This post builds on the framework explored in a previous post: Navigating Indian Philosophy
Growing up, I would occasionally hear quips about the advanced thinking that supposedly existed in Ancient India. “They first conceptualized the number zero, you know…” ; “The pillars of astronomy were known to the Vedic sages..” ; and other similar allusions, which always seemed equal parts intriguing and dubious. As I’ve delved into the orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy over the past year, I have indeed been surprised by the rigor that exists throughout the ancient systems. No system, however, has been more peculiar - and more evocative of those childhood quips - than the Vaisheshika school, which presents a highly specific atomic structure of the universe.
As with most strands of Vedic philosophy, the Vaisheshika system lacks a precise origin story. It’s known to have initially developed alongside the Nyaya school (which is discussed in a previous post), before the two systems became more formally intertwined. The principal author of the foundational Vaisheshika Sutras was a sage known as Kanada, who lived sometime between the 6th and 2nd centuries BCE. Among all of the Vedic Period philosophy that I’ve studied thus far, Kanada’s treatise struck me as a singularly ambitious attempt to reconcile both spiritual and material reality within a consistent framework.
While that framework contains myriad components and considerations, in this post I’ll focus on two that struck me. The first is the “naturalist ontology” that underpins the Vaisheshika system. The second is Kanada’s approach to atomic theory.
Ontology with Soul
In philosophy writ large, an ontology conventionally provides a useful categorization of some domain of interest. Ancient Greece provided no shortage of “scoped” ontologies that covered domains like psychology and medicine, along with fundamental ontologies that claimed to represent the underlying categories and structural nature of reality. As Western philosophy unfolded, the intricacy of these categorizations evolved - often reflecting the conceptual progressions in mathematics and empirical science (e.g., Leibniz’s and Spinoza’s respective works). In contrast with most Western constructs, the Vaisheshika school begins with a framework that derives several of its specific categories from a theological source (The Vedas).
In Kanada’s ontology, there are six fundamental dimensions of reality, known as the padarthas. The first padartha is known as dravya, or substance; it is the category that other padarthas “inhere within” - serving as a sort of substrate for other aspects of reality. The first five types of dravya are the primary elemental forces described in The Vedas: Earth (Prthivi); Water (Jala); Air (Vayu); Light (Tejas); and Ether (Akasa).
Interestingly, it seems that early in both Vaisheshika and Nyaya development, there was a detailed association between each of these physical substances, and the bodily senses. This provides a justification for including ether (akasa) as a physical substance: it is the medium that carries sound. These associations evolved over time; first as a 1:1 mapping between the elements and the senses; and eventually to accommodate the fact that often multiple senses are needed to validate (seemingly) objective claims made about the material world.
The remaining four types of substance (dravya) are considered the subtle substances, and as we’ll examine in a bit, are beholden to different underlying mechanics than the five elements. The subtle substances are Time (Kala), Space (Dik), Mind (Manas), and Soul (Atman). In Kanada’s framework, each of these requires some additional attributes (i.e., the other padarthas) in order to actually be discernible to human sensation. This ontological treatment of the subtle substances, in particular, has been a primary source of debate between Vaisheshika scholars and various Buddhist schools, over the centuries.
To grossly oversimplify: Buddhist inquiry finds it illogical that a substance could exist independent of its discernible attributes; i.e., why is it sensible to assume that there’s an underlying substance, that all of the discernible attributes need to exist “within”? The Vaisheshika rebuttal, at its core, employs the notions of essence and abstract form: how can we maintain the shared mental construction of an object after its been mutated or destroyed, if there is no consistent underlying substrate? What allows us to even make qualitative comparisons, if there isn’t some consistency in the underlying domain of evaluation?
As you might imagine, these ontological arguments tend to dig towards the very core of each philosophical system - often centering around the true nature of the mind, and whether or not an eternal soul actually exists. The Vaisheshika school maintains that each person does possess an immortal soul, and that the goal of each soul is to achieve liberation. Liberation (moksha) is accomplished through the removal of physical and egoistic “impurities” that are attached to the soul, and rising above the metaphysical ignorance that we’re all born into. The practical imperative here has been open to wide interpretation - with some Vaisheshika schools believing that the only path to liberation is ultimately an ascetic path, and others prescribing modes of engaging with the world that seek to minimize material entrapment.
Notably, in contrast to the Nyaya school, most Vaisheshika scholars do posit the notion of a Supreme Godhead (in the personalized form Ishvara, rather than the impersonal Brahman), that effectively functions as a cosmic overseer, responsible for all of the mechanics that function across the intertwined padarthas. The conception is somewhat evocative of Deism, which views God as a cosmic clockmaker at the heart of a lawful universe.
We’ve only covered the very basics regarding the fundamental substances (dravyas), and their implications. Recall that there are six more primitive dimensions (padarthas) required to understand any object, in Kanada’s estimation: Quality (Guna), Action (Karma), Generality (Samanya), Particularity (Visesa), and Inherence (Samavaya). Each of these dimensions has its own rich intricacies, and specific characteristics when paired with each other padartha. Quality has 24 subdivisions, which include color, taste, smell, touch, numerical composition, knowledge, and other things often considered as “qualities”. Action, or Karma, is the activity occurring within a given substance - with the primary action regimes being: upward movement, downward movement, contraction, expansion, and locomotion.
Suffice to say, each of the padarthas is a world unto itself - and provide compelling entry points for future posts. Even in my limited reading, I’ve been amazed by the combinatorial complexity that Vaisheshika scholars have spent the centuries digging through - postulating what effects a specific substance (be it a mustard seed or a soul) might experience, when placed under different physical and subtle conditions, and different spans of time. While you could argue that it looks leaps of imagination to assemble the underlying framework, the logical consequences of that framework all flow forth with surprisingly minimal ambiguity.
Indivisible Underpinnings
At the core of Kanada’s theory of substances is a strikingly familiar paradigm: atomicity. He arrived at the idea through the negation of what he viewed to be absurd: the universe, if it truly could be described through a systemic and realist ontology, could not contain infinite subdivisions. There had to be a fundamental and foundational deconstructive “backstop” to any category being considered; and in his formulation, that fundamental unit was the paramanu, or individual atom. The entirety of existence - from boulders to emotions - had to consist of different arrangements of these atomic units.
Kanada continues on to describe atoms as spherical, and optimized for constant motion. Each atom, he asserts, is eternal and is one of the nine types of substance that we discussed earlier. Within each atom, there are varying amounts of the other attributes (padarthas) described - which function at the singular level, and also express different phenomena when combined together. Kanada offers a very specific theory for how atoms are combined, among the elemental substances: individual atoms (paramanu) combine into a two-atom dyad (dyanuka); and three dyads form into a triad (tryanuka). The tryanuka is the smallest perceptible composite of any substance - whether fire, water, or the soul we perceive through deep meditation.
In addition to combinatorics, Kanada elaborates upon the supposedly “fleeting” perceptibility of individual atoms, and circumstances under which different molecular arrangements will result in observable change. Notably, the Vaisheshika system maintains that there are a diversity of different types of atoms - each pertaining one of the nine substances, and with their own characteristics: for instance, “space” atoms cannot hold color in the same way that several of the elemental atoms can; they also act differently under the effects of time, motion, and different forms of inter-atomic collision. This heterogeneity is sometimes contrasted with the Classical Greek formulations of atomicity, which (largely) conceive of a more homogeneous and consistent microscopic world.
Onward
Given the highly schematic nature of the Vaisheshika school, it’s tempting to keep peeling the onion on the different layers of detail - across the different padarthas, and within the different regimes of interaction that occur at both the atomic and macro scales. I’ll conclude things for now, with the hope that I’ll be able to revisit the school in greater detail through upcoming efforts. Beyond all of the rich detail, there’s a compelling core to Kanada’s quest: the belief that the material and spiritual worlds can both be examined with rigor, and can coexist within a unified framework. While many of the specific axioms of the Vaisheshika school have been obviated by modern science, I still feel like there’s much to learn from the magnitude of its ambition.