 The idea that things are their own causes is a somewhat peculiar one. The Buddhist discussion usually distinguishes two different views under this heading: that cause and effect are the very same object, and that the effect is somehow contained in the cause. One plausible candidate for the identity of cause and effect is persistence through time. The idea here is that the cause of the present rock is the rock one second ago, and that these two rocks are the very same thing. Of course this only works if we are not endurantists, i.e. if we do not think that there are different temporal slices all of which make up the rock. If this is the case then what we are looking at here is one part of an object causing another, rather than one object causing itself. For a perdurantist who believes there is some object wholly present during each time there is the difficulty that we usually believe causes to temporally precede their effects. No object can be temporally prior to itself, however.