Surak is a fictional character in the backstory of the Star Trek television series and franchises. He is portrayed as the most important philosopher in the pre-history of the planet Vulcan. Living in an Earth-like "modern age" when the Vulcans are technological but violent, Surak founds a movement which reforms the Vulcan way of thinking and lifestyle and leads to the world of logically-reasoning and emotion-mastering Vulcans known from the TV series.

This period in Vulcan pre-history is referred to as the "Time of Awakening". Ironically, the "Time of Awakening" is accompanied by violence unmatched in Vulcan history, according to the canonical Star Trek: Enterprise screenplay, "Awakening" (wherein Surak's mind is resurrected 1,800 years after his death to restore to modern Vulcans an uncorrupted version of his original philosophy.) During the "Time of Awakening" a Vulcan schism of those who "sought a return to savage ways" and "marched beneath the raptor's wings" (later the symbol of the Romulan people) perpetrate a cataclysmic nuclear attack upon Surak and his enlightened society. Soon after Surak's death, these Vulcan recidivists abandon their homeworld to colonize the planets Romulus and Remus—where Surak's philosophy of peace and logic survives only as an underground movement within their emotional, warlike society for the next 2,000 years, while flourishing to become the predominant philosophy on Vulcan.

The fate of Surak's resurrected mind is not discussed in Star Trek series canon, but Surak's latter-day successor, shepherding the long-delayed emergence of Romulan rationalism, is the aged Spock. The "Time of Awakening" and its "ironic violence" noted by Surak, which ends in nuclear holocaust but philosophical maturity, was written by Star Trek creators with intentional parallels to modern human society—particularly its historical progression toward cultural enlightenment, reason and tolerance interrupted by extreme bouts of cultural regression, irrationalism and fanatical violence.

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