Heraclitus and Buddha

 Heraclitus is famous for the observation that we can never step into the same river twice because a river is never the same twice. If it was its waters would need to stop flowing to keep it the same. But it is not just obviously flowing things like rivers that are constantly changing, everything is. Anyone who has walked a mountain will have seen the scree and rocks that are continuously falling from the mountain. And obviously as a person we are familiar with change as in the West we celebrate a birthday every year not just to mark an objective period of time, but to mark the changes in ourselves. This is the other reason we cannot step into the same river twice, we are never the same person twice.

ChatGPT gives these two example of the Heraclitan idiom:

Plato in Cratylus paraphrases Heraclitus:

"You cannot step twice into the same stream, for other waters are ever flowing on to you."

In another fragment (possibly sourced from later commentators), a variation exists:

"We both step and do not step into the same rivers. We are and are not."

The second version is particularly interesting. It captures something never really satisfying about the exposition above. While it is true the river is never the same twice, it is never an elephant. It is always a river. As discussed in a recent post change is only possible because it is not total. For something to change it must still have some relation to itself.

Walking this is a tight rope. We slip one way to what Buddha calls Nihilism when we say that change means the old is eradicated and replaced with the new, and we slip to Externalism when we say that something permanent remains. This is especially true of ourselves. As time passes we are very habituated to the idea that something permanent travels through time. And while it is true we do not wake up each morning as someone new, we are also changed.

The river is a good analogy. While it is the same river for eons we can undeniably see it flowing. What is apparently ungraspable in the distinction between Nihilism and Externalism is actually not hard to see, while it is hard to grasp. Which is an irony in itself as "grasping" needs a fixed entity to grasp and when things are always slightly shadowy grasping is never really possible. However this does not mean we are committed to a world of confusion. When we see clearly we can see these things in absolute satisfying clarity.

Now the actual reason for this blog entry was not to repeat myself as I have above but to point out that key to Buddhism is this realisation that there is nothing fixed about ourselves. Life feels like a stream flowing past us. But such a feeling stems for the idea that we ourselves are outside the stream. We like to dip our toe into life, or throw ourselves in for a swim and some time later climb out and go on our journey elsewhere. Our view is that we are a fixed entity that differs from the stream of life. This is the essence of Externalism. Gradually we will realise that we are part of the stream. When we dip our toe in the river, the river also dips its toe in us. We are inseparable.

Again this is not to say that a swimming human is ever a river and vice versa, that would be Nihilism and erase the obvious difference. But the entities that are meeting are both in a state of flow and change and so the meeting is not just unique because the river has flowed but doubly unique because the human has flowed too.