Six classical schools of philosophy, each built on its own foundational sutras, disagreeing openly with one another about logic, matter, the self, and liberation — argument as a form of scholarship in its own right.
वैदिक व उत्तर-वैदिक काल · Vedic and post-Vedic era
Nyaya (founded by Gautama Akshapada, focused on logic and epistemology), Vaisheshika (Kanada's school of atomism, already covered in this site's Rishi Parampara chapter), Samkhya (Kapila's dualism of consciousness and matter, also covered there), Yoga (Patanjali's practical path built on Samkhya's metaphysics), Mimamsa (Jaimini's school centered on correct Vedic ritual interpretation), and Vedanta (grounded in the Upanishads and Vyasa's Brahma Sutras, later split into Advaita, Vishishtadvaita, and Dvaita by Shankaracharya, Ramanuja, and Madhvacharya) make up the six.
Rather than converging on a single answer, these six schools debated each other for centuries within a shared willingness to be questioned, a tradition of open philosophical dispute that shaped how later thinkers across the subcontinent, including the Buddhist and Jain traditions outside this six-school framework, argued their own positions.