2. Introduction to Bhartiya Darshan

Bhartiya darshan is considered to be the oldest. They say that when basic needs of survival and food were fulfilled, human being started thinking of deeper issues concerning them. 

In the west and rest of the world, the earliest evidence of philosophy is found around 6th century BC. Thales of Greece is considered to be one of the first philosophers. Pythagoras, for the mathematics enthusiasts, was also in this same century. 

In 5th century BC, some of the most influential philosophers were Heraclitus, who saw the world as a constantly in flux, changing. He said “No person can step into a river twice”. This is very similar to Bhuddha’s philosophy of kshnabhangwaad, or khsnikwaad. Buddha also said the same sentence as mentioned above which was said by Heraclitus. Other important philosophers for the 5th century in west were Socrates and Democritus. Many of the texts available from Socrates’ time are in a dialogue form. Many of them with his disciple, Plato, himself a distinguished philosopher. Socrates gave the concept of dialogue or argument to prove a theory. This is the first time we see problem solving by shasthrarth in western philosophy rather than by belief system. 

Democritus was the person who has conceptualised “atom” for the first time. He said that the world is formed by much smaller objects which are called atoms and its the collection of atoms which form the large objects. The more scientific definition of atom was later given by Niels Bohr in early 20th century.

As we come towards 4th century, the most prominent philosophers in western world are of course Plato, Socrates’ prodigy and Aristotle. .

The idea here is not to talk about western philosophy as part of this paper as that’s a topic in its own right. So I will stop here to draw some parallels from for timelines. During the 6th century BC, India had Bhuddha, Mahavir - Jain philosophy. If you see, both the Bodh and Jain philosophy were trying to counter the deterioration of society who were focusing on more karm-kand part of Vedic and Upanishadic philosophies, and not on the thought (chintan) part. Vedic time is set to be around a thousand years earlier of Bhuddha or Bhagwaan Mahavir. Some people believe that Vedas are more than ten thousand years old and further research might prove vedas to be much older than they are believed to be, but for the purpose of this paper, I will put Vedic time to be around 1700 BC - 1500 BC. Also to mention that Jain philosophy itself is very old as Mahavir was considered to be the 24th tirthanker, so there were 23 more tirthankars before him.

Darshan comes from Sanskrit word “darsh”, which means “to see”. What to see? - is the question, the darshans mostly try and answer the fundamental questions like where did we come from? What is the ultimate reality? Whether it is deterministic or is there free will? There are various paths suggested, complimentary or opposing on how to develop the skills to see and to understand.

Philosophy, on the other hand literally means “love of knowledge”. 

For the purpose of this paper, we will use darshan and philosophy interchangeably.