Vaiśeṣikasūtra

The opening line announces an explanation of dharma, right conduct, and the second defines dharma as whatever brings both prosperity and the highest good; then, within a few lines, the text turns to listing what the world is made of. This is the root text of Vaiśeṣika, the school of Indian philosophy that set out to sort everything there is into kinds. It is a collection of sūtras, terse aphorisms meant to be memorised and explained by a teacher, ascribed to Kaṇāda, whose date is unknown; estimates run from the sixth to the second century BCE. There are nine substances, the sūtras hold: earth, water, fire, air, ether, time, direction, the self and the mind. Beside them stand qualities, from colour, taste and number to pleasure, desire and effort, and five kinds of motion, among them throwing upward and throwing downward. The school held that the things we see are built from eternal atoms too small to perceive, and it accepted only two means of knowledge, perception and inference. The sūtras never mention God. They end as they began, with the statement that the Vedas are authoritative. The text was handed down badly. For centuries readers knew it chiefly through the Upaskāra, the commentary of Śaṅkara Miśra, who, later scholars judge, worked from an imperfect copy. In 1961 the editor Muni Jambuvijaya published at Baroda Candrānanda's commentary, edited from two manuscripts; it is the oldest surviving commentary devoted to the sūtras, and the sūtras it carries differ substantially from the version known before. The text here is the sūtras alone, without their numbers or a commentary.