AdvaitaVedanta

  • Increase font size
  • Default font size
  • Decrease font size

Darsana Mala index

Print PDF

DARSANA MALA

INTRODUCTION

The DARSANA MALA is a work whose form is strange for those used to the western tradition of philosophy. It is a poem of one hundred verses, divided into ten chapters of ten verses each. This is not unusual in the Indian tradition where aphoristic verses are often preferred to the long verbose treatises which are the only form used by western philosophy. Panini's Grammar and Patanjali's Yoga Sutras are classic examples of this terse poetic style.
The DARSANA MALA is a mala, Sanskrit for a necklace or garland, of the "darsanas". A darsana is more or less translatable as a school of philosophy or a thought-system. Traditionally in India there are six schools, but here Narayana Guru has divided the poem into ten and not six sections, which do not correspond strictly to the traditional darsanas. Perhaps the word darsana could be translated here as "philosophical viewpoint".
For example, the first chapter's point of view is that the world is real and has a creator.
The next chapter will suppose the opposite; another will view the world as consciousness; yet another from the point of view of action etc.
Thus, he presents ten possible visions of the universe, of ourselves and of the value or purpose of life - which together comprise philosophy. These different viewpoints could be taken as contradicting or excluding each other, especially in the context of western philosophy. The Guru however links them together by a common thread of value which runs through them all. Each darsana or "vision" is thus related structurally to the others, as are the verses inside each chapter.

a) VERSES ONLY
Page 1
Page 2

b) COMMENTS part 1
Page 1

c) COMMENTS part 2
Page 1

Thank you for bookmarking us.
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 21 October 2008 07:35 )  

Search

Important notes:

Please note that the site has been upgraded and we are in the process of resetting all the broken hyperlinks. This takes time so thank you for your patience. If you find a link is broken you can use the search function above to find the page "title" you need. If you discover a broken link please let us know using the contact form above.

Also if you arrived at this page from a search engine then you may find that the results page link does not match the page you landed on. The links that are found on the search engine search pages link to pages that have either been removed or replaced. These links will be updated shortly.

Thank you.

Admin.