Prashastapada

Prashastapada was an ancient Indian philosopher of the Vaisheshika school, tentatively dated to the second half of the 6th century CE. He wrote the Padartha-dharma-sangraha, a collection of the properties of matter, which is called a commentary on the Vaisheshika Sutras of Kanada but is better read as an independent summary of the school's tenets. It became the main vehicle for later commentary, overshadowing the sutras themselves, and was taken up by Vyomashekhara, Shridhara, Udayana and Shrivatsa. He added seven qualities to the seventeen that Kanada listed, among them heaviness, fluidity, viscidity, merit, demerit, sound and faculty. As a realist he held that the determinate features of things are objective parts of reality, not constructions imposed by the mind, which set him against Dignaga. He saw Ishvara as the cause of the universe, without explaining how creation works, and described the dissolution of earth, water, air and fire into atoms.