One Reality, Many Ways of Knowing
The Ṛgveda states the shape of this whole landscape in a single line:
ekaṃ sad viprā bahudhā vadanti — the real is one; the wise speak of it in many ways. — Ṛgveda 1.164.46
Notice what is one and what is many. Reality (sat) is one. Speech (vāk) is many. The plurality is not confusion — it is the many-voiced report of a single object by witnesses who each see it from where they stand.
The corpus is not a library
Every text in this tradition is one of three things: a pramāṇa (an instrument that knows), a prasthāna (a path of reading), or a prayoga (a practice of living). The map is not a shelf of books; it is a set of approaches.
Why a hierarchy and not a flat list
The tradition sorts knowledge by the object and the instrument. The seen (dṛṣṭārtha) is reached by perception and inference. The unseen (adṛṣṭārtha) is reached by authorless testimony — śabda. This distinction is the spine of everything that follows.
The center is not the landscape
One of those many ways — Vedānta — goes further than any other. It does not merely report the one reality; it names it. Its mahāvākya runs:
satyam jñānam anantam brahma — Brahman is being, awareness, infinitude. — Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.1.1
That is the center of the landscape. It is not its frame. Vedānta is one of the viprā, not the arbiter of them all. Mīmāṃsā’s center is dharma; Nyāya’s is pramāṇa; Sāṅkhya’s is puruṣa and prakṛti. The landscape is the line that holds them together, not any one school’s conclusion.
The modern English slogan “truth is God” (Gandhi) is a devotional gloss on that Vedāntic center — useful as a motto, misleading as a map. We will reach the center properly in the Upaniṣad chapter, when the instruments to hear it have been laid down.
The right approach
Five moves, in order. Skip one and the claim collapses into either dogma or category error.