Kaṇāda

Kaṇāda is the sage credited with founding the Vaiśeṣika school of Indian philosophy and composing its root text, the Vaiśeṣika Sūtra. Nothing reliable is known of his life. Estimates of his date range from the sixth to the second century BCE, and the sūtras were probably put into their present form around the turn of the common era. Tradition linked his name, which can be read as 'grain-eater' or 'particle-eater', to his doctrine that the material world is built from tiny, eternal, indivisible atoms. The Vaiśeṣika Sūtra opens by promising an account of dharma, the means to prosperity and the highest good, and then sets out a catalogue of the basic kinds of thing there are. Later joined with the Nyāya school of logic, Vaiśeṣika became a main framework for Indian debates about substance, qualities and causation.

Key ideas

• Reality falls into six categories: substance, quality, motion, universal, particularity and inherence; later thinkers added a seventh, absence.
• There are nine substances: earth, water, fire, air, ether (ākāśa), time, space, self and mind.
• Material things are made of eternal, indivisible atoms that combine to form larger wholes.
• Each eternal thing has its own particularity (viśeṣa), which sets it apart from all others; the school takes its name from this idea.
• An effect is a new whole produced from its causes, not something already present in them, against the Sāṃkhya view.

Major works

• Vaiśeṣika Sūtra (attributed; compiled c. 2nd century BCE – 1st century CE)
• Padārthadharmasaṅgraha of Praśastapāda (c. 6th century CE), the classic later restatement of his system

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