Heraclitus, Vasubandhu, Zhuangzi, Mulla Sadra: four routes to process, or four destinations?
It is often said that four thinkers, with no documented transmission between them, all arrived at a process view of reality: Heraclitus in Greece, Vasubandhu in India, Zhuangzi in China, and much later Mulla Sadra in Safavid Iran. The convergence is real. I want to test how far it goes, because comparison is most useful where it breaks.
Consider what each was actually arguing:
- Heraclitus: change is constitutive of things, but under a measure (logos) that holds the opposites together. The river is the same river because the waters keep changing.
- Vasubandhu: in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya he argues that destruction needs no cause, so whatever comes into being perishes at once. Things are momentary. This is less a flowing river than a film of discrete frames.
- Zhuangzi: the "transformation of things" closes the butterfly dream. It is not argued as a thesis about the basic constituents of reality; it is an attitude towards change and death.
- Mulla Sadra: substantial motion. Aristotle confined motion to quality, quantity and place, and Ibn Sina added position; both denied motion in the category of substance. Sadra argued, inside their own vocabulary, that bodily substances themselves are in continuous change, with time as a dimension of that change.
My suspicion is that "process" names four different things here: a cosmological order, a theory of discrete moments, a way of living, and a renovation of Peripatetic physics. If that is right, the convergence shows the question is real, and the differences show that the substance/process split is one tradition's way of dividing the ground. I would like specialists in each to tell me where I have flattened their thinker.