Vaisheshika

The claim

Six categories exhaust reality: substance, quality, motion, universal, particularity, and inherence. The name comes from the fifth — vishesha, the ultimate particularity that makes one atom differ from another otherwise identical one.

What it held

Vaisheshika is a systematic ontology, and its distinctive contribution is the category the school is named for. If two atoms are exactly alike in every quality, what makes them two? Kanada answers: an irreducible particularity, present in each, doing nothing but individuating. It is the same problem Duns Scotus faced with haecceity, arrived at independently and about a thousand years earlier.

The atomism is worked out in detail. Earth, water, fire and air are atomic; ether, time, space, self and mind are not. Atoms are eternal and partless, combine in pairs and then in triads, and a triad is the smallest visible thing — which is offered as an explanation of why we see motes in sunlight and nothing smaller.

Inherence is the sixth category and the strangest: the relation by which a quality is in a substance, or a whole in its parts. It is not itself a quality, since that would start a regress, so it is given a category of its own.

The system is causally realist in a way that opposes Sāṃkhya directly: the effect is a genuinely new thing, not something already present in the cause.

How it argued

Exhaustive classification, tested by asking of any proposed entity which category it falls under and whether the list needs extending.

What it was arguing against

Sāṃkhya's doctrine that the effect pre-exists in its cause; Buddhist momentariness; and any account on which wholes are nothing over and above their parts.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether inherence is one relation or many. Whether particularity is coherent as a category. Later Vaisheshika added a seventh category, absence, which not everyone accepted.

Common misconceptions

That the atomism was inspired by the Greeks. The dating makes independent development at least as likely, and the physics is different — Vaisheshika atoms have qualities and combine in triads.

How it began

Attributed to Kanada, whose name means atom-eater. Almost nothing is known about him and the sutras are difficult and archaic.

What became of it

Merged with Nyaya from around the tenth century, since the two were compatible and Nyaya had the better epistemology.

Lasting influence

Its categories became standard equipment across Indian philosophy. The atomic theory shaped Indian physics and medicine for a millennium.

Why it still matters

The individuation problem it names is unresolved in contemporary metaphysics, and Vaisheshika's answer is one of the recognised options.

Put another way

Two grains of sand identical in every respect, and the fact that there are nevertheless two of them.

Where to start

Prashastapada rather than the sutras. It is what the tradition itself read.

The surprising bit

Kanada's name means atom-eater, apparently from a story about him gathering grains from a field. The founder of Indian atomism is known only by a nickname about picking up small things.

In their own words

Connections

Opposed by

Sāṃkhya school, Madhyamaka Buddhism

Influenced

Nyaya, Navya Nyaya

The verdict

An ontology built by asking what the shortest complete list of kinds of thing would be, and getting six.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy