An inventory of everything there is, built from partless atoms and held together by a relation called inherence. It is the nearest thing classical India has to a physics, and it fails and succeeds in instructive places: it gets the smallest visible particle to three dyads by an argument about number, and it argues about whether baking a pot changes the pot or its atoms.
Chapter 7 set out the six categories, the nine substances and the elemental staircase. This page assumes them and goes further.
Vaiśeṣika asks a question no other Indian school asks in this form: what kinds of thing are there, exhaustively? The answer is a closed list, and the school's whole method is to show that the list closes.
Kaṇāda lists six. Later Vaiśeṣikas add a seventh — abhāva, absence — and the addition is not tidying. It is the claim that nothing is a kind of something: that when you see a bare floor you perceive a real feature of the world, not merely fail to perceive a pot.
The argument is a reductio, and it is a good one.
There are atoms of earth, water, fire and air, each with its own qualities (chapter 7's staircase). Within a kind, every atom is exactly alike: same size, same qualities, no parts to differ in. So what makes this earth-atom a different thing from that one?
Nothing available in the other categories. Hence viśeṣa — an ultimate particularity residing in each eternal substance and distinguishing it from every other, and doing nothing else whatever. The school is named after it, which is a fair indication of how seriously the problem was taken. It is also the category opponents mock most: a property whose only job is to make two indistinguishable things two.
The best argument in the school, and the least known. Atoms are imperceptible; a mote in a sunbeam is the smallest thing you can see. How many atoms are in a mote? The answer is six, and it is derived, not guessed.
Praśastapāda gives a full cosmological cycle, and it is worth following because every step is constrained by the ontology rather than by a narrative.
The mechanism that starts the cycle is adṛṣṭa — the accumulated but not-yet-fruited merit and demerit of all souls, treated as a real quality residing in each soul. It is the school's placeholder for every motion whose cause is not evident: the first stirring of the atoms, the rising of sap in plants, the movement of iron toward a magnet, the circulation in a body. Naming it is intellectually honest and it is also, unmistakably, where enquiry stops.
The effect does not exist before it is produced. Sāṅkhya says the opposite, and the disagreement is the sharpest metaphysical fault line among the Vedic schools.
The cloth was in the threads all along, unmanifest. Otherwise: why can you only get oil from sesame and not from sand, if the oil was in neither? Why does a specific cause yield a specific effect? And how can what does not exist be brought into existence — that is producing something out of nothing.
If the cloth already existed in the threads, we would not need a weaver, and we could wear the threads. Something new comes to be, and its coming to be is what we mean by production.
As to specificity: sesame yields oil because sesame has the capacity to produce oil, not because it contains it. A capacity is not a hidden possession of the effect.
And you have your own problem. If nothing new ever appears, then destruction is equally impossible, and the smashed pot must still be there somewhere, unmanifest. You have not explained production; you have abolished it and change with it.
You are both assuming things with fixed natures that either do or do not contain other things. Drop that assumption and the question does not arise.
Deny that the effect pre-exists and you must say that the cloth is a genuinely new substance, over and above its threads. That new substance has to be somewhere — so you need inherence to hold it in its parts. And you need it to be a real thing over and above the parts, so you need a category of whole. Both are then attacked, in §8. Satkāryavāda avoids all of this by paying a different price: nothing genuinely new ever happens.
A cloth is a single substance inhering in its threads. Where, exactly, is it?
A black clay pot goes into the kiln and comes out red. Something has changed colour. What?
Sound is a quality of ether, produced at one place and heard at another. Ether does not move — it is all-pervading and partless. So how does the sound get to the ear?
Sound is perceived, so it must inhere in some substance. Not in earth, water, fire or air, since it is heard where those are absent or irrelevant. Not in soul, mind, space or time, which have their own qualities. So a ninth substance is required whose distinguishing quality is sound — and that is ākāśa. The argument is entirely negative, and it is the only argument the school offers for ether's existence. Whether that is a proof or the naming of an embarrassment is a fair question.
Kaṇāda lists seventeen. Praśastapāda adds seven more, and the additions tell you where the system was under pressure.
| Group | Qualities | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Sensible | rūpa (colour), rasa (taste), gandha (smell), sparśa (touch) | One per element, in the staircase of chapter 7 |
| Quantitative | saṃkhyā (number), parimāṇa (magnitude), pṛthaktva (separateness) | Number is a real quality — hence §4 and Udayana's eighth proof |
| Relational | saṃyoga (conjunction), vibhāga (disjunction), paratva and aparatva (priority and posteriority) | Conjunction is what §6's non-inherent cause consists of |
| Mental | buddhi (cognition), sukha, duḥkha, icchā, dveṣa, prayatna | All qualities of the soul, on the same footing as colour is of a pot |
| Added by Praśastapāda | gurutva (weight), dravatva (fluidity), sneha (viscidity), saṃskāra (disposition, including momentum), dharma and adharma (merit and demerit), śabda (sound) | Six of the seven are needed to state a physics — weight for falling, momentum for projectiles, fluidity and viscidity for liquids, sound for §10. Merit and demerit are needed to make adṛṣṭa a real quality of a soul |
Of the additions, saṃskāra earns the most. It covers three things: elasticity, the mental trace that makes memory possible, and — in its form as vega, velocity — the disposition imparted to a moving body that keeps it moving. Chapter 7, §10 gives the sūtra: an arrow's first motion comes from the impulse, and each subsequent motion from the saṃskāra produced by the one before. This is an impetus theory, and it is a real intellectual achievement, though not a quantitative one.
The Vaiśeṣika-sūtra does not mention Īśvara. The developed school proves him. Something happened in between, and it is worth naming plainly.
You need inherence to hold quality to substance, whole to part, universal to individual. Very well: what holds inherence to its terms? Another inherence? Then the same question again. You have an infinite regress, and you stop it by decree.
Inherence is self-linking. It relates its terms without needing a further relation to relate it to them, because that is what kind of thing it is. One inherence, eternal, everywhere, imperceptible.
Then say why conjunction is not self-linking too, and save yourself a category. Or admit that “self-linking” means only “we have decided to stop here.”
An atom is partless. Two atoms conjoin. Do they touch wholly or partly? If wholly, they coincide and occupy one place — and no aggregate is ever larger than one atom. If partly, the atom has parts, and is not an atom.
They conjoin without either coinciding or having parts, because conjunction between partless things is not spatial contact of surfaces. It is the standard reply, and it is the same reply as in §8.
You have twenty-four qualities, seven categories, nine substances, an eternal particularity per atom, and a relation you cannot explain. Every one of these is a separate commitment to defend. We do the same work with two principles.
By Udayana's time there is no independent Vaiśeṣika. The categories are Vaiśeṣika's, the epistemology is Nyāya's, and the school is Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika. Annaṃbhaṭṭa's Tarka-saṅgraha — a few pages long, and still the first book a student of the tradition reads — teaches both in one breath.
dravya, guṇa, karma, samavāya, abhāva, paramāṇu become the default terms in which any Indian philosopher discusses the furniture of the world, including those who reject the ontology. Āyurveda takes the framework wholesale (chapter 13).
It is not chemistry and does not become chemistry. There is no measurement, no combining ratio, no experiment. What it is, is an argued atomism, with a proof that division terminates, a derivation of the smallest visible aggregate, and a real dispute about whether change is atomic or bulk. Those are the right questions, reached by pure reasoning.
Inherence, the whole over its parts, and how partless things touch. Nobody solved them; the school defended its answers ably for a thousand years and its opponents never stopped pressing. They are recognisably the problems of mereology and of the reality of relations, and they are not settled now either.
1 · Why does the school need a category of viśeṣa?
A property whose only function is to individuate indistinguishables. The school is named after it, and opponents mock it for exactly that reason.
2 · Why is the smallest perceptible thing composed of three dyads rather than two?
And the reliance on number as a cause is what gives Udayana his eighth argument for God: number beyond one requires a counting mind.
3 · What is the asamavāyi-kāraṇa of a cloth?
It has no Western counterpart, and it is forced by the ontology: conjunction is a quality, so it is neither the stuff nor the maker.
4 · What does pīlu-pāka commit Vaiśeṣika to?
Forced by the rule that a whole's qualities derive from its atoms' qualities. Nyāya rejected it on the ground that the pot's shape and defects would have to be reproduced by chance.
5 · On the Vaiśeṣika account, what travels from a drum to your ear?
Ether is partless and cannot be displaced, so propagation has to be causal rather than mechanical — a genuinely unusual conception.
The regress objection is formally identical to Bradley's, and the reply is formally identical to the one made in twentieth-century metaphysics: some relations must be internal, or nothing is ever related to anything. That does not make it obviously right, but it does mean Vaiśeṣika is not being naïve. The sharper question is the one the Buddhist actually asks: why is this relation self-linking and conjunction not?
It depends what you take the system to be. If Vaiśeṣika is an attempt to say what there is on the evidence, then adding an entity for which the root text saw no need, some seven centuries later, is a warning sign. If it is a tradition of enquiry, then revising a position under argumentative pressure — and Praśastapāda's God does answer real gaps about the first motion of atoms — is what such traditions do. The honest description is that both things are true.
Probably not, and the reason is instructive. The commitments that generate the atomism — qualities inhering in substances, wholes over parts, number as a real quality — are the same commitments that block quantification, because they make every magnitude a quality of a particular rather than a measure. A theory whose atoms differ by an unanalysable particularity cannot get to combining ratios. The Rasa-ratna-samuccaya tradition of chapter 10, which measured things, developed almost entirely separately.
| IAST | Devanāgarī | Sense |
|---|---|---|
| abhāva | अभाव | Absence; the seventh category, of four kinds. |
| adṛṣṭa | अदृष्ट | The unseen: accumulated merit and demerit, and the school's name for any cause not evident. |
| asatkāryavāda | असत्कार्यवाद | The doctrine that an effect does not pre-exist in its cause. |
| avayavī | अवयवी | The whole, treated as a substance over and above its parts. |
| ayuta-siddhi | अयुतसिद्धि | Inseparability: the condition of things that cannot be found apart, which inherence relates. |
| dvyaṇuka · tryaṇuka | द्व्यणुक · त्र्यणुक | The dyad of two atoms; the triad of three dyads, and smallest perceptible body. |
| kāraṇa, threefold | कारण | Inherent, non-inherent and efficient cause. |
| paramāṇu | परमाणु | The partless, eternal atom. |
| pārimāṇḍalya | पारिमाण्डल्य | The atom's spherical minuteness — a magnitude that produces no magnitude. |
| pīlu-pāka · piṭhara-pāka | पीलुपाक · पिठरपाक | Baking at the atom; baking of the whole pot. |
| pratiyogin | प्रतियोगिन् | The counterpositive: what an absence is an absence of. |
| samavāya | समवाय | Inherence: the single, eternal, self-linking relation of inseparables. |
| saṃskāra | संस्कार | Disposition: elasticity, mental trace, and momentum. |
| trasareṇu | त्रसरेणु | The mote in a sunbeam — the triad, as observed. |
| viśeṣa | विशेष | Ultimate particularity, individuating eternal substances. The school's namesake. |