Within the Vaisheshika vision, reality is grounded in eternal, indivisible atoms and a set of enduring substances, yet the world that appears to the senses is marked by ceaseless change. Atoms, souls, time, space, ether, and mind are regarded as permanent; they do not perish or alter in their essential nature. What does change are the composite entities that arise when these atoms enter into various relations and configurations. Tables, bodies, mountains, and all other observable things are thus seen as impermanent formations, dependent on particular arrangements that can always be undone. Impermanence, in this framework, belongs not to the ultimate building blocks, but to the complex structures and states that emerge from them.

Change itself is explained through the dynamics of relation, motion, and quality. Atoms come together in conjunction and separate in disjunction, and this ongoing play of connection and separation gives rise to new entities and the dissolution of old ones. Motion serves as a key factor, displacing atoms and enabling fresh configurations to arise. Along with this, qualities such as color, taste, or temperature can appear, alter, and vanish as they inhere in different substances and arrangements. Time, as an eternal substance, provides the ordered sequence within which these transformations unfold, allowing one to speak of “before” and “after” in the arising and passing away of composite things.

From this standpoint, the universe of experience is a vast field of impermanent forms resting upon a stable ontological foundation. Composite objects are born when atoms combine under appropriate conditions and perish when those combinations break apart, returning to more basic configurations. Causality is understood such that effects are genuinely new beginnings, not merely the unfolding of something already fully present in the cause, which underscores the reality of change without undermining the permanence of the underlying atoms and other eternal entities. Thus, the flux of the phenomenal world and the constancy of the ultimate constituents are held together in a single, coherent account of reality.