Darśana is the auspicious sight of a deity or a holy person. The term also refers to six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy and their literature on spirituality and soteriology.
Etymology
The word, also in the forms of darśana or darshanam, comes from Sanskrit दर्शन, from dṛś, "to see", vision, apparition or glimpse.
Definition
Darśana is described as an "auspicious sight" of a holy person, which bestows merit on the person who is seen. "Sight" here means seeing or beholding, and/or being seen or beheld. It is most commonly used for theophany, "manifestation / visions of the divine", in Hindu worship, e.g. of a deity, or a very holy person or artifact. One can receive darśana or a glimpse of the deity in the temple, or from a great saintly person, such as a great guru.
In Hinduism
The term darśana also refers to the six systems of thought, called darśanam, that comprise classical Hindu philosophy. The term therein implies how each of these six systems distinctively look at things and the scriptures in Indian philosophies. The six orthodox Hindu darśana are Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mīmāṃsā, and Vedanta. Buddhism and Jainism are examples of non-Hindu darśanas.
On the significance of darśana in Mahayana thought, Paul Harrison writes: "By the second century CE... the vision of the Buddha and the accompanying hearing of the Dharma are represented as a transformation experience of decisive importance for practitioners, be they who have renounced "ascetics" or householders." The Abhidharma, collections of systematic summaries of the sutras, mention Darśana-citta, i.e. visions. Indian Mahayana philosophers Vasubandhu and Asanga acknowledged five paths to liberation, of which the third is darśana-marga, the "path of seeing". Nagarjuna, a prominent philosopher of the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism, wrote that the wise person perceives tattva-darśana, true reality.
Other meanings
Darśana also sometimes has a more mundane meaning. For example, Sivananda Saraswati wrote in his book The Practice of Brahmacharya that one of the eight aspects of brahmacharya is not to look lustfully at women: "You should carefully avoid... Darshana or looking at women with passionate resolve". Scholar of religion Richard H. Davis has said that darśana is one of three terms in classical Indian discourse that could be considered roughly analogous to what today's English-speakers understand as "religion." The other two terms are dharma and marga. According to Davis, "most Hindu texts accepted that religious paths are relative to the points of view and moral responsibilities of practitioners, whose individual circumstances may make one or another course of action more appropriate in their particular situations." Poet Gary Snyder has given a naturalistic meaning to darśana: In Sikh culture, folios or manuscripts that depict all ten Gurus on a single page are called darśana paintings, simply because they offer a vision of all ten sacred Gurus in one glance.
