Journey
The six darshanas — traditional seats
The six āstika darśanas paired in threes — Nyāya with Vaiśeshika, Sāmkhya with Yoga, Mīmāmsā with Vedānta — and the places tradition seats each in. These are the tradition's own claims about itself, not findings; Vedānta gets three seats because its three readings settled in three different towns. The pairing into threes is itself a later scholastic convenience rather than anything the schools agreed to.
Stops (8)
- Mithilā / Janakpur · Nyāya — logic at Mithilā
Mithilā is Sītā's natal city in the Rāmāyana and, quite separately, the seat of Nyāya for a thousand years. Gangeśa's Tattvachintāmani about 1300 launched Navya-Nyāya, the 'new logic', whose technical Sanskrit for quantification and relation is the most formally precise anything in Indian philosophy reached.
- Somnāth / Prabhāsa · Vaiśeshika — atoms at Prabhāsa
Tradition seats Kanāda, author of the Vaiśeshika Sūtra, at Prabhāsa on the Saurashtra coast — the name means atom-eater. The school reduces the world to six categories and holds that matter is made of indivisible paramāṇus that combine in pairs and triads, a physics argued out without instruments.
- Gangā Sāgara / Gangasagar · Sāmkhya — enumeration at Gangā Sāgara
Kapila, credited with Sāmkhya, is placed at the island where the Gangā enters the sea, and the ashram there is the focus of the Makar Sankrānti mela. Sāmkhya counts twenty-five principles and makes matter and consciousness two irreducibly separate things, with no god required to connect them.
- Chidambaram · Yoga — Patañjali at Chidambaram
Chidambaram's tradition holds that Patañjali came to see Śiva dance and that the temple's thousand-pillar hall is where he taught. The Yoga Sūtras take Sāmkhya's metaphysics and add method and a god, so the pair is one system split into theory and practice.
- Māhishmatī / Maheshwar · Mīmāmsā — ritual at Māhishmatī
The Narmada town where tradition seats Mandana Miśra and sets the debate with Shankara. Pūrva Mīmāmsā holds that the Veda's authority is in its injunctions and that correct action, not knowledge, is what liberation requires — the position Advaita had to defeat to displace.
- Kālaḍi · Vedānta as Advaita — Kālaḍi
Shankara's birthplace, and the seat of the reading that the self and Brahman are one and plurality a superimposition. Of the three Vedāntas it is the one that treats the world's appearance as the problem to be dissolved rather than as something to be correctly described.
- Shrīrangam · Vedānta as Viśishtādvaita — Srirangam
Rāmānuja's seat, and the reading that Brahman is one and really has qualities, with souls and world as its body. It keeps the unity Advaita insists on and refuses the price — that a qualityless absolute leaves nobody to worship and nobody to be saved.
- Udupi · Vedānta as Dvaita — Udupi
Madhva's foundation, and the reading that God, soul and matter are permanently and really distinct — five differences, each irreducible. It is the most straightforwardly realist of the three and the least willing to call anything we observe an appearance.