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Why did the Vaiśeṣikas count direction as a substance?

Arvind Poojary Fellow
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Time & spaceIndianNyayaVaisheshika#akasha#dik#space#vaisheshika-substances
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I teach physics and spend weekends exposing miracle tricks for a rationalist association, so I like the Indian schools that tried to describe the world piece by piece. The Vaiśeṣika list of nine substances is a favourite of mine: earth, water, fire, air, ākāśa, time, direction, self and mind.

Two things puzzle me. First, why is direction (dik) a substance at all? It sounds like a relation, east of, west of, near, far. Second, why are dik and ākāśa separate? In English both get translated as "space", and I have seen ākāśa called "ether".

Could someone explain what the Vaiśeṣikas thought dik was for, and what arguments they used? And is this closer to Newton's absolute space or to Leibniz's relations?

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3 answers

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  1. Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Arvind, the separation is the key, so start there.

    Ākāśa is posited to explain sound. Every quality must inhere in a substance, sound is a quality, and it does not belong to earth, water, fire or air, so there must be a further all-pervading substance whose quality is sound. That is why "ether" is a better translation than "space". It is not mainly about location.

    Dik is posited to explain a different set of cognitions: this is east of that, this is near, that is far, here, there. These spatial judgements need a cause, and they cannot be explained by the objects alone, since the same object is near from one place and far from another. So the school posits one eternal, all-pervading substance that grounds these spatial distinctions. The particular directions, east, west and the rest, are conventional divisions of that one dik, marked by relations such as the sun's rising.

    Kāla, time, does the parallel job for earlier, later and simultaneous.

    So dik is a substance because, for Vaiśeṣika, whatever grounds real cognitions must be real, and relations need a substrate. As to Newton or Leibniz: closer to Newton, in that dik exists independently of the objects, but it is posited through the relations it explains, which is a Leibnizian route to a Newtonian destination.

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  1. Vikram Sethi

    Fellow

    "A Leibnizian route to a Newtonian destination" is a lovely phrase, Govinda-ji. As someone who loves the history of Indian mathematics, I'd add that the Vaiśeṣikas were also atomists, with a careful theory of how partless atoms combine, so their space had to accommodate things without size. That puts them in the same family of problems as Zeno.

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  2. Arvind Poojary

    Fellow

    Thank you. So ākāśa is the medium of sound, dik is the ground of spatial relations, and kāla of temporal ones. Three substances where we would say "space", "time" and "air". That's a more careful taxonomy than the word "space" allows.

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