Bhagavad Gita First Cause

[watchamadoodle]

As I was reading this passage from the Bhagavad Gita, it reminded me of the "first cause" problem.
It seems to be saying that every real thing must have always existed and will always exist.
Nothing real is every created and nothing real is every destroyed.

I assume philosophers have thought of this approach and have a fancy name for it?

That which is
Can never cease to be;
that which is not
Will not exist.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/gita/bg02.htm

[Pyrrho]

It makes me think of Parmenides:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmenides

http://www.iep.utm.edu/parmenid/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/parmenides/

[Chad32]

That which is, ceases to be all the time. That which is not, is brought into being all the time. I don't know what that's supposed to mean, but it doesn't sound very insightful. Then again, I just may not be thinking deeply enough. Like solving the "sound of one hand clapping" riddle by smacking my fingers against my palm. 

[watchamadoodle]

It makes me think of Parmenides:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmenides

http://www.iep.utm.edu/parmenid/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/parmenides/

I read the wikipedia in you link, and Parmenides does seem very similar. He lived several centuries before Alexander the Great, so they must have developed the idea independently in Greece and India.

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That which is, ceases to be all the time. That which is not, is brought into being all the time. I don't know what that's supposed to mean, but it doesn't sound very insightful. Then again, I just may not be thinking deeply enough. Like solving the "sound of one hand clapping" riddle by smacking my fingers against my palm. 

It solves the problem of the first cause, by claiming that everything real exists from the beginning of time to the end of time.
I suppose this is why the Hindus are panentheistic.
The stuff that comes and goes is just concepts that lose their applicability? For example, we think of the Earth as an object - even though it is always changing and interacting with everything else.

It seems a little simpler to me, but I don't know.

[Mudhammam]

I believe it was Nietzsche whom I read make reference to the similarities in thought between some of the Presocratics and "their teachers in the Orient," though to what extent the ideas sprung independently or were assimilated from one region to the other is probably unknowable.

There is a sense in which a thing that "is" cannot cease to be, for when something "is" no longer it no longer "is" the same thing of which we originally spoke. This is part of what drove Plato to introduce his Forms.

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I should also add that I like Aristotle's idea that it is the form that changes while matter is what remains the same