Heraclitus Studies
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Background
There is no such thing as a master or pupil among them
[the Heracliteans], but they spring up of their own accord.
Plato (Theat. 1790-180 A&C)
Introduction
I know very little about Zen koans but enough to hold the opinion that the method of study is as
important as the words themselves, maybe more so. People study Zen koans to become enlightened. To
get there one apparently has 18 major mystical experiences and numerous minor ones, insights some
call them, these experiences. I've had some of these so-called insights, and the effort is worthwhile only
if you are the sort of person who appreciates greater depth and meaning in life. If not, then you will
likely find them a waste of time.
It is this method that makes it possible to study Heraclitus fragments as one would study Zen koans,
and with the same or similar result. The method of study comes from Chinese Zen and has been in use
for about 1000 years. The Heraclitus fragments have been around for about 2500 years, but so far as I
know the two have never been introduced to each other – until this work you are now reading. You will
be one of the first to apply a Zen method to Heraclitus study.
In addition, this is the only work I know that attempts to understand Heraclitus from the perspective of
the right cerebral hemisphere. Heraclitus was known as the Obscure One, even in his lifetime, because
he often said things that defied rational analysis. You will find that much of the literature investigating
these fragments attempts to make sense of them by using the left brain – often until the scholar appears
tired and not just a little silly. We won't be doing that. Instead, we will be using Zen mystical methods
to study a Western mystic, offering entirely new and different possibilities.
Translations
John
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Burnett's translation was used, first, because it is in the public domain. After awhile, I also
realized that Burnett has a poet's affection for the words of Heraclitus. However, as is generally the
case with works that are more than 100 years old, some of the words are outdated and rarely in use
today. There were a few very minor revisions that were made, all of them with the assistance of the
more contemporary scholar and translator, T. M. Robinson. His work, Heraclitus Fragments
(University of Toronto Press, 1987) is recommended, and unlike many commentaries available, it is
readily accessible to the lay reader. The various interpretations and commentaries available on
Heraclitus should be read with caution, and it should be remembered that their opinions may or may
not be more valid than your own – especially after you finish these studies.
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History
[Heraclitus (c.535-c.475 BCE). Extracted from The Path of the Sage, 1996.] There are a number of
centuries in history when human beings rose to the challenge of greatness. One of these was in the sixth
century BCE, a time when we crossed the bridge from animism to natural philosophy and Western
Civilization was born. It began in Ionia, a rich culture made up of twelve principle cities located along
the southwestern coast of Turkey and on the nearby Aegean Islands in the Mediterranean.
Ionian history began when colonists from mainland Greece fled their homeland around 1000 BCE to
escape the conquering Dorians of southwest Macedonia. The Grecian refugees married the native
Carians to produce a new culture and a new people, the Ionians. The Ionians became merchant seamen
and builders of great cities and temples that were renowned throughout the ancient world. Today, these
cities and temples are largely forgotten, buried in the silt and dust of time. But it’s only an empire that
was lost, a small matter compared to the civilization that was won, a civilization that first formed in the
philosopher’s mind. For the Stoa, that mind belonged to Heraclitus.
He was a nobleman of Ephesus. Some say he was a hereditary king who set aside his crown to study
philosophy. He was undoubtedly a sage, a mystic genius, and the first cosmologist of the Stoa.
Heraclitus has fascinated thinkers from Socrates to Goethe and from Aristotle to contemporary
quantum physicists. He is the greatest of the Ionian sages, a Founding Father of Western Civilization, a
creator of philosophy, and a diviner of the fundamental essence of the cosmos. He is also known as the
Obscure One, a reputation acquired in his own time for a vague and riddling style that some believe he
deliberately adopted to
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elude even the most erudite scholars.
God, he called the Logos, Reason, Intelligence, a Whole made up of the sum total of all opposites,
constantly in motion, birthing, living, dying, and being born again. The Heraclitean universe is a place
where all parts are related to the whole, and its symbol is fire, a rarefied fire that permeates, consumes,
destroys, creates, and lights the cosmos as one single organism of life.
Unfortunately, what he wrote, in its original form, has been lost in antiquity by the systematic attempts
of early Christians, such as Theodosius I (4th century CE), the last emperor of a unified Rome who set
out to destroy all remnants of pagan civilizations during the years of his reign, 375-395 CE. What the
Christians didn't destroy, many others attempted. In the 7 th century CE, the last of the early Stoic works
were likely destroyed in the willful destruction of the great library of Alexandria. Caliph Omar, the
Muslim general who conquered Egypt, gave the edict that all books except the Koran were to be
burned. The contents of the library, all the greatest works of antiquity, were carted off to be burned as
fuel for the public baths of Alexandria, keeping their fires lit, it was said, for more than six months.
All that remains are fragmentary references from many sources, some reliable, some unreliable, from
Plato to Medieval monastic scholars. And from these fragments we discover remarkable parallels
between the observations of Heraclitus and modern physicists 2500 years later. His cosmology and ours
describe a universe that is a unified whole; an eternal becoming, perpetual and cyclical; unity and
paradox in pairs of opposites; and a dynamic living organism of movement, flow, and change. In all of
these attributes of Nature, Heraclitus would
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include a rational consciousness and providence.
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[All Roads lead to Heraclitus. Extracted from The Book of Doubt, 2005.] The darkest night of
Pyrrhonean doubt settled on Aenesidemus (Unknown: after Philo but before Sextus Empiricus of 2 nd
c.), but the first prophet of uncertainty began nearly five centuries earlier with Xenophanes (570-478
BCE), a wandering poet-philosopher from Ionia born in the town of Colophon who lived in a number
of Greek city states during his exceedingly long life. He was often claimed by the ancients to be the
first true skeptic based especially upon one preserved fragment of his work, a comment he purportedly
made about knowledge:
...and of course the clear and certain truth no man has seen nor will
there be anyone who knows about the gods and what I say about all
things. For even if, in the best case, one happened to speak just of
what has been brought, still he himself would not know. But opinion
is allotted to all.
Contemporary academic philosophers argue over the exact interpretation of this text, but the gist of it is
that there never has been and never will be anyone who has or will achieve certain knowledge.
Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BCE) and Parmenides (early 5th century BCE). Heraclitus disagreed with
Xenophanes and believed it was possible to provide an explanation of the world by the relationship of
the Logos, the divine intelligence, to the human psyche, the seat of human knowledge whereby we
come to know such intelligence. This is thought to be the origins of epistemology, the study of the
nature of knowledge, in Western philosophy. Then, Heraclitus went on to describe the processes of
Nature as emanation from God, the One, into the many parts of our familiar world and back again in a
continuous state of flux. Existence as we know it is in such a state of flux that at any given
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moment one
could not describe the nature of any object, because, by the time it was described, it would have
changed again and become slightly different. Heraclitus maintained that all objects in our world were in
a state of becoming, from birth and growth to deterioration and death, from the life of planets to the
aging of our own physical constitution.
Parmenides disagreed with Heraclitus and thought it was impossible for God, the One, to become all
the many parts of our familiar world. In fact, if the One were perfect, why would it extend itself into a
state of imperfection? No, the One was an immovable being, the world was in a state of being, not in a
state of becoming, as Heraclitus maintained, and the changes we see in life as we know it was an
illusion. In his work, The Way of Truth, Parmenides states that the One is “whole, immobile, eternal,
all together, one and continuous.” There were two kinds of knowledge: true knowledge and common
knowledge, and what most of us see with our senses and believe with our minds is of the common sort,
mere opinion.
Aenesidemus and Heraclitus. Sextus Empiricus criticized Aenesidemus for saying, “All roads lead to
Heraclitus.” Academicians today take three positions on Aenesidemus' statement: first, it is
meaningless and irrelevant;1 second, it was made while he was in the process of converting from the
Academy to Pyrrhonism;2 and third, Aenesidemus actually left Pyrrhonism in the end and became a
1. Stough, C., “Stoic Determinism and Moral Responsibility,” in The Stoics, Ed., J. Rist,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978.
2 Rist, John M., “The Heracliteanism of Aenesidemus,” Phoenix XXIV (1970), pp. 309-319.
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Heraclitean.3 It does seem odd that he would become a Heraclitean after the pure form of skepticism he
endorsed and taught, and Rist may be right.
Rist thinks the criticism of Sextus may have been referring to a period between Aenesidemus'
skepticism at the Academy and breaking away to found the school of Pyrrhonism. His thesis begins by
noting that skeptics assert the appearance of opposite attributes while Heracliteans assert the reality of
opposite attributes, which leads him to suggest the following possible conclusions:
1. Aenesidemus broke with the Academy because of Philo and Antiochus’ move towards Stoic
dogma.
2. Aenesidemus first aligned himself with his teacher Philo in searching for the true reality of
objects behind the information we get from our senses.
3. His skeptical education led him to embrace the Heraclitean notion of a continuum of opposites
in every object. This was the Heraclitean period to which Sextus was referring.
4. Finally, he comes to reject the possibility of ever knowing the real object lying behind our
sensory impressions, and just by knowing that it has opposite characteristics doesn’t give us any
certainty about its underlying nature. So, epoche, we must suspend judgment.
In an attempt to attain some certainty on the matter, I wrote an e-mail to Professor Groarke, Dean of the
Brantford Campus of Wilfed Laurier University in Canada. He had referenced his assertion that
Aenesidemus ended his philosophical career as a Heraclitean with the usual Sextus material, plus a
couple of passages from the early Christian apologist, Tertullian (De Anima 9.5, 14.5).
Professor Groarke answered, “From my point of view, I don’t find the Heraclitean/Pyrrhonean parts of
Aenesidemus’ career all that strange. If you believe, as I do, that the essence of
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scepticism is its
emphasis on equal but opposing points of view, then it is not so surprising that someone would jump
from this to the conclusion that opposites are the essence of the world (i.e. Heraclitus!).”
And so it goes. If Aenesidemus created Pyrrhonism, then abandoned his creation and became a
Heraclitean, as the only ancient references to this fact suggest, a good explanation of his reasons have
not be found.
*
3 Groarke, Leo, Ancient Skepticism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2003.
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The Method
Introduction
The Zen koan, a kind of teaching story, was first begun in China more than 1000 years ago as a test of
mystical insight. A practitioner of Zen, then and now, uses koans as a tool of meditation and to evaluate
the level of understanding of both master and pupil. There are two parts to the koan, the koan itself and
the commentary added by other masters.
Here is an example of a Zen koan as found in Thomas Cleary's work, Unlocking the Zen Koan (North
Atlantic Books, 1997).
37: The Cypress Tree in the Yard
[The Koan]
A monk asked Zhaozhou, “What is the living meaning of Zen?”
Zhaozhou said, “The Cypress tree in the yard.”
[The Commentary]
Wumen says,
If you can see the point of Zhaozhou's answer intimately, there is no past Buddha before and no future
Buddha after.
Wumen's verse
Words do not set forth facts,
Speech does not accord with situations;
Those who take up words perish,
Those who linger over sayings get lost.
Zen Master Huanglong Nan's verse
All trees wither and die in time,
But the cypress in Zhoazhou's yard flourishes forever.
Not only does it defy the frost, keeping its integrity;
It virtually sings with a clear voice to the light of the moon.
And so on . . . .
The method we will be using here follows that which can be found in Unlocking the Zen Koan quoted
above. Cleary claims to have studied Zen koans for thirty years and is reputed to be one of the foremost
translators of Buddhist and Taoists texts in the world. I have personally studied this work and its
method and can recommend it highly. That's why I have adopted and adapted it to the study of the
Heraclitus fragments. I know that it works.
I have chosen twelve well-known fragments of Heraclitus to be used as koans in our study. However,
Stoics do not have a tradition of Zen koan
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masters to provide the commentary necessary to fully
implement the correct method. Thus, I have used the words of Heraclitus himself to amplify the chosen
koans. He alone will be our commentator until such time as others can be added.
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There may be those who wonder why we don't just study Zen koans; why go to all the trouble of using
a Zen method to study the fragments of Heraclitus? After all, they have 1000 years of practice to offer
the student of meditation. Yes, I would agree, except that, frankly, I'm more interested in the words of
Heraclitus than I am in those of the Zen mystics. Today, Heraclitus is in danger of being forgotten by
all but a handful of scholars, and I believe it is profoundly important for Stoics to know the concepts
and origins of our cosmology.
Essence and Function
In using the classical Zen method, according to Cleary, we seek the experience of two symbolic
domains of enlightenment: essence and function. First, we seek the “Land of Eternal Silent Light,” the
essence of what we are. Then, we seek the “Land of True Reward,” the function of what we can be. It's
important to remember that these are not real places. They represent symbolic names for the two
domains of experience that we find in our fulfillment as a human being.
These two domains are also reflected in the order in how Zen koans are presented. The first koan
establishes one form of response and the second establishes another. As it happens, they are also similar
to the two kinds of meditation we have already studied: Pneuma and Stick Action Meditation,
respectively. Pneuma focuses on the essence of being, clearing the mind and entering into silence,
while SAM focuses on the mindfulness of our active being. Cleary refers to this as “...focusing the
attention on the total perception of the immediate present (p. XXIII).” This will become more apparent
when we actually get into the steps that follow, but first we need to consider some of the reasons and
problems we should know.
Although we are immersing ourselves in