In case you want to taste some South Asian ontological ideas which will remind you of Greece, but at the same time be different, please continue reading.
In a work called Nyāyasiddhāñjana and in the Nyāyapariśuddhi, the 14th c. philosopher Veṅkaṭanātha discusses some fundamental ontological topics in order to distinguish his positions from the ones of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school.
The Nyāya school proposes a fundamental division of realities into dravya ‘substances’, guṇa ‘qualities’, and karman ‘actions’,1 with the former as the substrate of the latter two. This leads to two difficulties for Veṅkaṭanātha’s agenda. On the one hand, the radical distinction between substance and attribute means that Nyāya authors imagine liberation to be the end of the connection of the ātman ‘self’ to all attributes, from sufferance to consciousness. By contrast, Veṅkaṭanātha, would never accept consciousness to be separated from the individual soul and even less from God. The other difficulty regards the theology of Veṅkaṭanātha's school, called Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, which accepted among its sacred texts also the Pañcarātra texts. Since the beginnings of Pañcarātra, one of its chief doctrines has been that of the manifestations (called vibhūti) of God, which are dependent on Him but co-eternal with Him and in this sense are unexplainable according to the division of substances into eternal and transient.
Veṅkaṭanātha opposes to the Nyāya one more than one classification, so that it is clear that Veṅkaṭanātha's main point is addressing the above-mentioned problems with the Nyāya ontology, rather than establishing in full detail a distinct ontology. For an instance of alternative classifications see, e.g., the opening verse in the Nyāyasiddhāñjana, chapter on inert substances:
``Substance is of two types, [according to this classification:] inert or alive, or [according to this other classification:] innerly [luminous] or what is its opposite. [Furthermore,] it is of six types, according to the division in [natura naturans having] three qualities, time, individual souls, God, the ground for [God's] enjoyment (i.e., His manifestations, vibhūti) and [His] cognition. Some distinguish reality as of three types, in order to distinguish the Lord, the individual soul, and the self (as the material cause of the universe) because they do not want to include cognition, time and the ground for [God's] enjoyment, since these have the nature of qualities''.(Cross-posted, with some modifications, on my personal blog and on the Indian Philosophy blog)
There are in fact further categories, namely sāmānya ‘universal’, viśeṣa ‘individual’, and samavāya ‘inherence’. See for the fact that these latter categories have been added at a later stage of the evolution of the school. The Navya Nyāya school adds also abhāva to the categories. (see Eli Franco and Karin Preisendanz, "Nyāya-Vaiśeịṣika", Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy)↩︎
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