What Docker containers can teach us about Buddhist and Hindu thought

This will be a ridiculous post, but please indulge me

Note: This applies to all of my posts, but my exploration of ideas in this article does not constitute an avowal or endorsement of said ideas. I am skeptical of the dharmic skepticism of self, though I think it is still thought provoking to consider.

I’ve recently been brushing up on Docker, Kubernetes and other technologies essential to DevOps and distributed systems. In the course of this study binge, I’ve been reacquainted with the technology that makes containerization possible: UNIX Namespaces.

According to Marko Lukša’s Kubernetes In Action, a namespace:

….ensures that each process has its own view of the system. This means that a process running in a container will only see some of the files, processes and network interfaces on the system, as well as a different system hostname, just as if it were running in a separate virtual machine.¹

At the risk of some mild anthropomorphizing, a containerized processed is effectively ‘fooled’ into believing that it resides in a completely separate operating system. It has no idea if one or twenty or three hundred other processes are sharing the same underlying host OS. This has enormous implications for maximizing resource utilization, which is part of why container technology has exploded in popularity in the past decade.

As I was reading this passage, it occurred to me that this idea is analogous to how certain dharmic intellectual traditions conceive of the self, and our separateness from other ‘selves.’ I will be crudely reducing several thousand years of theological and philosophical debate here, but in summary, Buddhists are profoundly skeptical of this putative separateness. As the famed monk Thich Nhat Hahn stated:

We are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.²

A commentary on Hahn’s thought elaborates:

There is no such thing as a separate object, event, or experience, because no any part of the world can exist apart from all others. Rather, everything that looks like a separate entity is actually dependent on, and therefore interwoven with, something else. Everything (object, event, idea, experience, whatever) is made up of other things. Whatever appears to be an isolated "thing" is actually a combination of its constituent elements. These elements are the influences from the other things with which it is interwoven. And those elements, too, are made up of other combinations. The world is an endless web of combinations.³

Though differing profoundly on the nature of the self⁴, the Vedantic Hinduism of Adi Shankaracharya⁵ shares Buddhism’s repudiation of the idea that human beings are separate from each other or from existence itself. Shankaracharya famously argued that the atman, the indivisible and eternal self that is the fundament of every person, is identical with brahman, the divine ground of being, the supreme and total reality:

Brahman is the only truth, the world is illusion, and there is ultimately no difference between Brahman and individual self.⁶

Though both traditions differ on many, many points⁷, they both posit that awareness of our non-separateness is vital for liberation from suffering, and for our moral and spiritual progress. Recognizing that we are in fact not ontologically distinct from our neighbor, or even a pebble, river or distant star, is the beginning of wisdom and freedom.

To Hahn and Shankaracharya, the self is a namespace, the illusion that our thoughts and our bodies are all that we are. Beyond the legible limits of our bodies is a reality that is as much a part of who we are as our kidneys, our pinkies, our innermost cognitions.

In retrospect, this slightly deranged post is likely the result of my being on call this week, but I found it enjoyable to connect one of my favorite OS conceits to one of the great claims of dharmic thought.⁸

1. Page 47 of Kubernetes in Action, 2nd Edition

2. http://www.purifymind.com/IslandSelf.htm

3. https://spot.colorado.edu/~chernus/NonviolenceBook/ThichNhatHanh.htm

4. Buddhism advances a doctrine of called anatta, or “non-self” — in Buddhism, the self is an illusion; in Shankara’s hinduism, the self exists but is identical with Brahman.

5. Beside being one of the titans of Hindu philosophy and theology, Adi Shankaracharya is a fellow Malayalee, or rather son of Kerala, so I have a habit of shoehorning him into every other conversation.

6. https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/9960/help-me-to-find-out-the-verse-brahma-satyam-jagat-mithya-jivo-brahmaiva-napa

7. Shankaracharya’s Hinduism was influenced by Buddhism, and was even accused of crypto-buddhism by critics.

8. There are also affinities between this idea and Spinoza’s thought, which I might explore in a later post.