A humble Critique of Indic Darshana-s

 Critique of Indic Darshana-s 

Yes — any explanation of pāramārthika and vyāvahārika inevitably admits the existence of two distinct states. 

So Advaita is not, as it is popularly understood, the assertion of absolute non-duality. 
It presumes a duality of operation — a higher and a lower plane — and on that very premise all its later conclusions are built. Like every other philosophy, Advaita too has its foundational flaw: the presumption itself.  

Sāṅkhya falters in its division of prakṛti and puruṣa. 
If in samādhi the puruṣa remains calm and supreme, how and why does prakṛti manage to drag the mind back into the mundane world? 
And truly, no one can remain in samādhi for long — except in death. 

Yoga errs in the opposite direction — in its attempt to over-discipline the mind into a single-pointed fixation. 

Its claims of miraculous siddhis arising merely from concentration border on the absurd. 

Vaiśeṣika is a mathematical obsession with categories and numbers — an intellectual taxonomy without soul. 

Naiyāyika logic, derived from Vaiśeṣika, remains trapped in the mechanics of deduction. 
But deduction alone never reveals truth; some spark of intuition, some eureka — the anubhava — is always necessary.  

Mīmāṃsā is a valiant but futile effort to justify obsolete ritualism through intricate theories of karma.  If karma truly ensures cosmic justice, why then do we require human courts and punishment? 

Tattvavāda of Madhva leans heavily upon theology, bordering on monotheism.  It cannot explain why the lover should wish to remain eternally separate from the Beloved. It rests too much on Purāṇic authority, favouring Viṣṇu and Kṛṣṇa while overlooking that other Purāṇas glorify Śiva and Devī in equal measure. Indeed, Viṣṇu is scarcely prominent in the Vedas — Indra, Agni, and Soma shine far more vividly there. 

Śaṅkara’s Advaita, as mentioned, fails to explain how the One became many if the One alone is real. If all multiplicity is an illusion, to whom does that illusion appear?  And can illusion truly be identical with the perceiver? When questioned on divine justice, Advaita (like most Indic systems) invokes the doctrine of karma — God does not intervene; the pāpa and puṇya of jīvas play themselves out. 

But I have deep reservations about such passive karma-theory — its moral inertia, its easy abdication of responsibility. 

Buddhism, in its idealist and often solipsistic turn, leaves the same gap — if all existence is suffering and cyclic, what sustains the cycle? 

Jainism relies on the cleverness of its syādvāda, its fourfold logic —  
but how can anything simultaneously exist and not exist, be true and untrue, both and neither, if truth is to mean anything at all? 

And Cārvāka, the loud rebel, is mere materialism — a faith in matter masquerading as realism. 
It proclaims no profound siddhānta, only the obvious: that what is seen is real, and what is unseen is not.  That too, perhaps, is its illusion.