Who Am I?

This post is not technical. It’s an outlier to my regular posts: nothing to do with technology directly. Lately I’ve been exploring Indian philosophy, especially Buddhism. Most of the time I end up absent-minded and confused. I thought writing this down would clarify things. Spoiler: it didn’t. But I found something else along the way. The River There’s a fragment from Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived around 500 BCE. He said: “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” By the time you take the second step, the water has moved downstream, the bank has eroded a little, and you’ve aged a moment. Nothing stays the same long enough to be identical. His student Cratylus went further: “You cannot step into the same river even once.” Because during the step itself the river is already changing. Before your foot touches the water, the river you were about to step into is gone. Buddhism, which arose around the same time in a different part of the world, had already gone deeper. Not…