- Length
- 220 pagesSinha, The Vaisesika Sutras of Kanada, 1911 - with the commentary of Sankara Misra
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Vaisesika Sutra
The most systematic attempt in ancient India to produce a complete inventory of what exists, and one of the two independent traditions in world philosophy that arrived at atomism. Its categories became the furniture of Indian metaphysics, used and argued over by schools that shared none of its conclusions.
- Date
- c. 100 BC - 100 AD
- Attributed to
- Kanada
- Region
- Northern India
- Language
- Sanskrit
- 1911 English, Nandalal Sinha With Sankara Misra's commentary; public domain Attested
- 1961 English, Anantalal Thakur From the recovered manuscript tradition Consensus
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Opens — Starts a line of argument nothing before it was answering
- Form
- Sutra
- Method
- Sutra and commentary — A compressed root text carried by its commentary
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Superseded — Overtaken by later work rather than defeated
The school ceased to exist independently, merging with Nyaya, and its ontology was carried forward inside that tradition rather than on its own.
What the book says
An attempt to say what kinds of thing there are, and to make the list complete. Everything that exists, Kanada proposes, falls under a small number of categories: substances, qualities, motions, universals, particularities, and the relation of inherence by which a quality belongs to the substance that has it. There are nine substances - earth, water, fire, air, ether, time, space, self and mind - and the first four are made of atoms, indivisible and eternal, which combine into pairs and then into triads to produce the smallest visible thing. The world is periodically dissolved into these atoms and reassembled from them. The qualities are enumerated and examined one by one: colour, taste, smell, touch, number, size, separateness, contact, disjunction, priority, posteriority, cognition, pleasure, pain, desire, aversion, effort. Motion is treated as its own category rather than as a quality, because a thing that moves is not thereby different in kind. The category the school is named for is particularity - the bare thisness that makes two otherwise identical atoms two rather than one - and it is the most contested item on the list.
What it argues
That reality is exhaustively describable, and that the description takes the form of a list of categories with substance at the head. Its atomism is arrived at by an argument from division: matter can be divided, division cannot go on for ever without matter becoming nothing, so there must be indivisible units, and they must be eternal since anything with parts can be destroyed. The distinctive addition is particularity - if two atoms of earth share every quality, something must still make them two, and that something is a bare individuating feature with no further content. The whole scheme is realist and pluralist: the categories are features of the world, not of language or thought, and there is no single underlying reality of which they are aspects.
How it argues
By enumeration and division. The characteristic move is to propose a category, ask what falls under it, and then ask whether any proposed member really belongs or belongs somewhere else - an approach that looks like taxonomy and is doing metaphysics, since deciding that motion is not a quality is a substantive claim about the world. Like the Nyaya Sutras it is written in aphorisms and cannot be read without a commentary, and in this case the commentary tradition effectively replaced the original: for most of its history the school was known through Prashastapada rather than through Kanada.
The moment
Composed in the same period of open inter-school debate as the Nyaya Sutras, and evidently in dialogue with the Buddhist analysis of things into momentary elements. Where Buddhism dissolves the enduring object into a stream of events, Vaisesika insists that there are enduring things with properties that inhere in them, and much of the later argument between the two traditions is a proxy for that disagreement.
How it travelled
Inside another school. Vaisesika and Nyaya, close in their realism and complementary in their concerns - one an ontology, the other an epistemology - drew together over centuries and by the eleventh had merged into a single tradition, which is how the categories survived. The sutras themselves were poorly transmitted and partly corrupt; better manuscripts recovered in the twentieth century have improved the text considerably, and the school's reputation with historians of philosophy has risen with them.
The strongest objection
That particularity is a device introduced to save the theory. Its only function is to distinguish atoms that are otherwise indistinguishable, it has no properties of its own, and nothing detects it - which makes it exactly the kind of entity the system's own economy of categories ought to exclude. Buddhist critics said so, and the objection is recognisably the one raised in European philosophy against bare particulars. The Vaisesika reply, that something must account for numerical difference where qualitative difference is absent, states the problem rather than answering the charge that the solution is empty.
Why read it
Only in company. The sutras alone are opaque and damaged; the system as Prashastapada presents it is the readable form, and it repays a reader interested in seeing an ontology built from scratch with no reference to the Greek vocabulary that shaped every European attempt at the same thing.
- First printed
- 1861
- First in English
- 1911
- Digitised
- Partial
The transmitted text is damaged and was read for centuries through Prashastapada's independent summary of the sixth century, which reorganises the doctrine and is in practice the school's standard statement.
Nandalal Sinha's 1911 English is public domain. Modern scholarly treatments are in copyright and generally present the system rather than the sutras.
Where it stands
Superseded as a school and live as a subject. Its atomism is of historical interest only, but the category scheme is studied seriously in comparative metaphysics, and the treatment of universals, particulars and inherence is recognised as addressing the same problems as the European debates about properties and individuation, by a different route.
On quoting this book
Public domain in Sanskrit and in Sinha's English, but the sutras are unintelligible without commentary and the text is corrupt in places. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
The date, the identity of Kanada and the integrity of the text are all uncertain, and the manuscript recovered in the twentieth century differs enough from the received version to have changed accepted readings. Whether the system is originally atheistic - the sutras do not clearly argue for a creator, though the later school does - is disputed and matters for how the tradition developed. The number of categories varies between six and seven across the tradition, with absence added later, which is itself a substantive metaphysical disagreement rather than a matter of bookkeeping.