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183 rest content with a mere intellectual conviction but should aim at transforming such conviction into direct experience. It seems, however, more probable that darśana here, like its equivalent drsti which is sometimes substituted for it, means 'philosophic opinion'? and signifies a specific school of thought as distinguished from others. There are many such schools of philosophic opinion. They are commonly reckoned as six, viz. the Nyāya of Gautama, the Vaišeşika of Kanāda, the Sankhya of Kapila, the Yoga of Patañjali, the Purva-mimārsā of Jaimini and the Uttara-mimāmsā or Vedānta of Bădarāyana. These six systems may be regarded as falling into three pairs-Nyāya-Vaiseşika, Sankhya-Yoga and the two Mīmāṁsās-as the members forming each pair agree either in their general metaphysical outlook or in their historical basis or in both. We shall deal here not only with these three groups but also with two more-Indian Materialism, and later Buddhism with its four-fold division of Vaibhāşika, Sautrāntika, Yogācāra and Madhyamika. The latter, along with Jainism, are sometimes described as the six heterodox (năstika) systems to contrast them with the same number of orthodox (ästika) ones just mentioned.3 The germs of practically all of them are to be found in the literature of the previous periods, but their full development and systematization belong to the present one. The darsanas, when once systematized, determined the main channels in which philosophic thought ran for ever afterwards in India. Though ascribed to individual teachers, they in their present form are really the outcome of the thought of a long succession of thinkers, for the systems have grown with the growth of time. While we may know the names of some of the thinkers, we can hardly say what the nature of their contribution was and to what extent the original doctrine has been remodelled by each of them. For they always thought more of the system of which they were adherents than of claiming credit for their share in developing
1 Cf. NSB. IV. i. 14. * See BUV. p. 890. st. 22 (com.) and cf. SBE. vol. XXII. p. xlv. 3 Not all of these, as observed above (p. 107), are orthodox in the strict sense of the term.
