Non-religious philosophy in ancient India

[Aedes]

I was browsing through an Asian Religions book of mine and found a very interesting section on some non-religious philosophy in ancient India, found in the Vaisheshika Sutra, elaborated by the sage Kanada in the 6th century BCE (i.e. older than Buddhism).

From Vaisheshika comes an elaborate type of early physics or metaphysics. The material world is composed of eternal, indivisible atoms of earth, air, fire, or water, as well as an ether, which is a fifth element that is inert and cannot combine with the other elements.

The elements are combined in various ways that can be divided into 6 categories of perception (or description). The first is substance, which was divided into 9 types (earth, water, light, air, ether, time, space, self, and mind). Substance could be known only through direct perception or through inference from direct perception. Time could be inferred, because one directly experiencing now could also conceive of a future, and thus what lies between now and the future must be time -- and since time is irreducible to anything else it must be a substance in its own right.

The second category is quality -- color, smell, sound, number, happiness, size, distance, lightness, fluidity, etc.

The third category is motion, which also explains changes.

Interestingly, the fourth category is universals which explains similarities between things, and the fifth category is particularity. This is a neat contrast to Plato, who overlays a value judgement on this.

The sixth category is inherence -- which is used to analyze how all these categories cohere in an object as a whole.

An additional seventh category is nonexistence, which was held necessarily to exist on the premise that negation is possible.


Vaisheshika is often associated with a school of logic called Nyaya. These were two of the six orthodox schools of ancient Indian philosophy, or astika.

[ogden]

Thank you for that enlightening post. I had no idea that such an encompassing and coherent philosophy was depicted so early in history.

Do you think it was wide spread? I mean do you think Socrates read it, or Buddha, was it in the library at Alexandria?

[Aedes]

I don't think it was available that distantly, even though the writing has been preserved to this day. Aside from common Indoeuropean origins, Greece and India didn't have much contact with each other until Alexander the Great, and he came after Socrates (he was a contemporary of Aristotle).

This kind of early, speculative physics is very similar to what Aristotle undertook a few hundred years later, and certainly independently. I think Aristotle was probably influenced by the Milesian pre-Socratics like Thales (who held that water was fundamental) and Anaximenes (who held that air was fundamental). But I think Aristotle and Kanada (of the Vaisheshika Sutra) probably were like kids capturing frogs -- they liked to observe the world around them, and both devised organizational schema for understanding the visible world.

The foundations of Buddhism (like the four noble truths and the eightfold path) stradle the divide between metaphysics and ethics (i.e. how the world is and how we ought to act). Buddhism isn't (in my reading) too concerned with categorization of observible things.

In fact Buddhism is one of the nastika schools, which is distinguished from the astika schools like Vaisheshika by its rejection of Vedic authority (the ancient, foundational texts of Hinduism).

[Didymos Thomas]

A "non-religious" sutra?

Apart from my confusion about that term, this is certainly interesting. I'm vaguely familiar with the connection between Thales and Greek philosophy; I was always taught Thales was the first western "philosopher".

I was certainly educated with a western bias. If we were taught so and so did it first, so and so was from the west. Eastern history is largely ignored in American schools, especially Indian history. I'd never heard the name Ashoka before reading into some material myself, but of course I knew several relatively unimportant Greek rulers.

[Aedes]

A sutra is not necessarily a religious text:

Sūtra - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Keep in mind that the Vaisheshika Sutra pre-dates the Upanishads, so there was probably a lot more heterogeneity in the philosophies of India at the time. This philosophy was eventually subsumed within Vedantic thought, so what was preserved became part of a religious culture. But my book points out that ancient India DID have a discrete rationalist and empirical philosophical school that was ultimately rejected by mainstream thought -- it's not accurate to think that this was just some outgrowth of religious thought. Of course this was true for much of Christian European philosophical history as well -- there was a pretty big hiatus (i.e. like 1500 years) in which God was held primary and reason was held secondary. It was not until Descartes' rejection of Scholasticism that this changed.

Thales was the first (known) Greek philosopher to come up with a speculative philosophy; his was based on the idea that water was the primary element of existence.