Vaisheshika School

Historical Background and Texts

The Vaisheshika School (Vaiśeṣika) is one of the six classical orthodox (āstika) Hindu darśanas, noted especially for its systematic atomism and categorical analysis of reality. Tradition attributes its founding to Kaṇāda (also called Ulūka), sometimes dated around the 2nd–1st century BCE, though the ideas it codifies may be older.

The foundational text is the Vaiśeṣika Sūtra, a concise aphoristic work outlining doctrines on substances, qualities, motion, and liberation. Over time, the school’s teachings were expanded and clarified in commentaries, the most influential of which is Praśastapāda’s Padārtha-dharma-saṃgraha (c. 5th–6th century CE). Later thinkers such as Śrīdhara, Udayana, and others further developed and defended Vaisheshika positions, often in close engagement with Nyāya and with Buddhist and Jain critics.

By the medieval period, Vaisheshika thought had effectively merged with the Nyāya School, resulting in the composite Nyāya–Vaisheshika tradition, particularly in metaphysics and epistemology. Nonetheless, “Vaisheshika” continues to designate the system’s distinctive concern with categories (padārthas) and particularity (viśeṣa).

Metaphysics and Categories

Vaisheshika is best known for its realist metaphysics and categorical scheme. It holds that all that can be meaningfully discussed or truly known falls under a finite list of basic padārthas (“objects of predication” or “categories”). The classic list includes six, later expanded to seven:

1. Dravya (Substance) – The underlying bearers of qualities and motions. Vaisheshika enumerates nine basic substances:

   • Earth, Water, Fire, Air – material elements composed of atoms
   • Ether (ākāśa) – medium of sound
   • Time (kāla) and Space (diś) – non-atomic, all-pervasive entities
   • Self (ātman) – individual selves, many in number
   • Mind (manas) – an internal, atomic organ mediating cognition
     Substances are eternal at the level of their atoms or basic forms, though composite bodies are created and destroyed.

2. Guṇa (Quality) – Properties that inhere in substances but lack independent existence, such as color, taste, number, size, contact, remoteness, and others. Qualities explain observable differences without positing new substances.

3. Karma (Motion) – Specific kinds of movement (such as upward, downward, contraction, expansion, and general locomotion). Motion, like quality, exists only in substances, especially in atoms and composite bodies.

4. Sāmānya (Universal) – Common natures shared by many individuals, such as “cowness” in all cows or “substantiality” in all substances. Vaisheshika treats universals as real and eternal, inhering in particulars and enabling classification and conceptual thought.

5. Viśeṣa (Particularity) – The principle that individuates otherwise indistinguishable eternal entities, especially atoms and selves. Particularity ensures that multiple atoms of the same kind remain numerically distinct.

6. Samavāya (Inherence) – A special, inseparable relation connecting substances with their qualities, wholes with their parts, and universals with particulars. It is introduced to account for intimate connections that cannot be reduced to ordinary contact.

7. (Later) Abhāva (Non-existence) – Absence or negation, treated in later Vaisheshika and especially in Nyāya–Vaisheshika as a distinct category to explain meaningful statements about “what is not,” such as the absence of a pot on a table.

A hallmark of Vaisheshika is its atomism: all composite material objects are ultimately reducible to indivisible, eternal atoms (paramāṇu) of earth, water, fire, and air. Atoms combine through specific motions and contacts, under the influence of unseen moral forces (adṛṣṭa) and divine regulation. Proponents use this theory to explain change, diversity of forms, and the stability of natural kinds, while maintaining that ultimate constituents remain unchanged.

Vaisheshika’s theology generally accepts a supreme Lord (Īśvara) who orders the universe, though the degree of emphasis on theism varies among authors. The school maintains a plurality of selves (ātman), each associated with its own body and mind, undergoing cycles of birth and rebirth according to karmic merit and demerit.

Epistemology and Ethics

In epistemology, Vaisheshika is traditionally more limited than Nyāya. Early Vaisheshika prominently recognizes two pramāṇas (means of valid knowledge):

• Perception (pratyakṣa) – Direct sensory cognition, mediated by the mind’s contact with sense organs and objects. Perception is considered fundamentally veridical when unobstructed, grounding knowledge of substances, qualities, and motions.
• Inference (anumāna) – Knowledge derived through reasoning from observed signs to unobserved facts (for example, inferring fire from smoke). Inference relies on stable universal relations (vyāpti) such as “where there is smoke, there is fire.”

Later Nyāya–Vaisheshika authors integrate a fuller list of pramāṇas (adding comparison and testimony), but Vaisheshika’s core orientation remains empiricist and realist, holding that cognition, when produced by reliable causal processes, corresponds to mind-independent entities.

On ethics and soteriology, Vaisheshika shares many assumptions with other Hindu schools while placing its main emphasis on metaphysical analysis rather than moral theory. It regards:

• Dharma as the complex of ritual, social, and moral duties that produce beneficial unseen results (adṛṣṭa).
• Karma as the moral law linking actions to future experiences, including rebirth.
• Mokṣa (liberation) as the cessation of suffering and rebirth, achieved ultimately through true knowledge (jñāna) of the categories and the self’s distinctness from body and mental states.

In the liberated state, the self is said to persist but without pleasure, pain, or worldly entanglement. Some interpreters see this as a condition of value-neutral isolation; others emphasize its freedom from all forms of duḥkha (suffering). Critics have questioned whether this conception is appealing or coherent, while proponents defend it as the logical conclusion of their ontology.

Legacy and Influence

Vaisheshika has exerted a considerable influence on Indian philosophical history, especially through its later convergence with Nyāya. The Nyāya–Vaisheshika synthesis became a dominant framework in classical debates over metaphysics, logic, and philosophy of language, engaging intensively with Buddhist, Jain, Mīmāṃsā, and Vedānta interlocutors.

The school’s atomism and category theory attracted both admiration and criticism. Buddhist philosophers challenged the coherence of enduring substances and universals, while Advaita Vedāntins argued that Vaisheshika realism failed to recognize the ultimately non-dual nature of reality. In turn, Nyāya–Vaisheshika authors used Vaisheshika’s detailed ontology to defend common-sense realism and the reliability of ordinary cognition.

In modern scholarship, Vaisheshika is often discussed in the context of comparative metaphysics and early theories of matter, though most historians emphasize that its concerns and methods are deeply rooted in the classical Indian intellectual milieu rather than in proto-scientific inquiry in a modern sense.

Contemporary interest continues in Vaisheshika’s theory of categories, its account of universals and particulars, and its distinctive solution to problems of inherence and individuation, making it an important reference point in the study of global philosophical traditions.