An ancient Indian sage nicknamed eater of atoms proposed indivisible particles
Centuries before modern chemistry, the Indian philosopher Kaṇāda argued that matter cannot be divided forever. Somewhere the splitting must stop at tiny, eternal particles he called paramāṇu, which combine to form everything we see. His name, fittingly, is usually translated as eater of atoms, and his school became India's earliest physics.
Almost nothing is known about his life, and even his century is disputed; estimates range from the 6th to the 2nd century BCE. His Vaiśeṣika Sūtra mentions rival schools such as Sāṃkhya and Mīmāṃsā but not Buddhism, which some scholars take as a sign of an early date. Manuscripts found in 1957 and 1961 suggest the text was finalised between about 200 BCE and the start of the common era, though its core ideas may be older. By the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, other texts were already quoting and debating it.
His system names six categories he claimed could describe everything, observers included: substance, quality, motion, generality, particularity and inherence. Substances fall into nine classes, some atomic and some pervading everything. Atoms, he reasoned, must be spherical because they should be identical in every direction, and he described four kinds, two with mass and two without. Motion sat at the centre of what can be known, and he held that heat is involved when atoms join into larger bodies.
The framework was also ethical. Kaṇāda defined dharma as whatever brings both material progress and the highest good, adding that the Vedas deserve respect because they teach such dharma, not that something is right merely because the Vedas say it. Like several Indian schools of the time, including Jainism and Buddhism, his offered a route to liberation without a creator god.
Jain writers called him the owl, Uluka, and his philosophy was sometimes called Aulukya after that nickname. His school grew closely tied to the Nyaya tradition, and his ideas may have reached beyond philosophy, possibly influencing the medical writer Charaka.
Source: Kaṇāda
