Six Darshanas: Foundations

Start with method, because every later school argues by its rules. Nyaya built classical India's logic: how a valid inference is structured, what counts as proof, and how a claim survives debate. Get this first and the other five stop sounding like assertions and start sounding like arguments you can check.

Nyaya gave you the reasoning; Vaisheshika gives you the things to reason about. It is the inventory school: it lists the categories of what exists and reduces the physical world to indivisible atoms. Logic needs an ontology to work on, which is why the tradition fused the two into a single Nyaya-Vaisheshika line.

Samkhya is the oldest systematic metaphysics in India, and it draws one hard line: purusha, bare consciousness, is not prakriti, the nature that evolves through three gunas. Almost every Indian map of the mind borrows this split. Read it now and the Yoga path in the next step has a terrain to cross.

Yoga takes Samkhya's map and supplies the route it lacked. Patanjali's eightfold ashtanga discipline is a method for isolating purusha from prakriti, ending in kaivalya. This is the darshana behind the word everyone thinks they already know, so read it before you decide what yoga is.

Mimamsa reads the ritual half of the Veda and asks a narrow question with wide consequences: what does an injunction actually command, and how do you resolve a text that seems to contradict itself? Its rules of interpretation became the template for classical Indian hermeneutics. It also sets up the split in the final step.

Vedanta reads the other half of the Veda, the Upanishads, and inquires into Brahman. It is one sutra text and three rival readings: Advaita, Vishishtadvaita, and Dvaita, which agree on the source and disagree sharply on the relation between self and Brahman. End here, because this is where the foundations you have laid get put to work.