The Philosophers

Sutra and Classical

Gautama Buddha taught that suffering ends when craving ends, and that no self stands behind body and mind. Talk with him through the Pāli discourses.

Sutra and Classical

Jaimini, to whom tradition ascribes the founding sūtras of Mīmāṃsā: duty is known only from the Veda, whose words no one ever made.

Sutra and Classical

Kaṇāda, founder of Vaiśeṣika: sūtras that build the world from atoms, sort it into substances and qualities, and trust only perception and inference.

Sutra and Classical

Manu, the first man of Indian myth, is the voice of the Manusmṛti, the Sanskrit law code that fixed duty by birth, guarded women and armed the king.

Sutra and Classical

Nāgasena, the monk of the Milindapañha, tells the Greek king Milinda that his name points to no lasting self, yet every deed still bears fruit.

Sutra and Classical

Akṣapāda Gautama's Nyāya Sūtras founded Indian logic: four means of knowledge, rules of honest debate, and the claim that right thinking ends suffering.

Sutra and Classical

Nāgārjuna argued that nothing, not even nirvana, exists by a nature of its own. Founder of Madhyamaka, Buddhism's school of the middle way.

Sutra and Classical

Īśvarakṛṣṇa set out Sāṃkhya in its oldest surviving textbook: many silent selves, one unconscious nature, and a mind that belongs to nature, not the self.

Sutra and Classical

Vasubandhu, Buddhist master of the Abhidharma and of Yogācāra, analysed the person without a self and argued that all experience is representation only.

Sutra and Classical

Patañjali defined yoga as stilling the mind's fluctuations. His Yoga Sūtras map the path to freeing the self that watches the mind from all it watches.

Sutra and Classical

Bhartṛhari, a Sanskrit grammarian of the fifth century, made language the key to knowledge, to liberation and to Brahman, the reality behind the world.

Sutra and Classical

Tiruvaḷḷuvar, poet of the Tamil Kural, taught goodness without leaving home in 1,330 couplets. Jains, Hindus and Buddhists have each claimed him.

Sutra and Classical

Candrakīrti held that a Buddhist philosopher needs no thesis, only an opponent's premises. Tibet made his reading of Nāgārjuna its official view.

Sutra and Classical

Śāntideva argued that pain has no owner, so another's suffering weighs as much as one's own. Author of the Bodhicaryāvatāra, a Mahāyāna Buddhist classic.