“Reading Darśana: Vedic Hermeneutics and Deconstructing Comparative Criticism”, cshc.substack.com, June 20, 2026

“The word darśana derives its meaning from the Sanskrit root – dṛś ‘to look at’, ‘to view’, ‘experience.’ This exposition invites contemporary scholarship to reflect on how Hindus have historically understood and interpreted their own intellectual traditions, which naturally sets it apart from other epistemological studies. As an āstika tradition, it reflects a community-driven theological discourse shaped by the social, psychological, and intellectual life of the religion.

With the decline of the institutions that once provided the scholarly training needed to convey a structured meaning of the Hindu canonical texts to the larger public that informed its ritualists and theists of an unbroken tradition of their theology, a rather unorthodox school of thought has entered the field. This approach is often unequipped with the textual and theological foundations of the broader tradition. As a result, it struggles to develop a justified understanding of a subject that differs significantly, in both theory and practice, from dominant Western hermeneutical traditions. A theological tradition, at its core, derives meaning from the specific terms and concepts native to its own historical discourse — terms that carry meaning only within that tradition. “Discourse is a meditation of a shareable thought, as a result, both rhetoric and hermeneutics share a common relationship of the dialectic, that is thinking embodied within the said discourse.” Reading a text is a method of relating to discourse. Religious hermeneutics — the art of interpretation — is fundamentally about understanding: one must grasp the original thought behind a discourse, because language itself inherently shapes and modifies meaning as it passes through time.

For instance, even scholars beginning their study of literature or historiography recognize that applying a foreign hermeneutical framework to a discourse outside its original context can be of limited value. This is particularly true in the case of foundational texts of the Vedanta or later puranic literature, since their critical investigation is guided by the organs of scriptural hermeneutics of the Hindus, namely Uttara Mīmāṃsā (for contemporary understanding). Popular canonical texts informing the absolute metaphysical realities of the hindu theology ranging from commentaries on Itihāsa to smṛti have been susceptible to misinterpretation due to the absence of a widely accessible contemporary research methodology informed by native methods of theological exegesis……..”

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