Friday, July 26, 2024

Araka was Heraclitus?!

Wrathful Green Tara


The timeline lines up, to the extent that we actually know the timelines, it's possible the Buddha was referring to Heraclitus when he discussed Araka teaching impermanence, but not no permanent soul or the unsatisfactoriness of conditioned existence. On page 94 of Mindfulness with breathing by Buddhadasa, he makes the assertion I'd never heard before.

What I remember of Heraclitus was that he posed a challenge, that Plato solved by creating the forms. Heraclitus said you can't step into the same river twice. It was always different. He was a kind of nominalist, there were just lots of unique things, always changing, a flux. Plato thought the world participated in forms that were permanent and unchanging. That's a bad summary, I'm sure my old professor would find problems with it, but I want to just say something and you can't always wait to be perfect, you can't study endlessly. I do remember being really taken by the presentation and thinking myself a Platonist in metaphysics in my early 20's. I'm not sure how you solve the problem today, I mostly lay aside conceptual problems these days.

Sure enough there's the sutta in AN 7.70 called Araka's Teaching:

"'Just as a dewdrop on the tip of a blade of grass quickly vanishes with the rising of the sun and does not stay long, in the same way, brahmans, the life of human beings is like a dewdrop — limited, trifling, of much stress & many despairs. One should touch this [truth] like a sage, do what is skillful, follow the holy life. For one who is born there is no freedom from death."

I've heard the dew drop life metaphor before.

The idea that the teachings from Greece could make it to India so long ago is amazing. Of course the Greek were all about rationality and thinking, and meditation would never have entered into their path of spiritual fulfilment. On the Buddhist path rationality isn't the only tool. There is meditation, fellowship, study, ethics and devotion. 

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