Vaisheshika

(“noting characteristics”) One of the
six schools of traditional Hindu
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Vaisheshika
philosophy, and a school whose special
concern was the elucidation of physics
and metaphysics. The Vaisheshika
analysis of the categories for the
universe was later combined with the
stress on reasoning in another of the six
schools, the Nyayas, to form the NyayaVaisheshika school, sometimes called
the Naiyayikas. The Vaisheshika school
was atomistic—that is, it espoused the
belief that all things were made up of a
few basic constituent things—and this
atomism was the root of the school’s
metaphysics. Philosophically speaking,
the Vaisheshikas were realists—that is,
they thought that the world was made
up of many different things and that
these things actually existed as perceived, except in cases of perceptual
error. They believed that all things were
composed of nine fundamental substances—the five elements, space, time,
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Vaisheshika
One of the many forms of Vishnu. Vishnu’s followers are known as Vaishnavas.
mind, and Selves—and that whatever
exists was both knowable and nameable. The Vaisheshikas subscribed to the
causal model known as asatkaryavada,
which posited that when a thing was
created, it was a whole new aggregate,
completely different from its constituent parts. This causal model tends
to multiply the number of things in the
universe because each act of creation
brings a new thing into being. It also
admits that human efforts and actions
are one of the causes influencing these
effects, making it theoretically possible
to act in a way that brings final liberation of the soul (moksha).
According to the Vaisheshika analysis, the objects of experience can be
divided into six categories: substances,
qualities, activity, universals, particulars, and inherence (samavaya); some
later Vaisheshikas add a seventh category,
absences. The first three categories
can be perceived, whereas the others
must be inferred, but the concept of
inherence is central to their system of
thought. Inherence is the subtle glue
connecting all the elements of the universe: wholes and their parts, substances and their qualities, motions and
the things that move, general properties
with their particular instances, and most
important, pleasure and pain to the Self.
The philosophical problems with inherence—particularly the notion that it was
one single principle and not a collection
of things—caused them great difficulty
and were responsible for the rise
of Navyanyaya school, which attempted
to explain these relationships in a
more sophisticated way. For further
information see Karl H. Potter and
Sibajiban Bhattacharyya (ed.), Indian
Philosophical Analysis, 1992; and
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles
A. Moore (eds.), A Sourcebook in Indian
Philosophy, 1957.