Vaisheshika Sutra

The founding text of the darshana that asks what there is, and answers with a list. The Vaisheshika Sutra, attributed to Kanada, is the oldest systematic ontology in Indian philosophy and the origin of its atomism.

What it is

Aphorisms in ten adhyayas, setting out the categories, the padarthas, into which everything that exists can be sorted: substance, quality, motion, universal, particular and inherence, with absence added by the later tradition. The school takes its name from vishesha, particularity, the category that individuates one atom from another otherwise identical to it.

The opening pair of sutras sets the frame, and it is deliberately close to the Mimamsa opening while turning in a different direction: an inquiry announced, and then dharma defined by way of what produces prosperity and the highest good.

The atomism follows from an argument about division. Matter cut and cut again must terminate in something indivisible, or the smallest mustard seed and the largest mountain would contain equal infinities. The paramanu, the ultimate atom, is what division stops at. Four kinds of atom, earth, water, fire and air, combine in pairs and triads to make the perceptible world.

Two recensions

The text survives in two forms, and anyone citing it should know which. The Candrananda recension, with Candrananda’s brief commentary, was recovered and edited in the twentieth century and is generally taken as closer to the older text. The Upaskara recension is the one transmitted with Shankara Mishra’s fifteenth-century commentary of that name, and is the version most older translations follow. The two differ in sutra division and in places in wording, though the opening aphorisms are identical in both.

How it reached English

Nandalal Sinha translated it for the Sacred Books of the Hindus series in 1911. That translation is public domain and remains the accessible English route, though it follows the Upaskara recension and reads Kanada through Shankara Mishra’s much later eyes.

For modern treatment, Wilhelm Halbfass’s On Being and What There Is is the standard study of the ontology, and Karl Potter’s volume of the Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies covers the Nyaya-Vaisheshika tradition down to Gangesha.

What is not in it

A god, in the original. The theism that later Nyaya-Vaisheshika is known for, with Ishvara as the efficient cause who sets the atoms moving, is not in Kanada’s sutras. It is a development of the tradition, argued for by later writers, and reading it back into the base text is one of the commonest errors in popular accounts of the school.