- Lived:
- unknown — tradition places him at Prabhāsa (Prabhas Patan, near Somnath in Gujarat), but that is legend, not evidence; scholarly dating proposals run from the 6th century BCE to the early centuries CE
- Field:
- natural philosophy — founder of the Vaiśeṣika school; atomist and builder of India's first systematic ontology, the theory of what kinds of things exist
- The Big Idea:
- Everything you can see is built of invisible, eternal, partless particles — and everything that exists, particles included, falls into six kinds of real things, which can be listed, defined and argued over. Know the list correctly, he taught, and you are on the road to liberation.
- In their words:
- "Dharma is that from which results the accomplishment of exaltation and of the supreme good." (Vaiśeṣika Sūtra 1.1.2, translated by Nandalal Sinha, 1911 — the first sentence of a book about atoms)
- If you remember one thing:
- India's great atomist was nicknamed "the grain-eater" — and the honest way to honour him is not to claim he scooped modern chemistry, but to see what he actually built: a complete inventory of reality, assembled by argument, in which even the atoms carry their flavours and smells with them.