Anicca's claim that apparent objects are really successions of momentary arisings has a well-known Western philosophical parallel in the fragments attributed to Heraclitus, the sixth-century BCE Greek philosopher whose doctrine of universal flux is regularly compared to Buddhist impermanence, though the comparison, examined closely, reveals as much difference as similarity.
Heraclitus's most famous surviving statement, transmitted through later sources rather than a complete text, holds that one cannot step into the same river twice, since new waters are always flowing in, an image asserting that apparent stability conceals constant underlying change, structurally close to anicca's claim that what appears to be a persisting thing is really a rapid succession of arisings. But Heraclitus's flux doctrine was developed within a search for an underlying unifying principle, the logos, a rational order governing change, which he treats as itself a stable, graspable truth; Buddhist anicca, by contrast, is paired with anatta and dukkha specifically to deny that any such stable underlying principle or self can be found, and the point of the analysis is soteriological rather than cosmological.
The comparison has attracted scholarly attention since the nineteenth century, when European philosophers newly encountering Buddhist texts reached for Heraclitus as a familiar reference point, but specialists caution against treating the resemblance as evidence of historical contact between early Greek and Indian thought, and against collapsing two philosophies that reach flux from different premises and put it to different use into a single generic doctrine of "everything changes."