§11.1 The staircase, not the menu
The six darśanas — Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṅkhya, Yoga, Pūrva-Mīmāṁsā, Uttara-Mīmāṁsā (Vedānta) — are routinely presented as six competing philosophies, in the manner of a survey course. The tradition does not present them that way, and the alternative reading is more interesting and more defensible.
On the traditional account they are a single graded instrument, each stage addressing the question the previous stage leaves standing. They are ordered by the depth of question they can hold, not by chronology or popularity.
| System | Question it answers | Question it cannot answer |
|---|---|---|
| Nyāya | How do we know anything at all? Establishes the pramāṇas, the forms of valid inference, the anatomy of fallacy. | What kinds of thing are there? Logic constrains claims; it does not enumerate reality. |
| Vaiśeṣika | What categories of thing exist? Substance, quality, action, universal, particular, inherence, absence — and the atomic analysis of matter. | How does a manifold arise from a unity, and what is the ordered sequence of manifestation? |
| Sāṅkhya | What is the order of evolution, and what is the relation of the conscious to the unconscious? Enumerates the tattvas from prakṛti downward. | How does the knower disentangle himself in practice? Enumeration is not method. |
| Yoga | By what discipline is the disentanglement effected? The eight limbs, the analysis of mental modification and its restraint. | What is one to do in the world in the meantime, and what governs action? |
| Pūrva-Mīmāṁsā | What does scripture enjoin, and how is an injunction correctly determined? Supplies the entire interpretive apparatus of §8. | What is the referent of the non-injunctive portions — and who is the recipient of all this action? |
| Vedānta | Who is the ultimate referent, what is the relation of the self to Him, and what is the final end? | — |
Read this way, adopting a lower system as final is not heresy; it is stopping early. Each system remains fully authoritative in its own domain: the platform uses Nyāya's fallacy taxonomy without qualification, and Pūrva-Mīmāṁsā's interpretive apparatus is the operating machinery of §8, borrowed entire from a school whose theology this tradition rejects.
§11.2 The subordination rule
That last clause matters and is frequently violated. The Sāṅkhya-kārikā's atheism is not a misunderstanding to be explained away; it is the position of that text. The honest treatment is to say so, note that the tradition holds Kapila's original teaching to have been theistic and that the Bhāgavata presents it as such in the Kapila-Devahūti dialogue, and let the reader see that this is a claim about textual history rather than a reading of the Kārikā.
§11.3 Theistic and atheistic Sāṅkhya
Two bodies of material go under the name Sāṅkhya. The classical Sāṅkhya of Īśvarakṛṣṇa's Kārikā is dualist and does not require a God: prakṛti evolves for the sake of puruṣa, and liberation is discriminative knowledge of their difference. The Sāṅkhya taught by Kapila in the third canto of the Bhāgavata is theistic, treats the tattva enumeration as an analysis of the Lord's energy, and terminates in devotion rather than in discrimination.
The tradition holds these to be the original and the derived form respectively. That is a historical claim, and by the honesty rule it is labelled as one: it is not established by the texts themselves, which are simply two texts. Grade B, and the platform presents both Sāṅkhyas as separately addressed bodies rather than merging them. Register entry D-19.
§11.4 A note on synthesis
A body of contemporary work argues that the six systems form a single coherent epistemology reconstructible in modern terms, and that they can be aligned with Vedānta without loss. Some of it is very good. Our editorial position is that such synthesis is a legitimate genre with its own status: it belongs to the layer of contemporary interpretation, is attributed by name to its author, and is never presented on this platform as the tradition's own statement.
The non-conflation rule of §19 exists exactly to keep that boundary visible — a modern synthesis is a commentary node with a named modern author, addressed at layer L06, and never merged into the mūla or into a classical bhāṣya (failure mode M17).