The Aphorisms Of The Vaiseshika Philosophy

Excerpt from The Vaiseshika Aphorisms of Kanada: With Comments From the Upaskara of Sankara-Misra and the Vivritti of Jaya-Narayana Tarkapanchanana The following pages will, it is trusted, facilitate to Sanskrit students the perusal of the original text, and to general readers an estimate, of one of the schools of Indian thought. Such interest as they may claim, will be historical, as a picture of a low stage of metaphysical culture. The system must be judged from its proper place in the history of philosophy; not hastily condemned from a modern point of view. The Indian cosmologies, imperfect in analysis, and hasty in synthesis, may be compared to the pre-Socratic schemes among the Greeks. In India the Socratic reform in method has been wanting, and speculation has lapsed into a fruitless scholasticism. By these systems, however, it is that Indian thinkers are formed, and we may well remember that in mental discipline "speculation is higher than speculative truth," and that where philosophers "have not realised truth, they, have always determined exertion."* The technical terms employed in translation are necessarily rather suggestive than reproductive of the original. The artificial groupings, or (to use Locke's expression) mixed modes, of European and of Indian thought, intersect and overlap, rather than coincide with, one another. The reader should bear this in mind, that he may avoid the misleading associations of an English terminology. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."

Reprint of the original, first published in 1873.

This book introduces readers to Indian philosophy by presenting the first integral English translation of Vaiśeṣikasūtra as preserved by the earliest canonical commentary of Candrānanda (7th century AD) on the old aphorisms of the Vaiśeṣika school of Indian philosophy. The present monograph offers a canonical description of the fundamental categories of ontology and metaphysics, among which the category of ‘particularity’ (viśeṣa) plays a major role in the ‘problem of individuation’ of the ‘nature’ of substance in both Indian as well as Western metaphysics. This commentary should be read primarily in relation to Aristotle’s Categories. It is structured in 3 parts. Chapter 1 contains a general introduction to Indian philosophy and the Vaiśeṣika system. Chapter 2 is a textual-philological discussion on the commentary itself, since its first publication in 1961 by Muni Jambūvijayaji up to the present day. Chapter 3 is a ‘philosophical translation’ that reads Vaiśeṣika in the global context of Comparative Philosophy and aims to render this text accessible and comprehensible to all readers interested in ontology and metaphysics. A new reference work and a fundamental introduction to anyone interested in Indian and Comparative Philosophy, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students in Classical Studies, Modern Philosophy, and Asian Religions and Philosophies.