溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Can We Step Into the Same River Twice?
If all things flow without rest, is yesterday's river the same river as today's?
Upon those who step into the same rivers, ever different waters flow.
Heraclitus's flux (panta rhei) at once called forth a head-on rebuttal. Parmenides countered that what truly is neither comes to be nor passes away but abides as one, and that change itself is an illusion of the senses. This clash — is flux real, or permanence? — led into Plato's synthesis, setting the changeless world of Forms above the flowing world of sense. In the East, Buddhism sang the insight of impermanence, that all things flow, strikingly close to Heraclitus. Whether flux or constancy is the truth of the world split off from the single line that one cannot step twice into the same river.
This question, reminding us that days seeming the same as yesterday are in truth a flow that will not return, makes us cherish the passing now a little more.
The river stands in its place under the same name.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
The river stands in its place under the same name. Yet the water flowing within it is different water each instant. Heraclitus saw all things as this river — everything that seems to abide is in truth ceaseless flow. Even I am not the same water as yesterday's I. I sense this question carved the nature of time into the metaphor of a river. Between the mind that would grasp what does not change and the truth that all things flow, I stand at this riverbank too.
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