Place
Varanasi
One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Sacred to Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains. The intellectual center of classical Indian philosophy.
Varanasi sits on the west bank of the Ganges where the river turns north, and has been lived in for something like three thousand years. Pilgrims come to bathe at the ghats and to die inside the city, which is believed to release the soul. Argument has been part of its life as long as devotion has. Brahmin scholars disputed grammar, ritual, and metaphysics here, and the Buddha gave his first sermon at Sarnath a few miles out, choosing the region with the densest concentration of religious specialists to make his case.
Thinkers Connected to Varanasi
Kanada
The Indian atomist. He said the world is made of indivisible particles, centuries before Democritus said the same thing in Greece.
Patanjali
Yoga is the stilling of the mind. He codified a practice that had existed for centuries into a system of eight limbs.
Akshapada Gautama
Four ways to know: perception, inference, comparison, and testimony. He built Indian logic from the ground up.
Kapila
The sage credited with Samkhya, the oldest of India's systems, which split reality into spirit and matter.
Badarayana
He gathered the teachings of the Upanishads into the threads that became Vedanta, India's most enduring philosophy.
Jaimini
He built a whole philosophy around action and the authority of the word, asking what it means for a duty to bind.
Ashvaghosha
The first great Sanskrit poet, who told the Buddha's life as an epic and made philosophy sing.
Bhartrhari
He argued that language is not how we describe reality but how reality exists. The word and the world are one.