Indian philosophy, the orthodox schools · c. 2nd c. BCE to 1st c. CE
Vaisheshika
Overview
What exists can be sorted into kinds: substance, quality, motion and the likeness that lets two things share a name.
Vaisheshika begins by refusing a blur. Kanada sorts what exists into kinds, so that a word is not asked to do every job at once. Substance is what bears the rest. Quality is what it is like. Motion is what it does. Generality is the likeness that lets two fires share a name. Particularity is what keeps this fire from being that one. Inherence is the tie that lets a quality belong to a substance rather than float nearby.
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The point of the list is that a mistake in kind is a mistake in the world. Call a motion a substance and you will go looking for it in the wrong place. Call a likeness a particular thing and you will treat a word as if it were an object you could put in a bag. The categories are a discipline of naming.
Later the school is read beside Nyaya, and the two share a great deal. Vaisheshika’s own gifts are the inventory and an early atomism: earth, water, fire and air are made of tiny, eternal atoms that combine into the things we see. Before you argue what a thing is worth, or what you ought to do with it, you owe a plain account of what sort of thing it is.
Where it answers
What is real?
The world is made of a few kinds of thing, substance, quality and motion among them, built up from tiny atoms.
Key terms
- Padartha
- The categories of everything that can be named and known, such as substance, quality and motion.
- Atoms (anu)
- The smallest, eternal particles of earth, water, fire and air.
- Substance
- That in which qualities and motions belong, such as earth, water, time, space and self.
- Quality
- A feature that belongs to a substance, such as color, number or size.
Further reading
- Vaisheshika Sutra · Kanada
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