Indian thought did not spurn the accumulated wisdom of its ancients in favour of current fashions and did not experience a violent disruption of its traditional hospitality to multiple standpoints. The so-called astika or orthodox schools found no difficulty in combining their veneration of the Vedic hymns with a wide and diverse range of views, and even the nastika or heterodox schools, which repudiated the canonical 'authority' of the Vedas, retained much of Vedic and Upanishadic metaphysics and almost the whole of their psychology and ethics. Indian philosophical schools could not see themselves as exclusive bearers of the total Truth. They emerged together from a long-standing and continuous effort to enhance our common understanding of God, Man and Nature, and they came to be considered as darshanas or paradigmatic standpoints shedding light from different angles on noumenal and phenomenal realities. They refrained from claiming that any illumination which can be rendered in words -- or even in thoughts -- can be either final or complete.

~ Raghavan Iyer