Vaiśeṣikasūtra: the arrow’s flight, sound from sound, and the atom

Companion source

Source: GRETIL plain-text transformation of sa_kaNAda-vaizeSikasUtra.xml, data entry Nozawa Masanobu, version 2020-07-31; local verbatim excerpt .txt; retrieved and verified 2026-09-18. Metadata: Vaiśeṣikasūtra, attributed to Kaṇāda. Layered text, conventionally c. 100 BCE–200 CE, with wider ranges in the literature; book 5 possibly a distinct stratum. The attribution to Kaṇāda is traditional, not established. Extraction: four groups of sūtras copied verbatim from the plain-text file with their kvs_ references, plus a working translation marked as such. Rights: the sūtra text is ancient and public domain. The electronic edition is distributed by GRETIL under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0; this excerpt is short, attributed, and the licence is recorded here and in the excerpt file. Recension: numbering follows the Candrānanda family. The vulgate/Upaskāra family numbers the sound sūtra 2.2.31 where this edition has 2.2.36; the arrow sūtras carry the same numbers in both.

What it supplies

The first Asian source in this collection that states a positive theory of propagation, rather than a paradox about it. Three things the Greek and Chinese material here does not give:

• Motion as a succession carried by an impetus. VS 5.1.16 makes the arrow’s particular conjunctions ayugapat, non-simultaneous, and that is the ground of the plurality of its motions. VS 5.1.17 gives the mechanism: impulsion (nodana) causes only the first motion, and each later one is caused by the saṃskāra deposited by the motion immediately before it. VS 5.1.18 ends the series when the impression is spent and gravity takes over. Where Zeno’s arrow argues from instants that motion is impossible, this argues from non-simultaneous conjunctions that motion is many, and supplies what carries it across the gaps.
• Transmission by a generated chain. VS 2.2.36 derives sound from conjunction, from disjunction, and from sound, so what reaches the ear is a later member of a chain rather than the original event; VS 2.2.37 makes sound non-eternal. The ripple and kadamba-bud similes for that chain belong to the later commentators, not to this layer.
• A stopping rule for division. VS 4.1.6–7 make perception depend on magnitude and deny it of the atom. The Nyāya side of the corpus states the rule outright; see the leads below.

Passage anchors

Two readings differ slightly from secondary reports: this edition has karmakāritāc where some report tat-karma-kāritāc, and the genitive śabdaniṣpatteḥ where some report śabdaniṣpattiḥ. The excerpt preserves the edition as served.

Coverage and limits

Reading level passage for the four groups above, verified character by character against the GRETIL file; metadata for the rest of the work. No commentary is stored here, and the sūtra layer is what this file certifies.

Leads not verified here, from the 2026-09-18 research round and to be treated as citations rather than readings:

• Vātsyāyana, Nyāyabhāṣya (c. 400–450 CE), on NyS 2.2.13: the sound born of a contact generates further sounds, and the distant hearer apprehends the member that has come near the ear, argued from wood splitting, since the axe-wood contact has ceased while the sound is still heard at a distance. Reported as the strongest pre-500 CE Asian statement that transmission takes time.
• Vātsyāyana on NyS 4.2.16 and 4.2.25: division halts where nothing smaller exists, “that than which there is nothing smaller we call the paramāṇu”, with a reductio from equality of magnitude under endless division.
• Candrānanda’s vṛtti on 5.1.16–17 (dated before c. 1000 CE by Jambuvijaya, 8th–10th c. by Isaacson, so outside the window), which argues the discreteness rather than asserting it.
• Praśastapāda, Padārthadharmasaṃgraha (contested, c. 4th c. in older scholarship, commonly c. 530–600 CE in modern work, so at or past the boundary): vega as “cause of an uninterrupted series of motions in a fixed direction”, destroyed by conjunction with a tangible substance, and sound as a vīcī-santāna, a series like water ripples.