History of Chemistry in Ancient and Medieval India, Incorporating the History of Hindu Chemistry by Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray c39.s6.29

c39.s6.29

Charaka's view of the formation of a new quality or a new substance is based on the Samkhya teaching as to the conservation and transformation of Energy, and brings chemical synthesis in a line with evolutionary change (*parinam*). On this view, a new substance may arise by spontaneous or isomeric change, i.e, by the interplay of Energies within the system of any given substance, in the absence of any action from without. New qualities like new substances are only readjustments of the old, and continual changes are going on by spontaneous disintegration and recombination. Opposed to this evolutional view of chemical synthesis is the Nyaya-Vaiseshīka doctrine of *arambhavada*, according to which no change of substance or quality, no effect, in short, can take place except by the action of one component element (substance or quality) on another. A binary molecule, for example, cannot possess any 'specific quality' of a kind not represented in each of the two component atoms In the cosmic process, no atom can exist free and uncombined with another atom, and every specific quality in a substance can be ultimately analysed into the union of two 'specific qualities' of the same class in two ultimate particles, which cannot be further divided. A single colour, smell or taste in a single particle, until it can link itself on to another specific quality *of its own class* in a second particle, cannot characterise any substance formed by the union of these particles as material causes. Hence an *earth-atom* cannot unite with an *ap-atom*, to form a new substance of which both the particles must be equally regarded as material causes. At any rate, such a compound, if effected, would be smell-less, as of the two constituent atoms, only one, viz., the *earth-atom*, possesses smell. A compound of *earth* and *vayu* would be smell-less, colourless and tasteless, and so on. The Nyaya-Vaiseshika does not deny that there may be compounds of different *bhutas*, nor does it deny the causal operation of specific qualities as efficient or energising (dynamic) causes, but it refuses to place these compounds on the same footing as compounds of isomeric modes of the same *bhuta*; and it accepts the 'material' causality, in such cases, of only one of the *bhutas*, regarding the others as 'co-efficients'.