Vaiśeṣika

Vaiśeṣika (from viśeṣa, “particularity”, “distinction”) is the school of Indian philosophy devoted to ontology and natural philosophy — the systematic classification of everything that exists. Founded on the Vaiśeṣika Sūtras of Kaṇāda (perhaps 2nd century BCE), it analysed reality into a small number of categories (padārthas): substance, quality, action, universal, particularity and inherence, to which later thinkers added absence. It taught an atomism — physical things are made of eternal, indivisible, imperceptible atoms of earth, water, fire and air — developed independently of, and in some ways more elaborately than, the atomism of Democritus and Epicurus. Its realist, pluralist world-picture was adopted by the Nyāya school, and from about the tenth century the two were taught as one system, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, the main realist opponent of Buddhist and Vedāntin views for a thousand years.

History

The Vaiśeṣika Sūtras are hard to date; estimates range from the sixth to the first century BCE, with additions later. The decisive text is the Padārthadharmasaṅgraha (“Compendium of the Properties of the Categories”) of Praśastapāda (c. 6th century CE), which systematised the school and is often treated as its real foundation; commentaries on it include Śrīdhara’s Nyāyakandalī, Vyomaśiva’s Vyomavatī and Udayana‘s Kiraṇāvalī. Later manuals — Śivāditya’s Saptapadārthī (“The Seven Categories”, 11th century) and Annaṃbhaṭṭa’s Tarkasaṅgraha (17th century) — taught the combined Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika to generations of students; the Tarkasaṅgraha is still the first book of logic in traditional Sanskrit schools.

The categories

The Vaiśeṣika Sūtras begin, like many Indian texts, with dharma — “Now we shall explain dharma; dharma is that from which comes prosperity and the highest good” — and claim that the highest good results from knowledge of the categories by their similarities and differences. A category is anything that is existent, knowable and nameable: Vaiśeṣika assumes a close fit between language, thought and reality.

1. Substance (dravya) — that in which qualities and actions inhere, and which is the material cause of composite things. There are nine: earth, water, fire, air (each in eternal atomic form and non-eternal composite form), ether (ākāśa, the substratum of sound), time, space (direction), self (ātman) and mind (manas, atomic, the internal organ that links self and senses).
2. Quality (guṇa) — that which inheres in a substance but has no qualities itself. Praśastapāda lists twenty-four, including colour, taste, smell, touch, number, size, separateness, conjunction, disjunction, remoteness, nearness, weight, fluidity, viscidity, sound, cognition, pleasure, pain, desire, aversion, effort, merit, demerit and disposition.
3. Action (karman) — movement: upward, downward, contraction, expansion and locomotion.
4. Universal (sāmānya) — a single property present in many things, such as “cowness” in all cows or “existence” in all substances, qualities and actions. Universals are real, eternal and perceived.
5. Particularity (viśeṣa) — the ultimate individuator of eternal things that are otherwise indistinguishable, such as two atoms of earth or two liberated selves. This category gives the school its name.
6. Inherence (samavāya) — the intimate, inseparable relation between a whole and its parts, a quality and its substance, a universal and its instance.
7. Absence (abhāva) — added by later thinkers: prior absence (the pot before it is made), posterior absence (after it is broken), absolute absence (colour in air) and mutual absence (a pot is not a cloth). Absence is real and can be perceived — I see that there is no pot on the floor.

Atomism

Vaiśeṣika argued that if things could be divided infinitely, a mountain and a mustard seed would have the same number of parts and so the same size, which is absurd. Division must therefore end in indivisible, partless, eternal atoms (paramāṇu). There are four kinds, corresponding to earth, water, fire and air, each with its characteristic qualities (earth has smell, water taste, fire colour, air touch). Atoms are imperceptible. Two atoms combine to form a dyad (dvyaṇuka), also imperceptible; three dyads form a triad (tryaṇuka), the smallest perceptible thing — the mote of dust in a sunbeam. Larger things are built up from these.

At the beginning of each cosmic cycle, atoms are set in motion and combine; at the end they separate and the world dissolves, while atoms, selves, minds, time, space and ether remain. What sets the atoms moving? The unseen force (adṛṣṭa) — the accumulated merit and demerit of selves, i.e. Karma. Early Vaiśeṣika may have been non-theistic; later Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika held that God directs the atoms according to adṛṣṭa.

Vaiśeṣika also developed theories of motion (including a notion of impetus, vega), of heat and cooking (whether heat changes the qualities of the atoms one by one — pīlupāka, “atom-cooking”, the Vaiśeṣika view — or of the whole pot — piṭharapāka, the Nyāya view), of gravity (gurutva) and of sound as a quality of ether propagated in waves.

Causation

Against Sāṃkhya’s view that effects pre-exist in their causes, Vaiśeṣika held asatkāryavāda: the effect is a new thing, non-existent before its production. The pot is not hidden in the clay; it is a new whole that comes into being and inheres in its parts. Vaiśeṣika distinguished three kinds of cause: the inherent or material cause (the threads of a cloth), the non-inherent cause (the conjunction of the threads) and the efficient cause (the weaver, the loom).

The self and liberation

There are infinitely many selves, eternal and all-pervading. Consciousness, pleasure, pain and the like are qualities that arise in the self when it is connected with a mind. Liberation is the permanent cessation of these specific qualities, through knowledge of the categories: the self remains, without experience. Critics found this unappealing; the Vaiśeṣikas found it better than any mixture of pleasure and pain.

Comparisons and legacy

Vaiśeṣika’s list of categories has often been compared with Aristotle‘s, and its atomism with that of Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius; there is no evidence of borrowing in either direction. Unlike Greek atomism, Vaiśeṣika is not materialist — selves, minds and universals are as real as atoms — and its atoms are moved not by chance but by moral causation. Its realism shaped all later Indian ontology; even its opponents — Buddhists, who denied universals and wholes, and Advaitins, who denied ultimate plurality — framed their arguments against its categories.

Vaiśeṣika in conversation

The most useful idea is its argument for atoms: if everything could be divided forever, a mustard seed would contain as many parts as a mountain. And its strangest and most interesting claim is that absence is real — the empty space where your keys should be is something you perceive.