Vaiśeṣika Sūtra

The founding text of the Vaiśeṣika school, a collection of terse aphorisms in ten books traditionally ascribed to the sage Kaṇāda and probably compiled over a long period. It opens by promising to explain dharma, and holds that knowing the true nature of things leads to the highest good. Its main work is a catalogue of what exists, organised around what the school came to call the six categories (padārtha): substance, quality, motion, universal, particularity and inherence; later Vaiśeṣika added absence. There are nine substances: earth, water, fire, air, ether (ākāśa), time, space, self and mind. The text discusses how qualities and motions depend on substances, how wholes relate to their parts, and how causes produce effects, and it lays the ground for the school's atomism, developed in full by later commentators such as Praśastapāda. It also treats inference, the self known through signs such as breathing and desire, and the 'unseen' force (adṛṣṭa) behind karma.

It is the starting point of Indian realism and atomism, and a careful early attempt to list the basic kinds of things that exist and how they relate to one another.