[Music] so the next darshana or tradition that we will try and get acquainted with is vaisheshika it is generally paired with nyaya it is traditionally attributed to one another Rishi ah along with panini whom you may have heard in some other context like vyakarana kanada is another very important Rishi these two are supposed to have found given the methods for all other shastras the Kana the vaishika sutras are supposed to have been authored by kanatha in fifth century there was a another scholar by the name who has given the commentary on these sutras ah later on towards the end of the first Millennia it merged along with nyaya and today what we have is a syncretic combined school called Yaya vaisheshika the vaisheshika the term if you see it derives itself from the another Sanskrit world called vishesha which means difference or unique attribute of a particular thing so there are multiple entities in this world so the stand or this camera or this laptop Etc each of these things is different from each other if you take two stands also or if you take two laptops let us say of the same company even then you will see some distinction between them so they try to recognize this diversity but at the same time they try to classify it as easily as possible and that is the reason why they get the word vishesha they try to find out or they they noticed an important feature or an important entity called vishesha which is peculiar to each entity because of which it is different from another entity they believed that diversity is fundamental to all aspects of the world or diversity is the fundamental aspect of the world you take other Traditions like vedanta or especially advaita vedanta they will say that the whole world is just one it is Brahman whereas if you remember both the nyaya as well as the vaishi shikha believed that whatever we get from unknown predicted experience should be true or should be real and all of us from our day to day experience we know that there are multiple entities in the world so there are diverse entities we don't see one entity everywhere some maybe sages Etc may see it but all the rest of us see different entities so for us diversity is the given experience or it is the day-to-day experience so the vaishika also tried tried to take this common experience and try to give a theory for that however as a theoretician it is very difficult for us to give a explanation for each and every entity if I have to give one explanation for this stand one explanation for the mind one explanation for the sky another explanation for this chair Etc there will be a whole lot of theories which I have to explain or a whole lot of theories infinite objects in fact which I will have to explain so the easier way out for theoretician is to classify these various entities into certain categories so what you have to do is that you have to just explain that category what is the nature of that category if I explain the nature of the category I would have explained the nature of every other thing that is there inside that category so they try to develop a set of categories under which you can subsume all the entities in the world whether it be a stand or a laptop or a mind or a cognition or whatever it is I can put it in certain number of baskets if I give you the general definition of the basket all the entities within that basket would have been explained this was the strategy that they took and according to them a knowledge of these uh categories was important to get Liberation they tried to classify the all the entities that we have in the world into seven categories six of these things are existent categories or bhava padarthas and one is non-existent or a let us say absence category we will come to that later but the six categories of existence or bhava padatas are dravya Guna Karma samanya vishesha samavaya so these are the six categories of existence so all the entities that you take in this world they can be put into any one of these six categories to this we add one more category called abhava or absence with these seven categories I can describe almost any phenomenon that happens in this world let us take a brief example and see how this happens take a simple sentence okay like no brown cow walks here so this is the sentence that I have just to repeat no brown cow walks here so now in this sentence there are different words each of these word belongs to a different different category for example the word cow belongs to a category called dravya or substance here which is a spatial term it here represents some spatial location isn't it so according to the vaishika even space is a substance because it can have certain things inside it so the word cow and here fall under the category called substance so if you take them individually cow is a different entity whereas space is a different entity now what the YC I have done is that they have scrubbed both of them into a single category called substance or dravya so these two stand for a category called dravya then there is the word called Brown it is coming under the category called Guna or attribute now all of these attributes which are brown red hard soft contact Etc all of these things can be put under the category called Guna so instead of giving a theory of each and every color what is the theory for brown color what is the theory for red color what is the theory for softness what is the theory for hardness Etc I can just give one theory for Guna or attribute so whatever is true of that basket will be true of everything that is there inside that basket so the word Brown which is a color term falls under the category called Guna then there is one word called walks this is an action so they have created a separate category for Action called karma so any kind of activity walking running jumping Etc all of these activities fall under the ontological category called karma so I don't have to give a theory of each and every action if I just have one category called action I would have given an account of all of them then how are you able to recognize that so and so is a cow or so and so is brown or this is a stand this is a human being how are you able to recognize this this is the first time I'm seeing this stand I have never seen the stand before uh in my life and yet I have been able to recognize that this is a stand why it is because it shares some common feature which is common to all the stands similarly the word cow this cow for example I am seeing for the first time in my life yet I am able to recognize that this is a cow how is that possible because it has certain attributes or it has something in it because of which I am able to label it ah this is a cow I may have seen the human being for the first time in my life but I am still able to say that person is a or that thing is a human being how I am able to do that because they have something called the samanya or the universal which all of them have so this has the stand samanya the cow has the cow samanya or the gotv that they have the human have the universal Hood called humanness the human Universal called humanness so they have all of these things because of which we are able to recognize or identify that each of them falls under this category apart from this they have difference so I am able to point out that this is a human being but this human being is different from this human being this stand is different from this stand this laptop is different from this laptop I'm able to say this also so the particularity also is a distinguished feature of reality so if you are able to follow the commonness is one kind of category the particularity is a another kind of category now all of these are held together by one glue one ontological or metaphysical glue called samavaya so the Guna inheres inside the substance so the technical term for this relation inherence relation is samavaya the color of an entity and for example this remote let us say it is black in color I cannot separate out the black of this just like I have separated the remote out of my hand so these two are in a very simple relationship the con the contact of this remote and my hand it is a very simple kind of a contact I can separate it out whereas the color of this thing and the entity are in a very different kind of a relationship similarly if I am sitting and talking over here this action that I am doing is very inherently related to me and it is not the same relation that I have with this chair I can get up from this chair and walk I can't do that now but I can get up from this chair and I can walk but the action that I am doing in hers in me so the technical term for this inherence relation is Samaya now notice that there is one word still that we have not yet explained which is no so what was the sentence original sentence no brown cow walks over here so we have to explain that negation also we have to explain that absence also so they created one ontological category for that also called abhava or absence so as you can see using these using one simple sentence you are able to see how the seven padharthas that the vaisheshikas have proposed all of them are able to you are able to find them in a single sentence incidentally that is what the term padhartha also means so that towards which a word reaches so the entity pointed out by a pada is called the Paratha so the cow the pada called cow reaches out to a padhartha called the substance or the other cow similarly the term here points out to a spatial location which is also a dravya the brown points out to some color entity so like this each of the linguistic entity corresponds to some existence or some entity outside in the reality so this is how the seven categories you can use in order to break the sentence into its individual ontological components now another important contribution of the vaishika are the theory of the paramanu if you remember the nayakas also accept this parmanu but the real proponents of this Theory were the vaishika so the nyaya borrowed lot of Concepts from vaishika and the vaishika borrowed lot of Concepts from the nyaya so for example the idea of ishwara Etc whatever the nayakas believe the vaishika also believes similarly the idea that paramanu that the vaishika developed was also acceptable to the nayakas so this paramanu out of which the world is created if you remember these are the smallest particles ah they are not further divisible and each parmanu is distinct from other so you remember there was one ontological category called vishesha each of the paramanu has a vishesha because of which it is different from every other parmanu it is because of this vishesha that it is the notion of paramanu here is different from the modern notion of atom so you may have some of you may have been acquainted with this modern notion of atom one gold atom if you take it is same as another gold atom whereas in the case of paramanu it is not like that each atom is different from each other the atoms of prithvi or Earth are different from the atoms of Yu or the atoms of Jala Etc and within prithvi also each prithvi paramanu is different from another patri so in this way it differs from the modern conception of atom though it is translated parmanu is translated as atom you must remember that this important distinction is there between the vaishika idea of paramanu and the modern idea of atom and this paramanu form the material cause of the world the parmanas of prithvi Jala that prithvi is Earth Jala water fire Agni and vayu wind so these the paramanus of these form the material cause of this world ah and another important thing is that we cannot directly perceive the parmanu so today with some electron microscope or something like that we can see some atoms or something like that it is possible perhaps but the pressure sense of the paramanu is not known via direct perception or even aided perception it is known via inference so the argument that the vaishi Shaker gives is that all the entities that we see in this world are composite entities composite means it is made up of parts now logically speaking you should be able to break away that components into smaller components so the stand for example the lower part is different from the upper part there is a screw over here I can remove so the upper part will come away from the below part there is another screw down from the middle part to the bottom part there is another screw I can see one nut over there I can remove that and one rod will come away from another rod in this way I can go on uh separating out the parts of the composite entity that is there in the external world if you follow this step logically you should end up with some entity which is partless which cannot be divided further that entity is called paramanu so via inference or biological reasoning they posited one this entity called paramanu and not by direct perception so this was the General a brief very very brief introduction to their theory of parmanu the vaishika were not the only people to come up with a theory of paramano the China also had their own theory of parmanu the Border darshana also had their own theory of parmanu but in this short lecture series we have seen only the vaishika idea of paramanu apart from this the other ideas like Liberation Etc are the same as that what the nyaya school believed in so these people also believe that the correct understanding of the pramana and the pramaya will lead us to Liberation and that the ishwara has the same roles that the nyaya proposed is acceptable to the vaishika also [Music] foreign