Work · South Asian & Tibetan Philosophy
Vaisheshika Sutra
Aphorisms that sort reality into categories – substance, quality, motion, universal, particularity, inherence – and trace material things to atoms.
Introduction
The founding text of the Vaisheshika school, attributed to Kanada and arranged in ten books of short aphorisms; its date is disputed, and it survives in more than one recension. It opens with the promise to explain dharma and moves on to an inventory of what can be known and named. Besides the categories and the theory of indivisible atoms, it discusses the nine substances – earth, water, fire, air, ether, time, space, self and mind – as well as inference and the arguments for a self. The school’s name comes from vishesha, the ultimate particularity that distinguishes one atom or one self from another. From the late first millennium onwards Vaisheshika increasingly merged with Nyaya.
Connections
Taken up in
- Nyaya Sutrac. 150 · Akshapada Gautama
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