Āstika (आस्तिक) and nāstika (नास्तिक)

How a sitting works · Yoga Sūtra (योगसूत्र)

A darśana (दर्शन) is a way of seeing. The word is from dṛś (दृश्), to see. The divide in this book is one question: is the Veda a pramāṇa (प्रमाण), a means of knowing?

The menu on the side opens with the reading order, then the school drawers. Each school is its own book. The school page names the chapters. A chapter page is the list of lines. Open a line from that list.

The means of knowing have their own book, the pramāṇas (प्रमाण). The schools do not share one list. That book sets the lists side by side and links each means to the line that names it.

Āstika

Āstika (आस्तिक) means the Veda is a pramāṇa (प्रमाण). The six classical systems are the āstika (आस्तिक) darśanas (दर्शन). They are not six sects, and they are not six answers to one question. Each one stands in a different place and, from that place, tries to end suffering.

They are learned in pairs. A pair shares a picture, and then the two books argue inside it.

Where to start

Read in this order. Finish one before you open the next. The same list is the first thing in the side menu, and it is the list on the Hindu Philosophy page. The home page lists Sangeet Yatra, Learn Sanskrit, Hindu Philosophy, Household stories, and Nepali Readings.

1. Sangeet Yatra is the music. Its rooms hold practice, theory, and tools. This is the practice the rest of the reading is for.
2. Gāndharva (गान्धर्व). The shelf tells how celestial gāndharva came down into earthly deśī. That lore of the music is read beside the practice.
3. Learn Sanskrit opens with the introduction, then lessons 1 through 116. A sūtra is a line of Sanskrit. The cases come first.
4. Nāṭyaśāstra (नाट्यशास्त्र), from 6.1. Bharata writes on rasa and bhāva, which is what the spectator tastes.
5. Speech and sound (वाच्). Bhartṛhari writes on the word, and Śārṅgadeva writes on nāda. The page sits the passages that are written.
6. Māheśvara sūtras (माहेश्वरसूत्राणि), from the first beat. The fourteen drumbeats generate the alphabet and the pratyāhāras (प्रत्याहार). The rhythm rooms are still Sangeet Yatra.
7. Yoga Sūtra (योगसूत्र). Patañjali wrote a short book of the mind. Stay with 1.1 onward until citta (चित्त) and vṛtti (वृत्ति) are yours. Every later book uses this sitting.
8. Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā (हठयोगप्रदीपिका), from 1.1. Svātmārāma’s manual holds four chapters. They give the shapes of the seat named at 2.46.
9. Bhagvad Gītā (भगवद्गीता). The Gītā is the poem of that yoga.
10. Nārada Bhakti Sūtras (भक्तिसूत्र), from the first sūtra. The book holds eighty-four lines on divine love, beside Gītā 12.1.
11. Sāṅkhya Kārikā (सांख्यकारिका). The kārikā holds seventy-two verses. They are the map the Yoga Sūtra assumes. Stay with puruṣa (पुरुष) and prakṛti (प्रकृति) through verses 1–21.
12. The pramāṇas (प्रमाण). The page asks what counts as knowing. The long sūtra books argue inside these lists.
13. Tarka-Saṃgraha (तर्कसंग्रह), from the opening verse. The book is Annambhaṭṭa’s primer, and it comes before the long sūtra books.
14. Nyāya Sūtra (न्यायसूत्र), from 1.1.1. The sūtra shows how a claim is proved.
15. Vaiśeṣika Sūtra (वैशेषिकसूत्र), from 1.1.1. The sūtra names what exists to be proved. It is the pair of Nyāya.
16. Mīmāṃsā Sūtra (मीमांसासूत्र), from 1.1.1. What dharma (धर्म) is: how to read the Veda as what is to be done.
17. The Upaniṣads (उपनिषद्), from the Māṇḍūkya. The shelf sits the Māṇḍūkya, the Īśāvāsya, and the Kaṭha.
18. Brahma Sūtra (ब्रह्मसूत्र). The sūtra is the later part of that pair, from the four opening lines. It asks what is to be known.
19. Upadeśasāhasrī (उपदेशसाहस्री). These are Śaṅkara’s own verses. They teach Advaita, inside Vedānta.
20. Aṣṭāvakra Gītā (अष्टावक्रगीता), from 1.1. Aṣṭāvakra teaches Janaka across twenty chapters and 298 verses. The same shelf is said as a dialogue.
21. Śiva Sūtra (शिवसूत्र), from 1.1. Seventy-seven lines, three awakenings. Caitanyam (चैतन्यम्) is the self. The bliss of the world is the joy of samādhi (समाधि).
22. Vijñāna Bhairava (विज्ञानभैरव), from verse 1. Bhairava answers the Goddess in 162 verses. The same stream as the Śiva Sūtra. Sanskrit, then English and Nepali.
23. Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam (प्रत्यभिज्ञाहृदयम्), from sūtra 1. Kṣemarāja wrote twenty sūtras on recognition.
24. Madhyamaka (मूलमध्यमककारिका), from Nāgārjuna’s opening. The schools that leave the Veda off the list of pramāṇas (प्रमाण) begin here.
25. Viṃśatikā (विंशतिका). Vasubandhu’s “Twenty” holds 22 verses in this text. What appears is vijñapti (विज्ञप्ति), cognition.
26. Tattvārtha Sūtra (तत्त्वार्थसूत्र), from the Jain path. The sūtra sets right seeing, right knowing, and right conduct.
27. Cārvāka (चार्वाक). The school keeps perception, the four elements, and the good of this life.
28. Ājīvika (आजीविक). The page reports niyati (नियति), the fixed course of a life, as the other schools tell it.

Two further dialogues sit beside Aṣṭāvakra as maps. The Avadhūta Gītā is attributed to Dattātreya, in eight chapters. The Ribhu Gītā is the sixth aṃśa of the Śiva Rahasya. Their lines are not sat. They stay off the order above. A path in that order is a shelf of lines.

Five shelves now have their pages. Bharata’s chapters on rasa, in the Nāṭyaśāstra, come straight after Learn Sanskrit: that is the emotional grammar of the music rooms. Śārṅgadeva’s Saṅgītaratnākara and Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya sit with that music. The sittings there are the opening of the Brahmakāṇḍa and the nāda verses. The rest of those two books is named on that shelf. The Haṭha text comes after the Yoga Sūtra, at 2.46, where posture is named. The Tarka-saṃgraha comes just before the Nyāya Sūtra, as the short primer on proof. The Māṇḍūkya, the Īśāvāsya, and the Kaṭha come just before the Brahma Sūtra. Seven other principal Upaniṣads are named on that shelf and are not sat. With the Gītā, those three are the places Vedānta starts from. The Gītā is earlier in this path because the Yoga Sūtra has already taught the words it uses.

One aim, six names

Each book says the trouble is a failure of knowing, and the end is the end of that failure. They do not use the same word.

• Nyāya calls the failure mithyājñāna (मिथ्याज्ञान), false knowing, and the end apavarga (अपवर्ग).
• Vaiśeṣika calls the end niḥśreyasa (निःश्रेयस), the good beyond which there is no better.
• Sāṅkhya calls the failure aviveka (अविवेक), not telling the seer from what is seen, and the end kaivalya (कैवल्य).
• Yoga uses that same end. Its definition of the work is the stilling of the mind's activities.
• Mīmāṃsā begins from dharma (धर्म), what is to be done because the Veda says so. Liberation is the later horizon of that school, not the first line.
• Vedānta calls the failure avidyā (अविद्या) and the end mokṣa (मोक्ष), knowing Brahman (ब्रह्मन्).

A later writer, Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, argued that the six finally point at one Lord. That is his claim, made after the sūtras. Learn each book in its own words first. The disagreements are real, and they are the reason there are six books.

Advaita, inside Vedānta

Advaita (अद्वैत) is Śaṅkara's reading of Vedānta: Brahman (ब्रह्मन्) without a second. It is āstika (आस्तिक). The Upaniṣads (उपनिषद्) are its pramāṇa (प्रमाण). It is one reading of the Brahma Sūtra, beside Rāmānuja's and Madhva's. The pages here are his own verses, the metrical half of the Upadeśasāhasrī (उपदेशसाहस्री), all nineteen prakaraṇas (प्रकरण). The prose half is a different lesson and is not this book. The sūtra stays on the Brahma Sūtra pages.

Nāstika

Nāstika (नास्तिक) means the Veda is not the pramāṇa (प्रमाण). Four schools sit under that name. They argue with the āstika (आस्तिक) books, and they argue with each other.

Later lists often name three nāstika (नास्तिक) schools, the Bauddha (बौद्ध), the Jaina (जैन), and the Cārvāka (चार्वाक). The Ājīvika (आजीविक) school is in this book because it was a nāstika teaching in the same centuries, and the Buddhist and Jain books still argue with the doctrine those reports give. Its own book is not in hand.

The same kind of page

One line is one sitting, as in the Yoga Sūtra book. The line is read in Sanskrit, split into words, and only then put back together. The English of the whole line comes last on purpose.

Every line that is in a pāṭha has a sitting. Sāṅkhya, the Yoga Sūtra, and the Viṃśatikā were written out by hand, and so were the openings of the long sūtra books. The remaining lines are a gloss of the words that are there: the form, the case spelled out, and the sense. When the stem list does not yet know a word, the sitting still gives the case and shows the stem. Cārvāka (चार्वाक) and the Ājīvikas (आजीविक) have no root book in hand, so those two pages stay essays. No sūtra was invented for them.

Sāṅkhya's book is seventy-two verses, the Sāṅkhya Kārikā (सांख्यकारिका) of Īśvarakṛṣṇa. The other four are sūtras: short lines that leave words out and expect you to carry a word forward from the line before. That carrying is called anuvṛtti (अनुवृत्ति). The sitting says when it is happening.