vedas. There are four vedas, Rig Ved - considered to be the oldest written text in the world. Yajur Ved, Sam Ved and Atharva Ved.
Each vedas are sub-divided in four parts, Samhitas - mantras and rituals to invoke the divine, Aranyak - Aranya means van or forest, so this section contains methods of living a good life for people living in the forest. The third section is called the Brahmin, or methods of ceremonies, karm-kand for various rituals. It is also said that the people who were doing the ceremonies and rituals eventually took the name Brahmin from this section of Vedas. The last section of Vedas, which is the end of Vedas - Vedant, or where Vedas reach their completeness, are called the Upnishads. Upnishads, as a word means sitting next to a Guru or teacher and get the teachings or discuss the fundamental questions.
It’s important to understand the context here, that the written language took time to develop, and so in India culture, the teachings were initially imparted verbally. Hence the Upnishad gets its word. Upnishads are the first reference to what we call deeper philosophy. The other three sections of Vedas mostly concern on rituals and methodologies for ceremonies.
It’s safe to say though, that Indian philosophy starts with the Vedas and the Upnishads.
So who wrote Vedas? There are various thought processes around this. Some philosophers believe that Vedas are written by God. Some who do not believe in the existence of God believe that Vedas were not even written by God, but they are the language of the nature. Nature cannot really write Vedas, and so there would be people who collected all the teachings and put them in a structure. The credit of consolidating the teachings and knowledge of Vedas is broadly given to Ved Vyas.
Ved Vyas has been a super human who has been credited with consolidating Vedas, writing eighteen Puranas, writing the Mahabharat and hence the Geeta. This seems to be a lot of work to be done in one lifetime. Swami Vivekanand believes, that Ved Vyas might not be one person but like Parshuram, more of an institution of many people who have worked on these topics over time. Some scholars also believe that Badarayan, who wrote Brahmasutra was also none other but Ved Vyas.
The teachings of Vedas and the Upnishads continues for at least a thousand years before the society started deteriorating into more ritualistic ways and left the thoughtfulness and reasoning. The process of bali or sacrifice had taken over the society and new thinkers around sixth century BC had started realising that the movement away from tark or reasoning.
This is where the philosophers divided themselves into two branches, one who believe in teachings or vedas or aastik, and those who do not - nastik.
While most of us have heard of words aastik and nastik, the most commonly known meanings of these words now a days are theist and atheist. The words aastik and nastik are not used in this context in Darshan shastras. The broad level meaning of these words, as used in the Darshan are “orthodox” and “heterodox” respectively.
Scholars have a broad level agreement that there are nine India darshans, six aastik and three nastik darshans. The aastik darshans can be further sub-divided in three parts, 2 darshans in each part. This is because they mostly go together, one is the concept and other is the implementation of that concept. The non-vedic or nastik darshans also are very deep, at least two of them, Bodh and Jain darshan.
Vedic or Aastik darshans -
- Sankhya and Yog
- Nyaya and Vaisheshik; and
- Vedant and Mimansa
Non-vedic or Nastik darshans -
- Bodh darshan
- Jain
- Charvak
We will get into the details of these darshans in the next sections.
I would just like to discuss the difference between philosophy, science and dharma or religion. Dharma means various things in India, the most commonly used meanings of dharma are not religion, but is duty or essence. For example, Rashtra-dharma means duty towards the nation, swadharma means duty towards self. The other usage is - Agni ka dharma hai, jalaana, which means, “the essence of fire is to burn”.
There is also a third usage, which was used in the Geeta -
Yada yada hi dharmasya, glanirbhawati Bharat,
Abhuthanam-dharmasya, tadatmanam shrijanmyaham
This means -
“Lord Krishna tells Arjun - Whenever dharma will be maligned and adharma takes over the world, I will take avatar to reestablish dharma.”
The word dharma which is being used in this context is for “righteousness” or correctness.
While there are many more meanings of the dharma, these three were most used in India. When Britishers came, other than looting India of its wealth, they also wanted to spread Christianity and so they wanted a Sanskrit word to map to their word “religion”, that’s when dharma as a word started getting used for religion also.
Anyways, the difference between religion, philosophy and science in a nutshell is that religion provides simple answers to complicated questions, these answers might not be correct but simple enough for general people to understand. Religion is a belief based system. Philosophy thinks about the complicated problems and comes up with reasoning to come up with answers, these are not simple and not easy to understand by most people. The reasoning from different scholars for the same question might be different and they all might reach different conclusions. Science uses empirical evidences to come up with answers to questions, scientists do experiments, uses mathematical models to come up with solutions to questions. This also means that some things might be right but cannot be proven and hence is not part of science yet.
I think philosophy starts with a thought and the scholars bake the thoughts with reasoning or tark, Overtime, some of the things get proven with the help of experiments and become part of science, the rest remains part of meta-physics or philosophy. Religion almost runs in parallel to the stream of philosophy and science as a belief based system.
The important thing is to understand though is that one cannot really read or understand philosophy by ignoring sciences. Today’s philosophy is tomorrow’s physics and today’s physics is yesterday’s philosophy.
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