An inventory of everything

This is the fourth of six posts in which I work through the six Indian philosophical schools one at a time, writing down what I have understood. The last post, on Nyāya, ended with a handshake: Nyāya found the roads to knowledge, and its companions took those roads and started asking what the world is made of. This is the school that asked. Its answer is a list, and the list is one of the earliest attempts anywhere to say, item by item, what kinds of thing exist.

A note on what this is, because this post is unlike the first three. I am not a scholar of Vaiśeṣika; I am a compiler, and these pages are my learning, set down in the order it made sense to me, from the teachers and books listed at the end. Vaiśeṣika rarely gets a treatment of its own, and what I learned of it came in pieces: an introduction that pairs it with Nyāya, an account of the liberation the two schools share, a short answer on space and time, two overviews of the six schools, an account of creation that states Vaiśeṣika's view in the mouth of its opponent, a reckoning of the Purāṇic units of time, and a children's story that gives the atom one paragraph. That is enough for about a third of the school. The rest, the categories, the argument for atoms, the name, the text, I have added from the Vaiśeṣika Sūtra and the standard histories, and every such passage is marked where it appears. The diagrams are mine. The strip below is the honest map.

Where it sits

The map to Nyāya's road

The picture of the two schools I was given is a division of labour. Gautama's Nyāya worked out the four means of knowledge; then "the companions of Nyāya started looking, on the basis of these pramāṇas, at what this world is made of. Who joined Nyāya in this? Vaiśeṣika." The method and the inventory stand together as one darśana, which my teacher names in English: realism. "As things are in the world, we accept them as they are, and proceed." On liberation he goes further and says the two are "one and the same thing", and a modern division I learned from another of my sources runs the same way: Vaiśeṣika is the metaphysics, the substratum; Nyāya is the epistemology, the way of understanding it; and the later union of the two is Navya-Nyāya.

The founder is Kaṇāda, named in passing by my teachers and nowhere described. The one-line summary I was given runs: "the atomist school, which deals with metaphysics; founded by Sage Kaṇāda; an objective and realistic philosophy of the universe, according to which the universe is reducible to a finite number of atoms." One of my teachers places Kaṇāda's work in Mithilā alongside Gautama's and gives him the question "how was this universe made", against Kapila's "what is it made of."

My addition, from the textbooks. Kaṇāda is also called Ulūka and Kāśyapa, and the school Aulūkya after him; the late legend that he lived on grains, kaṇa, gleaned from fields explains the name he is usually known by. "Vaiśeṣika" is from viśeṣa, particularity, the category that distinguishes one eternal atom from another otherwise identical one, and the school's habit of attending to differences. The Vaiśeṣika Sūtra is usually placed between the second century BCE and the first century CE. And where Nyāya admits four means of knowledge, Vaiśeṣika admits two, perception and inference, folding testimony and comparison into inference. None of my teachers mentions this difference.

Step 1

Seven categories

My teachers circle this list without ever giving it. In one place Nyāya "accepted nine padārthas"; on creation the count comes out as "nine padārthas, seven padārthas" in one breath; on space and time, padārtha is defined as "an element that constructs the world". The sūtra's own scheme makes the two numbers consistent: there are six (later seven) categories, and nine substances within the first of them.

Two of the categories do real work in the rest of the post. Samavāya, inherence, is the relation between things that cannot exist apart: a quality and its substance, a whole and its parts, a universal and its instances. The red of the pot is not in the pot the way water is in the pot; it inheres. And viśeṣa, particularity, exists because the school's atoms are eternal and, within one element, identical: something has to make this atom of earth this one rather than that one, and the school posits a category for it. That category gave the school its name.

Step 2

Nine substances, seen and unseen

The enumeration I learned was spoken rather than read, and it is the best account I have of how the list was built. Some constituents of the world are given directly to the senses, and some are not: the self is not seen, the ether is not seen. "So they said: take the ones that are seen. Fire is seen, air is seen; they took the five. After that they took ākāśa; after that space; after that time, which we do not see, but by inference we can know that time is passing. In this way they took manas, and they took the ātman." The hero figure above is this procedure drawn out, with the sūtra's nine in their places.

My addition, from the textbooks. The nine substances in that order are Vaiśeṣika Sūtra 1.1.5. The spoken list I learned has the five elements and then ākāśa again, so ether is counted twice, and it puts absence among the items taken; the sūtra keeps absence as a category, not a substance. The sizes (manas atomic, ātman all-pervading) and the one-sense-quality-per-element rule are from the later handbooks.

Step 3

The atom, and why there has to be one

The one place I found the atom explained for a layperson is a story of twenty philosophies told through a girl named Ira, who is staying with her grandfather in the hills. By this point in the story she has learned Sāṃkhya's Prakṛti and is puzzling over a list she has made by the stream. Everything on it is made of the same Prakṛti, yet "Prakṛti made the river, which flows, and the mountain, which stands still; some things shine, some are rough, some smooth, some fragrant. What is happening in the world that things made of the same stuff take such different forms and give such different experiences?"

Her grandfather answers on the stairs on the way to dinner. Prakṛti has three strands in it, too subtle to see; what we can see are the elements; and according to Vaiśeṣika "all the things in the world are made by the joining of tiny, tiny particles. These particles are so small that you cannot see them, so we call them paramāṇu. Whatever kind of particles an object has, the object has that kind of quality, and that is how we experience it." The atom, in other words, is introduced as the answer to the question of difference: not what everything is made of, which Sāṃkhya had answered, but why things made of it differ.

My addition, from the textbooks: the argument. The sūtra tradition proves the atom from the regress of division. If every piece of matter had parts, division would never end, and a mountain and a mustard seed would both be made of infinitely many parts, so there would be no reason for one to be larger than the other. Division must stop at something partless: the paramāṇu. Atoms are eternal; everything built from them comes to be and passes away. The first visible compound is the triad, the mote one sees in a sunbeam through a window, and the sizes below it are inferred from it. The children's story's "five kinds of atom, including ākāśa" is a slip by the school's own account: ether is a single all-pervading substance, and only earth, water, fire and air are atomic.

Step 4

Space and time are things, not gaps

The clearest statement I have is my teacher's short answer to a question someone put to him on the Indian idea of space and time. Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika and the Jains, he says, all accepted dik, space, and kāla, time, as padārthas in the form of substances: "a padārtha means an element that constructs the world." Space is "that in which all things are contained, in which all events occur." And time is where the Indian view parts from a modern one he attributes to a Western thinker: that time is the interval between one event and the next, so that if events stopped, time would end. "This was not accepted here. Time remains regardless. Whether events happen or not, they happen within that time; time stays beyond the events. Even if no event occurs, time remains, because for an event to occur time must exist first." He reverses the formula: the West says no events, no time; here it was said no time, no events.

He gives the exception at once. Śaṅkara says neither space nor time ultimately exists; Brahman alone is, and in the infinite there is no space and no time. But from the worldly point of view Śaṅkara accepts exactly what Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika accept: all events occur within time. And then the question everyone asks, who was before Brahman, gets his sharpest answer: the words are wrong. "Before" and "after" are time words; time began with the world; the infinite, which has no beginning and no end, admits no word of time at all. "We are using the language wrongly. It becomes a question of language. Infinity has no logic of before and after."

My addition, from the textbooks. The Vaiśeṣika argument for dik and kāla is an inference: we have the notions of near and far, and of before and after, and those notions need a substance to be about. Each is one, eternal and all-pervading. My teacher states that they are substances without giving the inference.

Step 5

The clock of the cosmos

If time is a thing, it can be measured, and the Hindu units of time are where my sources do so. The frame, as I learned it, is the Sūrya Siddhānta's distinction between two kinds of time: the formless, endless, destroying kind, personified as Yama, and the measurable kind, which has form and can be counted. Then the counted kind is built from both ends. From below, the ladder in the figure above: the atom, the dyad, the triad, the truṭi that three triads take to combine, and up through the blink of an eye to the hour and the day. From above, the Purāṇic units: a day and night of the gods is a human year; twelve thousand divine years make a mahāyuga of 4.32 million human years; seventy-one of those make a manvantara; fourteen manvantaras, roughly a thousand mahāyugas, make one day of Brahmā, 4.32 billion years, which is one creation; his night of equal length is one dissolution; and a hundred years of such days and nights, his life, comes to about 311 trillion years.

Step 6

A combiner, not a creator

The only account of Vaiśeṣika's creation I was given comes from its opponent, and my teacher gives it as a Sāṃkhya man would. Who holds that God made the world? "The asatkāryavādins, that is, the Nyāya people." Sāṃkhya and Vedānta do not: nothing comes from nothing, "God cannot make a circular triangle," so creation did not happen, evolution did, out of a Prakṛti that already contained everything. Then he turns the potter against the Nyāya side. "They say: first there was nothing, and God created new things. And how? Ask them and they say: there were these elements, these padārthas, these atoms. Now if the padārthas already existed, what did God do? The clay existed and the wheel existed and the potter made a pot. What did he make? Had he made the clay, fine." So, in his telling, the Sāṃkhya reply is that the God the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika side calls creator is only a combiner: "the atoms were lying scattered, and God gathered them. If he were the creator he would have shown us by creating atoms."

Set the mockery aside and the objection is an accurate description of the school. A survey of the six schools I learned from supplies the other two movers. Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika "speak of adṛṣṭa, an invisible principle which sways even over the material atoms and brings about objects and events in accordance with moral principles," which is the school's version of the moral order that the Ṛgveda calls ṛta and Mīmāṃsā apūrva; and in these two schools "the law of karma works under the command of God, who is the creator of the world," where in Sāṃkhya, Mīmāṃsā, Jainism and Buddhism it works on its own. Add the karma that reorganises the elements into the next body, and you have three hands on the atoms, named in three places and never put in one sentence.

My addition, from the textbooks. Historically the three are layers. Kaṇāda's sūtra is nearly silent on God and lets adṛṣṭa, the unseen residue of past action, start the motion of atoms when a creation begins and stop it when a dissolution comes: atoms to dyads, dyads to triads, triads to the elements, the elements to bodies, and the reverse. The explicitly theistic version, in which Īśvara's will sets adṛṣṭa and the atoms to work, is Praśastapāda's, several centuries later, and it is the one that survey reports. The famous proof of God by argument belongs to the Nyāya side, in Udayana, as the previous post described.

Step 7

Karma, the regrouping elements, and the stone soul

Because my teacher treats the two schools as one, their account of bondage and release was told in full in the Nyāya post, and only the Vaiśeṣika-flavoured part bears repeating. What suffers is the body, which is made of the elements; the self feels pleasure and pain only by contact with one. At death the elements are not destroyed, "they reorganise themselves according to your karma; the ātman is the same; the five elements of a dog organise themselves as a dog and surround your ātman, and you get a dog's birth." Good and bad karma both bring you back, one to enjoy and one to suffer, through 84 lakh kinds of birth, "a Birla or a Tata" at the top of the list. Liberation is the absolute separation of self from body, after which the self feels neither pleasure nor pain. Rivals said that makes it a stone. The reply: call it a stone if you like, its state cannot be described, but it is free of all sorrow. Nyāya called the state mukti and, in his telling, the Vaiśeṣika side mokṣa, and the two became one word.

That inert liberation is, in its way, the inventory's conclusion. The self is on the list as a substance like time and ether, eternal and all-pervading. Pleasure and pain are qualities, and qualities inhere in substances only under conditions: the self's conditions are a body and a mind. Remove the conditions and the qualities do not arise. A realist's heaven is the absence of everything that was wrong, and nothing added.

Step 8

A child's question, and the school's afterlife

Back at the dinner table in the story, Ira has one more question about the atoms, and it is the best question in the whole tale. If matter is made of different particles, "is sorrow also made of particles?" Her grandfather is astonished, and answers yes: some scholars hold that it is. Sorrow comes from karma, and the Jain philosophers say there are countless particles of karma inside your body and mine, invisible, which give birth to sorrow, and which can be killed by meditation. So in one conversation the Vaiśeṣika atom becomes the Jain karma particle: matter made of invisible units, and suffering made of invisible units too. It is a storyteller's blend rather than any school's doctrine, and a good illustration of how far the idea of the atom travelled once someone had it.

The school's own afterlife ran through its partner. One of my sources, on Indian logic and machine reasoning, reports a senior from IIT Bombay who spent seven years on Navya-Nyāya, "a relatively recent development that brings Vaiśeṣika and Nyāya together," in the hope of an alternative model of knowledge for machines, and gives Ayurveda as his example of where the pairing still works: "the substratum, the metaphysics, is Vaiśeṣika darśana, and the way of understanding all of it is Nyāya." That is the handshake again, eighteen centuries on: one school says what there is, the other says how we know it.

My addition, from the textbooks. The union just described is older and more gradual than "recent": syncretic Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika handbooks predate Gaṅgeśa's fourteenth-century Tattvacintāmaṇi, and the primer recommended in the Nyāya post, Annambhaṭṭa's seventeenth-century Tarkasaṃgraha, teaches the two schools as one system, with the seven categories as its spine. The comparison with Democritus that every popular article makes came up with none of my teachers, and this post leaves it out.

In one piece

The argument, start to finish

1. Nyāya found the roads to knowledge; Vaiśeṣika walked them to list what there is.the pairing · realism
2. Everything nameable falls under seven categories, and substance is the one that carries the rest.padārtha · dravya
3. There are nine substances: four you can see, five you can only infer, and absence is counted besides.the inventory
4. The four visible substances are built from eternal, partless atoms, because division has to stop somewhere.paramāṇu
5. The kind of atom a thing has gives it its qualities, which is why a river flows and a mountain stands.Ira's question
6. Atoms pair into dyads, dyads into triads, and the triad is the first thing the eye can see: the mote in the sunbeam.dvyaṇuka · tryaṇuka
7. Space and time are substances: containers in which events occur, not gaps between them.dik · kāla
8. So time can be measured, from the moment three motes combine up to the life of Brahmā.truṭi to kalpa
9. The atoms are moved, not made: by the unseen force of past action, or by God's will, which assembles what was already there.adṛṣṭa · the combiner
10. Karma rebuilds a body from the elements around the same self, birth after birth.the regrouping elements
11. The self feels pleasure and pain only through a body; separated from every body, it feels neither, and that is release.mokṣa · the stone soul
12. The two schools fused into one system, whose handbooks still teach the inventory first and the method second.Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika · Navya-Nyāya

Terms

Glossary

The school

वैशेषिक Vaiśeṣika

Kaṇāda's school; "the atomist school which deals with metaphysics"; named from viśeṣa.

कणाद Kaṇāda

The founder; also Ulūka and Kāśyapa; placed by one of my teachers in Mithilā beside Gautama.

वैशेषिकसूत्र Vaiśeṣika Sūtra

Kaṇāda's text; the lists in this post are from its first chapter. Never named by my teachers.

समानतन्त्र samāna-tantra

"Of one system": the Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika pair.

प्रशस्तपाद Praśastapāda

Author of the classical restatement of the school, with its theistic creation cycle.

The inventory

पदार्थ padārtha

Category; "an element that constructs the world." Six in the sūtra, seven with absence.

द्रव्य dravya

Substance; the carrier of qualities and motions. Nine.

गुण guṇa

Quality, in Vaiśeṣika's sense (not Sāṃkhya's three strands): colour, taste, weight and the rest.

कर्म karma

Motion, as a category; five kinds. Elsewhere, action and its fruit.

सामान्य sāmānya

The universal: what all pots share.

विशेष viśeṣa

Particularity: what tells one eternal atom from another.

समवाय samavāya

Inherence: the relation between things that cannot exist apart, a quality and its substance.

अभाव abhāva

Absence, counted as real; "one more thing they took."

आकाश ākāśa

Ether: one, all-pervading, not atomic; the substance of sound.

दिक् · काल dik · kāla

Space and time, as substances. "Kāla is mighty."

अकाल akāla

Beyond time: Brahman, to which before and after do not apply.

मनस् · आत्मन् manas · ātman

Mind, atomic in size; self, all-pervading and many.

The atom

परमाणु paramāṇu

"Particles so small you cannot see them"; eternal and partless.

द्व्यणुक · त्र्यणुक dvyaṇuka · tryaṇuka

Dyad and triad; the Bhāgavata's aṇu and trasareṇu.

त्रसरेणु trasareṇu

The mote in the sunbeam; six atoms; the smallest visible thing.

त्रुटि truṭi

The time three motes take to combine; the first unit of the Purāṇic clock.

अदृष्ट adṛṣṭa

The unseen moral force that "sways even over the material atoms."

असत्कार्यवाद asatkāryavāda

The view that the effect is new, not pre-existing in its cause; my teacher's label for the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika side.

Time

मूर्त · अमूर्त काल mūrta · amūrta kāla

Measurable time and formless, destroying time, in the Sūrya Siddhānta as I learned it.

महायुग · मन्वन्तर · कल्प mahāyuga · manvantara · kalpa

4.32 million years; 71 of those; a day of Brahmā, 4.32 billion years.

सृष्टि · प्रलय sṛṣṭi · pralaya

Creation and dissolution: Brahmā's day and night.

The end

आत्यन्तिक वियोग ātyantika viyoga

Absolute separation of the self from the body: liberation.

मोक्ष · मुक्ति mokṣa · mukti

The Vaiśeṣika and Nyāya words for it, as I was taught; later synonyms.