Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c15.s1.4

c15.s1.4

The rest of existence is made up of eleven material compounds; one compound, mind; forty-six mental compounds; and fourteen non-mental compounds. The essential character of matter is its power of obstruction to the organs of sense, a fact which contrasts it absolutely with the ether. The unit of matter is the atom (*paramāṇu*), which is composite, as it rests on a fourfold substratum of colour, smell, taste, and touch. It is invisible, inaudible, intangible, without taste, indivisible, and unanalysable. But it is not permanent, but flashes into being; its essential feature is its action or function, and therefore may be compared to a focus of energy. Seven of these units, clustered around one as the centre, create the visible atom (*aṇu*) out of which matter, including the organs of sense, is composed. The distinctions of the elements; earth as rough, water as viscous, fire as hot, wind as movable; are due to the predominance in each of its own special characteristics and the inactivity of the others which are also present, for the unit has in itself the qualities of all the elements. The mutual attraction of material things is explained by the presence of the quality of water in each, their resistance by that of earth and so on; their collocations in nature are explicable by attraction, cohesion, heating, clustering, &c. As real, the cause never actually perishes; what happens is a change of state, when it becomes an effect, involving an alteration of name; thus the clay becomes the pot, without any real change of nature.