Imagine you’re looking at a blue pot. For the combined Nyaya-Vaisesika school, the world is composed of stable substances and their qualities. One of India’s oldest realist traditions in philosophy, it says that you’re perceiving three distinct realities at once: a substance (the pot), a quality (blueness), and potentially an action (if the pot moves). Moreover, digging deeper, the school argues that the universal property that makes all pots recognizable as pots (its ‘potness’) is also real, for without such universals, how could we recognize different objects as belonging to the same category? (There must be something that makes all horses horses, for instance.) This category is also responsible for communication. Without the basic understanding of categories (that is, of groups of things), how could language work?
The Nyaya-Vaisesika system includes seven categories of reality. The first three are, as we’ve seen, substance, quality, and action. These are the things that exist in the ordinary material sense. The next three are universals (like ‘horseness’), particularities (what makes each thing unique), and inherence (the conceptual glue binding qualities to substances). These are real but exist differently from objects: they’re like the rules of grammar that make sentences possible – not visible themselves, but necessary for anything to make sense. Finally, they also claim that even the absence (aabhava) of something is itself real. When you look for your keys and don’t find them, you perceive a genuine absence. That absence causes you to search – it has causal power. So it must be real.
Buddhist philosophers looked at this same blue pot and saw something entirely different: there is no permanent pot! They argued that what we perceive is only a continually changing stream of momentary events. Just like a movie, we see continuous existence, but it’s actually individual frames replacing each other so quickly that we perceive continuity of being. So for Buddhism, the blue pot is actually discrete pulses of experience that arise and perish in an instant. There is no enduring substance behind them, only the causal stream of reality. So what we call a ‘pot’ is just a convenient label for a causal sequence of momentary ‘pot events’.
The Madhyamaka school founded by the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna in the 3rd-century BCE went even further. Nagarjuna claimed that not only are there no permanent things, but even momentary events are empty of inherent existence. Rather, everything exists only in relationship to everything else. A pot exists only in relation to clay, potter, water, fire, and the entire web of conditions that brought it into being. Remove the relationships, and nothing remains.
Modern physics faces some similar puzzles. Are electrons real things, or just useful mathematical constructs, for instance? Throughout history, scientists have postulated entities such as phlogiston, ether, and caloric that successfully explained observations but later turned out not to exist.
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