Preliminary notes towards a comparison

of Stoicism and Buddhism as Lived Phi-

losophies
Leesa Davis and Matthew Sharpe 1

“…it seems to me that there really are troubling analogies between the philosophical attitudes

of antiquity and those of the Orient. These analogies cannot be explained by historical influ-

ences; nevertheless, they do perhaps give us a better understanding of all that can be involved

in philosophical attitudes ...” Pierre Hadot What is Ancient Philosophy?, 278.

Introduction

About two centuries after Siddhartha Gautama achieved awakening un-

der the Bodhi tree in India and became the Buddha, Zeno of Kition be-
gan to teach Stoic philosophy to the youths of Athens under the painted
metopes of a public porch. Quickly becoming one of the four major
schools of philosophy in the Hellenistic era, Stoicism was the leading
philosophical school in Rome from the great days of the Republic to the
reign of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius. (Reale 1985, 203-
294; Sandbach 1994, 11-27; 149-178) Stoicism was uneasily accepted
within the Christian culture of medieval Europe (Seneca, held to have
corresponded with Saint Paul, was excepted (cf. Verbeke 1983)). Yet

1Department of Philosophy, Deakin University. msharpe@deakin.edu.au or leesa.da-

vis@deakin.edu.au.
2

Stoicism again exerted huge influence in the Italian and European re-
naissance, and in early modern “neoStoics’” attempts to defend secular
foundations for ethical and social order despite the religious conflicts
of the era. (cf. Cassirer 1961, 166-170; Long 2003; Bouwsma 1990;
Brooke 2012; Oestreich, 2008; Sellars 2006, 135-159) When we teach
Stoic ethics today, however, this Western philosophy sets off a quite
different set of cultural and historical echoes in many students’ minds:
“that’s just like Buddhism!,” “that reminds me of Buddhism!,” “do you
know if there is any evidence of Buddhism influencing the Stoics?,”
“where can I read comparative accounts on Buddhism and Stoicism?”
Yet as instructors, we can only reply that, at this time, there is little such
literature.

The last 100 years in the Western academy has seen a growing
literature challenging earlier occidental images of the supposedly par-
thenogenetic ‘Greek miracle’. McIvelley’s magisterial Shape of Ancient
Thought shows in great detail the lines of cultural and philosophical in-
fluence passing in both directions between East and West, beginning
before Socrates and the Buddha, and continuing into the Roman era.
(McIvelley 2008) Ancient sources report the travels of wise men like
Democritus, Pythagoras and Plato to Egypt (Diogenes Laertius, IX 7.2).
We know that several philosophers, led by Pyrrho of Elis, accompanied
Alexander’s imperial adventures in the late 4th century BCE, which
made it as far as Northern India. (Diogenes Laertius IX 11.2; Flintoff
1980, 88; Waligore, 2010) There are several excellent comparative
studies claiming the direct influence of Indian thought on Pyrrho’s
scepticism, led by Flintoff’s “Pyrrho and India” (Flintoff 1980), and
Kuzminski’s studies on the remarkable parallels between Pyrrho’s
strategies for suspending assertoric judgment with like practices in
Madhyamika (Kuzminski 2007,2008)). Giovanni Reale, in his Systems
of the Hellenistic Age, has claimed that, through Pyrrho, Indian thought
played a shaping, indirect role in reorienting Hellenistic ethics towards
 3

valorising inner tranquillity (ataraxia or apatheia) as the goal of life,

over earlier Hellenic notions of eudemonia more consistent with the
wider values of the Greek poleis. (Reale, 1985, 3-23, 309-311)) An ear-
lier, apologetic literature has highlighted the near-Eastern, specifically
Semitic origins of many of the key Stoics, beginning from Zeno, Clean-
thes and Chrysippus. (Barker 1935; Bevan 1913; Durant 1939, 651-
658) In French, Laurentiu Andrei’s excellent ‘Le Retour sur Soi’ has in-
itiated what ought to become a wider academic discussion, comparing
Roman Stoicism and Zen. (Laurentu 2008) In English, 2010 saw Wil-
liam Ferraiolo’s “Roman Buddha,” an article which persuasively com-
pares Epictetus and the Buddha … (Ferraiolo 2010)

It remains that, beyond these examinations, there has presently

been little comparative philosophical work done on Stoic and Buddhist
philosophical discourses or practices. This paper aims to redress this
situation, drawing on recent continental philosophical approaches to
Stoicism led by Pierre Hadot, and taken up by Foucault (2006), Sellars
(2009), Holowchak (2008), Sorabji (2000), and Irvine (2009). In stark
contrast to Anglophone academic studies of classical philosophy since
the 1960s led by figures like A. A. Long (1974, 1976), Gisela Striker
(1996), John M. Cooper (2012) 2, and Brad Inwood (2008), Hadot fa-
mously contended that the Hellenistic schools including Stoicism con-
ceived and practiced philosophy as a way of life. This meant that an-
cient philosophy embraced and included the attempt to construct sys-
tematic reasoned theoretical understandings of physics, ethics, and
logic treated very ably and in great detail by Long, Striker, Cooper, In-
wood and others, and consistent with our sense of academic philoso-
phising today. But it also involved the expectation that the philosopher

2 See note 4 below on Cooper’s “ways of life” claim, and their relation to Hadot.
4

would live and comport themselves in distinct ways: ways still re-
flected in the lay use of the word ‘Stoic’ to describe a manner in which
a person, for instance, takes bad news, and repeatedly parodied by the
ancient comic poets. (Caizzi, 1993 3) Hadot makes much of the passage
in Diogenes Laertius wherein we are told that the Greek Stoics distin-
guished between discourse concerning philosophy (ton kata philoso-
phian logon; ta tou philosophou theorēmata) and philosophy herself,
which they specified as akin to a living organism. (Hadot 2010, 220-
221; DL VII.39-40) Philosophy herself, the Stoics specified, amounted
to a technē (art, skill, craft) of living (tou biou): one which could only
be cultivated by bringing together, and applying, theoretical discourse
to our practical experiences. (Sellars 2009, 47-50, 55-58) In particular,
Hadot argues, there are large swathes of ancient philosophical writing,
notably amongst the Roman Stoics Rufus, Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus
Aurelius, that can only be understood as either recommending, or in-
volving (in Marcus’ case) the ongoing practice of cognitive, mnemic, im-
aginative, somatic and existential practices (Hadot’s “spiritual exer-
cises”) aiming at “a transformation of our vision of the world, and … a
metamorphosis of our personality.” (Hadot 1996, 82 4) The price of

3 “This very rupture between the philosopher and the conduct of everyday life is strongly
felt by non-philosophers. In the works of comic and satiric authors, philosophers were
portrayed as bizarre, if not dangerous characters. It is true, moreover, that throughout all
of antiquity the number of charlatans who passed themselves off as philosophers must
have been considerable, and Lucian, for example, freely exercised his wit at their ex-
pense. Jurists too considered philosophers a race apart. According to Ulpian, in the litiga-
tion between professors and their debtors the authorities did not need to concern them-
selves with philosophers, for these people professed to despise money. A regulation made
by the emperor Antoninus Pius on salaries and compensations notes that if a philosopher
haggles over his possessions, he shows he is no philosopher. Thus philosophers are
strange, a race apart.” Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life trans. M. Chase (Lon-
don: Blackwell, 1996), 57.
4 It is here that Cooper decisively parts company with Hadot, although he does accept that

philosophy was a way of life, or rather involved the different schools promoting compet-
ing ways of living. But Cooper disputes the historical reality of Hadot’s exercises, in
claims it is not our task to consider here. (Cooper 2012, x, 20-22, 404 n. 4; cf. Sharpe
2014 for a critical assessment).
 5

closing off this metaphilosophical postulate is that such ancient texts

cease to make philosophical sense to us; so they can only be dis-
missively “written off” in a manner starkly displayed in T.W., Africa or
Dailly and van Effentere claims that Aurelius, to have written the Med-
itations, must have been an opium addict or (respectively) suffering
from a specific kind of liver complaint. (Hadot 2002a, 147-149; 1984;
Grimal 1991) 5

Hadot’s manner of reading ancient philosophies, including Stoi-

cism, as involving the cultivation of a manière de vivre has provoked
critical ire from analytically-inclined philosophers. It seems to several
of them to uncomfortably collapse the distinction between philosophy
and “religion” (Cooper 2012, 20-22) or philosophy and therapeutic
psychology or counselling. (Williams 1994; cf. Nussbaum 1994) While
we cannot address these anxieties here, they can serve to indicate the
framing contention of this paper. This is that Hadot’s metaphilosophi-
cal researches into Stoicism as a way of life open the way towards new
comparative work. This work can place this important Western philo-
sophical school (and perhaps also the Epicurean and sceptical schools)
in a new kind of dialogue with forms of Eastern philosophy. This is be-
cause Hadot sees Stoicism as a therapeutically-directed and lived phil-

5 This is not to say that this has not, very often occurred, as contemporary academic phi-
losophers and historians of ideas have looked back at ancient thought, presupposing our
own understandings of what philosophy is and must be. See, for a striking instance, Ber-
nard Williams, “Do Not Disturb”, London Review of Books, 16:20, Oct. 20, 1994, 25-26.
We are acutely aware as we write that this paradigm for reading ancient philosophy,
while still evidently alive in early moderns like Montaigne or the neoStoics, is not the ac-
cepted one today in academic philosophy. This paper cannot wholly vindicate Hadot’s
claims (and nor is this our intention here), except by bringing forth the material it does
from the Hellenistic and Roman Stoics: materials which, we propose, can only plausibly
be read as intending to diagnose the causes of human misery (Part 1), what needs to be
addressed to end avoidable forms of mental suffering (Part 2), and the practices by which
one sets about doing this (Part 3).
6

osophical culture (Nussbaum 1994) linking highly developed theoreti-

cal claims about the world to forms of existential practices aiming at
the transformation of the self of the philosopher. Previous understand-
ings of Western philosophies as solely theoretical, more or less existen-
tially free-floating, endeavors have foreclosed the very idea of such
comparative work. 6

The paper has three central parts, in which we will make this
case. Part I addresses the existential problems that Stoicism and Bud-
dhism address, to the extent that each can be conceived (as the evi-
dence we adduce aims to show each can) as therapeutic or soteriologi-
cal philosophies. We highlight the remarkable parallels between the
Stoics’ descriptions of unhappiness and its causes with the Buddhist
enumeration of the three kleśas of attachment, aversion, and ignorance.
Part II examines the parallels between the Buddhist conception of what
it is we are working on when we undertake meditative practice in that
tradition (we call this, following Foucault, the ‘ethical substance’); and
the Stoic philosophy of mind undergirding their accounts of the pathē
as reflecting false evaluative assessments of self and world. Part III ex-
amines the way that, in Buddhist and Stoic texts, existential practices
(Buddhist meditation and the Stoic askēseis and melētai) are clearly,
undoubtedly recommended (often in the imperative) and illustrated,
which aim at cultivating mindful attention to the present moment, the
transience of particular things, and non-attachment or “reservation”
(hypexairēsis) concerning such ‘indifferents’ (ta adiaphora), to use the
Stoic terms. (LS 58A-K, 356-359)

In Part III, a decisive differences between Buddhist meditation and the

Stoic spiritual practices as uncovered by Hadot emerges: Buddhism,

6But see Jiangxia Yu’s “The Body in Spiritual Exercise: A Comparative Study between
Epictetan Askēsis and early Buddhist Meditation” 2014 for an example of recent compar-
ative work in this vein.
 7

from the founding Foundations of Mindfulness Sutta (M.K:

Sattipaṭṭhāna Sutta) forwards, recommends specific, bodily practices
of sitting and breathing. Although the Stoics recommend forms of gym-
nasis or exercises of bodily endurance to “toughen [us] up”, such Bud-
dhistic exercises have no direct Stoic parallel. Our concluding remarks
thus raise the further questions that the comparative work we have
been able to achieve in this short paper skirts: namely, concerning dif-
ferences at the level of the theoretical ontologies of Stoicism and Bud-
dhism, and whether and how these differences affect the kinds of spir-
itual exercises each school recommends, in particular in terms of Stoi-
cism’s greater emphasis on cognitive-behavioral exercises as the
means for the philosopher to live more sagely. 7

Since Buddhism’s soteriological, ‘transformative’ or ‘therapeutic’ cre-

dentials are much more widely accepted than those of the Stoics, we

7 An important qualifying note on historical sources, and the scope of this analysis, is
needed before we proceed. Roman Stoicism is widely celebrated or reviled as more prac-
tical than what we can make of its Hellenistic sources, which we know only through the
doxographic tradition. While students of the school divide on this issue, we take there to
be a clear doctrinal continuity between Seneca, Epictetus and Aurelius and their sources
in Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, although the more practically-directed texts of the
Hellenistics, like Chrysippus’ Of Therapy, are lost. (see Gould 1970, 186-7; Tieleman
2006) Accordingly, we cite both the Hellenistics and the Romans in Parts I and II con-
cerning the passions and Stoic philosophical psychology, only drawing more exclusively
on the Romans concerning the practical philosophical exercises (Part III) For Buddhism,
given comparative difficulties, the primary focus of our comparative work here will be
the Pali Suttas although we will also draw on select contemporary Buddhist commenta-
tors to add scope and experiential texture to the discussion. Obviously, in future compar-
ative work of this kind, it would be intriguing to consider different specific strands of
Buddhist tradition in relation to the ancient philosophical schools of the West, sharing
their concern for philosophy’s informing practice and ways of life. …
8

frame each of the comparisons in Parts I to III by looking first at Bud-

dhism, then turning to the more disputed Stoic material. .

I. Diagnosis: the nature and causes of suffering

Buddhism, as a system of thought and practice, is avowedly centred on

the resolution of one all-pervasive problem: the eradication of suffer-
ing. Like a physician, the Buddha is traditionally thought to have diag-
nosed an illness, identified its cause and prescribed a cure. As is widely
known, the insight of the Buddha’s realization is expressed in the for-
mula of the Four Noble Truths: (1) the human condition is character-
ized by suffering (duḥkha); (2) suffering is caused by grasping or de-
sire; (3) suffering can be extinguished by eliminating its causes; (4) the
way to extinguish suffering is to follow the Middle Way (madhyamā
pratipad) in the form of the Noble Eightfold Path (Saṃyutta Nikāya,
Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, 56.11) The Sanskrit word duḥkha,
(Pali: dukkha) most often translated as “suffering,” and central to all
four of the noble truths, has the nuanced meaning of “that which is dif-
ficult to bear”. The standard English translation “suffering” is, in many
ways, not indicative of the full import of the concept. Duḥkha takes in
every shade of pain and dissatisfaction from outright anguish and des-
pair to general stress, displeasure and dis-ease. The basic meaning is
that human existence is pervaded and coloured with duḥkha in all man-
ner of gross and subtle forms and that not addressing this is the funda-
mental “problem” of human life. This all pervasive “suffering” has a
causal arising. It is caused by grasping or craving. 8 This “grasping”, in
the Buddhist sense, is predicated on a misunderstanding of the nature

8Peter Harvey describes the truths as “four realities” and goes on to say that “[they] are
not, as such, things to believe but to be open to, see and contemplate, and respond to ap-
propriately.” (Harvey 2007)
 9

and qualities of our existence, and wanting them to be other than they
are, as we will recall as we proceed.

Stoic ethical writings bring together three different vocabular-

ies to address the nature and causes of human unhappiness or vice. The
Stoics retain the eudemonistic or aretaic language of virtues, flourish-
ing and ethical perfectionism predominant in Aristotle. Yet, as in the
other Hellenistic schools (notably Epicureanism), Stoic descriptions of
the virtues and goal of life are interwoven, often seamlessly, into a med-
ical or therapeutic language diagnosing the illnesses of the psyche and
prescribing remedies, in ways that parallel the Buddhist literature.
(Nussbaum 1994; Voelke 1993) Thirdly, we find in the Stoic texts a
consistent set of “intellectualist”-sounding set of claims identifying the
virtues, and psychic health, with a kind of wisdom (phronēsis, sophia),
and the ideal personage of the sophos or sage: again, a kind of language
and emphasis germane to Buddhism, which identifies wisdom (prajñā)
as a virtue to be cultivated and happiness (or better ‘flourishing’) with
awakening or enlightenment. 9 In contrast to what is described as the
inner constancy or harmony of the virtuous sage, Stoic texts tend to
stress the dynamic (“disorderly and agitated”) instability of the psychic
life of the unwise, which is tied the Stoics’ physical theory to the soul’s
lack of tonos or inner tension (LS 47I-47L, 282-3); Cicero, Tuscalan Dis-
putations 4.29; LS 61O, 381) The unhappy man’s psyche, and “not just
one part of the soul but … the whole commanding faculty [hegemoni-
kon] ’s inclinations, yieldings, assents and impulses … change rapidly,
like children’s fights, whose fury and intensity are volatile and transi-
ent owing to their weakness.” (Plutarch, On Moral Virtue 446f-447s; LS

9 The current Dalai Lama is often quoted as saying that ‘all beings desire happiness’ but it
should be noted that, in keeping with the Buddhist virtue of non-attachment, happiness in
this context is not just subjective contentment but rather ‘being in touch with the flow of
things as they are’ and ‘things as they are’ in Buddhist terms are impermanent, inter-de-
pendent and empty. This idea of ‘non-attached happiness’ is closer to the idea of ‘flour-
ishing’ and can be fruitfully compared to eudemonia in Greek thought.
10

65G, 412) The unhappy man, as a result, spends much of his time wish-
ing that he, and the world, were other than they are, no matter where
he happens to find himself: a near-mirror image of the unenlightened
person in Buddhism, mired in forms of duḥkha.

So what then, more precisely, do the Buddhist and Stoic thinkers

argue are the root causes of this duḥkha or inner unease (or what Sen-
eca’s On Tranquility describes as stultitia) 10?

The parallels between the two schools concerning this question,

we think, are real and striking. The three kleśas (“root poisons” in the
Mahayana school or the “three unwholesome roots” in the Theravada
school) identified by Buddhist philosophy as conditioning factors of
duḥkha are the afflictive emotional/psychological states of attachment
(raga), aversion (dveṣa), and ignorance (avidyā). The kleśas are often
referred to in Buddhist terms as “mental afflictions,” or sometimes (in
a metaphor very dear to Stoic physics) “fires.” We suffer “thirst”
(taṇhā) for things we do not have, and when we attain these things, we
somehow always want more. 11 In the Buddhist sense, this craving is
fuelled by the need to grasp or hold things: to attach to them and grant
them a substantiality and permanence that Buddhism ultimately de-
nies. Attachment fosters the fear of loss and the anxiety of not attaining
the object of craving. For Buddhism in general and Mahayana Bud-
dhism in particular, attachment involves reification: a substantializing

10On this, see Foucault Hermeneutics of the Subject (New York: Picador, 2006), 130-135
11Here a further comparison with the Epicurean account of kenodoxia, empty opinions,
which fuel unnatural and unnecessary wishes incapable of satiation, might readily be un-
dertaken. Cf for instance André-Jean Voelke, “Opinions Vides et Troubles de l’Âme”, in
Le Philosophie Comme Thérapie de l’Âme: Etudes de Philosophie Hellénistique Préface
par Pierre Hadot (Fribourg: Academic Press), pp. 59-72.
 11

overlay on selves and things and one of the most problematic obstacles
to be overcome in practice. (Saṃyutta Nikāya 27.1; Loy 1983 )

In Buddhist terms, the second “root poison” of aversion (dvesha;

dosa) is defined as “not getting what we want or getting what we don’t
want” (Bodhi 2007, 84). Buddhist commentator Bhikkhu Bodhi de-
scribes aversion as “comprising all kinds and degrees of, ill will, anger,
irritation, annoyance, and animosity. Its characteristic is ferocity. Its
function is to spread, or to burn up its own support, i.e., the mind and
body in which it arises.” (ibid ) However, no matter what the “exter-
nals” contribute, the primary cause of aversion is within ourselves:

There always seem to be numerous causes for aversion (dosa)

and they invariably seem to be outside ourselves: other people's
actions or unhappy events which occur. However, the real cause
is within ourselves. Dosa has been accumulated and it can al-
ways find an object. We are attached to pleasant objects and
when we do not experience pleasant objects there is bound to
be dosa. When dosa arises it shows that the attachment which
conditions it must be very strong. (van Gorkom 1999) 12

Ignorance (avidyā/moha), the third kleśa, is described in differ-

ent ways in the different Buddhist schools: it can be explained generally

12 To anticipate content to which we will return in Parts II and III, the notion of a lasting,
independently existing substantial self urges us to expend enormous effort in resisting the
inevitability of change, making sure that this “self” remains secure. When we’ve
achieved some condition that makes us feel whole and complete, we want everything to
stay exactly as it is: and this form of attachment is at the root of aversion (dvesha, dosa)
also. As Geshe Tashi Tsering explains the logic here: “Aversion [dvesha; dosa] refers to
pushing away things that harm our sense of permanence... [It is] an exaggeration of an
object that arises from the fundamental ignorance of the way self and things exist. ...be-
cause the object harms the self’s notion of permanence, the mind exaggerates its negative
qualities. ...this mind of aversion can range from very gross to very subtle...” (Tsering,
2006, 54)
12

as not understanding the full meaning and implications of the Four No-
ble Truths; or (what amounts to the same) as a crucial misunderstand-
ing of the nature of reality. At stake is a fundamental misperception of
the nature of self and phenomena. In many ways, indeed, in Buddhism
as we will see momentarily in Stoicism, it is ignorance that drives the
entire dynamism of human suffering. Ignorance isn't just an inability
to apprehend the truth. It is an active misapprehension of one's own
mind or body, other people, and more. It is the conception or assump-
tion that phenomena exist in ways that they actually do not. As Jeffery
Hopkins explains:

Based on this misapprehension of the status of persons and

things, we are drawn into afflictive desire and hatred [i.e. attach-
ment and aversion]... Not knowing the real nature of phenom-
ena, we are driven to generate desire for what we like and ha-
tred for what we do not like and for what blocks our desires.
These three—ignorance, desire/attachment, and hatred/aver-
sion —are called the three poisons; they pervert our mental out-
look and cause us to suffer. (Hopkins in Dalai Lama 1992, 4)

It is remarkable that, just as in Buddhism, the root causes of the

unstable psychic condition of the non-sage for the Stoics lies, first, in
the person’s desires; second and as a flipside, in their aversions and,
thirdly, in the way these passions embody deeply erroneous ways of
seeing the world. 13 Evoking a metaphor with Socratic-Platonic prece-
dents, Cleanthes (3rd century BCE) depicts the passions (pathē) of the

13Mark Epstein (2001) describes the kleśas as “powerful reactions to things being out of
our control that have the ability to drive our behaviour and take over our consciousness.”
 13

non-sage as a kind of inner tyrant, demanding the entire world bend to

his every whim:

‘What is it, Passion, that you want? Tell me this?’ [What do] I
want, [O] Reason? To do everything I want.’ ‘A royal wish, but
tell me again.’ ‘Whatever I desire I want to happen.’ (Cleanthes
in Galen, loc cit., at LS 65I, 413)

As in the Buddhist psychological texts, the flipside of desire

(orexis) for some thing or other, in the Stoic literature, is enklisis, usu-
ally translated (in another exact echo of the Buddhist texts) as ‘aver-
sion’ from particular things. The Roman Stoic Epictetus’ Encheiridion
(2nd century CE), which Sellars, Ilsetraut and Pierre Hadot have argued
needs to be read as (per its traditional title) a practical ‘handbook’ for
living a Stoic life (Sellars 2006; Hadot & Hadot 2004), thus depicts this
task as exactly a business of training one’s desires and aversions. The
reason, just as in Buddhism, is that it is desiring the wrong kinds of
thing, and (mutatis mutandis) hoping to avoid things we cannot avoid,
which necessarily occasions our discontent:

Remember that desire (orexis) demands the attainment of that

of which you are desirous; and aversion (enklisis) demands the
avoidance of that to which you are averse; that he who fails of
the object of his desires is disappointed; and he who incurs the
object of his aversion is wretched. … Remove [the habit of] aver-
sion, then, from all things that are not within our power, and ap-
ply it to things undesirable, which are within our power. But for
the present altogether restrain desire; for if you desire any of
the things not within our own power, you must necessarily be
disappointed; and you are not yet secure of those which are
14

within our power, and so are legitimate objects of desire. (Epic-

tetus, Encheridion 2)

Stoic philosophical therapies then always involve the cultivation

of the ability to distinguish carefully what we should desire and what
avoid. As we saw with the Buddhists, it is above all a kind of ignorance
of the way the world is, the Stoics maintain, that both leads to (and is
then fed by) our needless fears, anxieties, and distresses. Indeed, for
all the major Stoics (excepting Posidonius who adapted a Platonic phil-
osophical psychology), our pathē or ‘passions’ just are “erroneous” or
“corrupt opinions and judgments” about ourselves, the world, and what
we need to be happy, as we are next about to consider. (Plutarch, loc
cit., LS 65G, 412; LS 61B11, 378)

II ‘Ethical Substance’: what is practiced upon or transformed

We have seen then that in Buddhism, according to the Second Noble

Truth, the cause of suffering is grasping. This grasping is based in our
mistaken views of the nature of things that causes us to suffer thirst
(taṇhā) for different objects of attachment. So what is it then that Bud-
dhism tells us we must work upon, in order to achieve liberation from
such grasping, and from the three kleśas, and what if anything about its
claims here can be meaningfully compared with Stoic claims?

The difficulty of the question is made more acute because of

Buddhism’s very great caution, which we have already met, concerning
any talk of reified “substances” at all. (Indeed, we hasten to stress that
our use of this Foucaultian term ‘ethical substance’ for this Part is heu-
ristic only). In Buddhist analysis, the hallmarks of conditioned exist-
ence are: impermanence (anitya), suffering (duḥkha), and no-self
 15

(anātman) (Dhammapada, 277, 278, 279). In other words, things and

selves are impermanent, tinged by suffering and without enduring es-
sence. It is when we attempt to ignore the impermanent, inter-depend-
ent nature of things and identify with (false) ideas of permanence and
stability that problems arise. The most damaging of these reifications
and the strongest form of attachment is to the self. As in the Western
Socratic lineages, the maxim “know thyself” in one sense remains al-
ways at the heart of Buddhist enquiry. But it is a very different idea of
“self” or, exactly, no-self. Selves, like all things, are for Buddhists of all
stripes not static, substantial entities. They are without any enduring
essence.

What this means, of course, is that strictly speaking Buddhism is

not a ‘care of the self’, to use Foucault’s phrase concerning ancient
Western philosophical practices. The ‘substance’ Buddhism as a lived
philosophy aims to change is no such self-standing, fixed, lasting es-
sence. When we ask what remains for practitioners to attend to, then,
and try to understand and transform philosophically, The Foundations
of Mindfulness Sutta (M.K: Sattipaṭṭhāna Sutta) outlines “five aggre-
gates of grasping”: form, feeling, perception, mental formulations and
consciousness.” (Walshe 346) It is to these, in particular our mental
formulations and consciousness that we must attend, with the end of
overcoming the illusion of stable selfhood.

Addressing the question in the context of his excellent article

comparing Epictetus and the Buddha, Ferraiolo (following Robert Mor-
rison and Stephen Ruppenthal) stresses the distinction in Buddhist
thought between forms of ‘selfish’ or ‘self-based’ thirst (trishna) and
taṇhā (desire) per se. “Aversion to conducting oneself in unwise or un-
skilful fashion, or the desire to improve one’s understanding and men-
tal discipline, or to assist others in their attempts to improve,” Ferraiolo
argues, are kinds of taṇhā which should be meaningfully distinguished
16

from forms of self-affirming craving for material possessions, the ap-

proval of others, or sexual conquest. 14 The latter forms of trishna are
antecedents of duḥkha; but the former may be subject to skilful
(kusala) effort: learning through meditative practices to pay attention
to our mental states, the conditions of their arising, and their relation
to forms of duḥkha. The key thing here is that, in Buddhism as we will
see in Stoicism, the kinds of desire we form are not taken to be auto-
matically preconditioned by external things: if by this claim it is implied
that these are beyond the reach of cultivation through meditative prac-
tice. As Morrison rejoins in his ironically-titled “Three Cheers for
Taṇhā”:

For example, if a heterosexual man encounters a very attractive

woman, this will probably give rise to a pleasurable ‘feeling-sen-
sation’, which in turn can form the condition for the arising of
affects such as ‘lust’ [rāga], ‘infatuation’ [pema], etc. ... The re-
sponse to ‘feeling-sensation’ is going to be a particular affect,
and [yet] taṇhā here, as I suggest, is not so much a particular
affect, but is best understood metaphorically, as a general con-
dition from which there can arise all manner of affects, includ-
ing, as we shall see, what Buddhism regards as ‘skilful’ (kusala)

14 Cf. “All the Buddha’s teachings come round to this one practical point: to find perma-
nent joy, we have to learn how not to yield to selfish desire. / This conclusion is so con-
trary to human nature that it is not surprising to hear even experts maintain that in preach-
ing the extinction of desire, the Buddha was denying everything that makes life worth liv-
ing. But trishna [taṇhā] does not mean all desire; it means selfish desire, the conditioned
craving for self-aggrandizement ... He distinguishes raw, unregulated, self-directed
trishna from the unselfish and uplifting desire to dissolve one’s egotism in selfless service
of all. The person who makes no effort to go against the base craving for personal satis-
faction is headed for more sorrow. (Stephen Ruppenthal, in Easwaran, Eknath – trans.
(1985) The Dhammapada. Chapter introductions by Stephen Ruppenthal. Tomales, Cali-
fornia: Nilgiri Press), p. 179 – emphasis and brackets added).
 17

affects, the kind of affects cultivated in an active spiritual life.

(Morrison, 2008 [our italics])

If in Buddhism it is not exactly the ‘self’ that is cultivated in prac-

tice, so much as our responses to taṇhā, in Stoicism what we must at-
tend to, if we are to approach the condition of the sage, are the passions
(pathē). 15 In Part I, we introduced the key Stoic claims that unhappi-
ness is characterized by deep psychological instability: the “proneness”
to be moved suddenly by passions (pathē) involving desire for (or the
impulse to avoid) particular things which present themselves. In what
is often described as the Stoics’ “cognitivist” theory of the pathē, the
passions are taken by the Stoics, like the Buddhist authors, to involve
false judgments we have actively assented to about the world. (LS65A-
Y, 410-422; Graver 2007, 15-60; Sandbach 1994, 59-67) It is because
we have actively taken ourselves to need things (like money, fame, or
power) which we do not, and actively assented to the idea that we must
avoid things (like death or bodily pain) we finally cannot, that we in
effect open ourselves to avoidable forms of mental distress.

While all the details of the Stoics’ accounts of the pathē need not
concern us here (cf. Graver 2007), two key ideas do need to be spelt out
to show the marked comparison with the Buddhist tradition. First is
the Stoics’ insistence that, in Epictetus’ concise formulation: “Men are
disturbed (tarássei) not by things, but by their opinions (dógmata)
concerning things.” (Epictetus, Encheiridion 5, start) The Stoics, like
the Buddhists, observe that people have a tendency to imagine, and

15 We note that this is one point of contention between Hadot and Foucault, in the recent
Western work on ancient Stoicism as a way of life. Hadot criticises Foucault’s emphasis
on the pleasures, rather than forms of tranquility and eudemonia, as the key terms in Sen-
eca. Cf. Hadot, “Reflections on the Idea of ‘Cultivation of the Self’” in Philosophy as a
Way of Life, 206-214; esp. 206-7; and “Un Dialogue Interruptu Avec Michel Foucault:
Convergences et Divergences,” in Pierre Hadot, Exercises Spirituels et Philosohie An-
tique Préface par Arnold Davidson (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 2002), 313-321.
18

very often to lament, that external things have a great deal more power
over us than in fact they do: ‘what could I do?... It was his fault, not mine
…’, etc. However, secondly, as Epictetus continues in Encheiridion 5,
the actions and examples of virtuous individuals show that even the
apparently worst events need not trouble us as we usually accept:

Thus death is nothing terrible (deinón), otherwise it would have

appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our opinion (dógma)
of death, that it is terrible. When, therefore, we are hindered, or dis-
turbed, or grieved, let us never impute it to others, but to ourselves;
that is, to our own opinions (dógmata). (Epictetus, Encheiridion 5)

The basis of this position is a distinction between the impres-

sions (phantasiai) of external things and events we receive, and the
emotive opinions we form concerning these things. Just as the Bud-
dhists distinguish between ‘feeling-sensations’ (vedanā) and the forms
of affective reactions we form in response to these, the Stoics maintain
that our affects involve, beyond the received impressions, our active
assent (synkatathēsis) to some description of what we have perceived
and how it affects us. As human beings, the Stoics agree with the Bud-
dha, we tend to interpretively “take” more from our impressions of the
external world than what, often, is actually the case. Indeed, for the
Stoics, it is strictly speaking only when we assent to interpret external
happenings under some ‘subjectively added-on’ epilogos that the pathē
of fear, panic, distress, or anger and urgent desire emerge. 16 The Stoics
argue that we need not interpret the world in these habitual ways:

When some terrifying sound … occurs, even a wise man’s mind

must be slightly moved … soon, however, the wise man does not

16 Cf. Epictetus, Discourses III.8.4: “So-and-so's son is dead.’ ‘What happened?’ ‘His son
is dead.’ ‘Nothing else?’ Not a thing.’.‘So-and so's ship sank.’ ‘What happened?’ ’His
 19

… assent to such impressions nor does he add any opinion to

them, but he rejects and belittles them and finds nothing in them
that should be feared. (Epictetus fragment 9; LS 65Y, 419; cf. Ep-
ictetus Discourses III.8.4; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
VIII.47) 17

Given this, we see that the pathē as the Stoics conceive them are not
simply somatic events. They are the psychophysiological ‘corollaries’18
of unnecessarily assenting to judgments that some external event com-
pellingly makes it “appropriate (kathēkon)” for us to respond in some
way or the other. The fullest Stoic categorizations of the pathē thus
tabulate passions according to whether their subject interprets a pre-
sent or future, external happening as necessary for their own happiness
(hence ‘good’) or as harming them (thus ‘bad’, to be avoided):

Present Future (in prospect)

Externals taken as Delight (hēdonē) Desire (epithymia)

‘good’ : rejoicing at attaining de- : anger (desire for retribution); intense
sired externals … lust; cravings, yearnings, love of pleas-
ures, honors, riches

ship sank.’ ‘So-and-so was carted off to prison.’ ‘What happened?’ ’He was carted off to
prison.’- But if we now add to this ‘He has had bad luck,’ then each of us is adding this
observation on his own account”.
17 Viz. “Say no more to yourself than what the initial impressions report (meden pleon

seautō lege, ōn ai proēgoumenai phantasiai anaggellousin). It is reported unto thee, that

such a one speaketh ill of thee. Well; that he speaketh ill of thee, so much is reported. But
that thou art hurt thereby, is not reported: that is the addition of opinion, which thou must
exclude. I see that my child is sick. That he is sick, I see, but that he is in danger of his
life also, I see it not. Thus thou must use to keep thyself to the first motions and appre-
hensions of things, as they present themselves outwardly; and add not unto them from
within thyself through mere conceit and opinion.”
18 The relationship between the cognitive, evaluative judgment in the passions and their

somatic manifestations/corollaries/ consequences/causes is a point of technical dispute in

the Stoic school, starting from Zeno and Chrysippus. We suspend judgment on it here,
with the quotation marks around ‘corollaries,’ since this technical issue need not detain us
given our different ends. See Martha Nussbaum in Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of
Thought (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), 19-84; and Graver, Stoicism and Emotions, 7,
15-48.
 20

Externals taken as ‘bad’ Distress (lupē) Fear (phobos)

: malice, envy, jealousy, pity, : hesitancy, anguish, astonishment,
grief, worry, sorrow, annoy- shame, confusion, superstition, dread,
ance, mental pain, vexation terror

(source: Stobaeus 2.90; LS 65E, 412; Graver 2007, 54)

However enticing “delight” may appear as an inner state, the Stoics

stress that, since the objects which it involves are external to us, and ex
hypothesi beyond our control, such hēdonē is unstable at best. When
the objects we have accepted as necessary to our happiness are taken
from us, broken, lost, or decay, the harvest of such “delight” is inner
distress (lupē). (Epictetus Encheiridion 1) And to the extent we are
canny enough to realise in advance that these ‘needed’ things are alien-
able and transient, forms of fear and anxiety (phobos) inevitably
shadow our delight. As Mingyur Rinpoche explains this “Stoic” thought,
but from within the Buddhist tradition:

Every strong attachment generates an equally powerful fear

that we’ll either fail to get what we want or lose whatever we’ve
already gained. This fear, in the language of Buddhism, is known
as aversion: a resistance to the inevitable changes that occur as
a consequence of the impermanent nature of relative reality.
(Mingyur 2008, 121]

Part III: Practices, Comparison and Contrasts

We have arrived then at the heart of our paper: the remarkable com-
parisons between Stoicism and Buddhism, conceived as lived philoso-
 21

phies involving existential or spiritual practices, rather than self-stand-

ing theoretical constructions. While following Hadot there have been
different attempts to catalogue the different Stoic and other ancient
spiritual practices 19,we will group these exercises under three head-
ings central to Buddhism, bringing together evidence for Stoic ana-
logues of each of these exercise-types or themes: viz. (i) exercises fo-
cusing attention on the present moment; (ii) exercises recalling the
transience, and true nature, of external things; and (iii) exercises in cul-
tivating “reservation” about, or nonattachment to, these ‘indifferents’.

i. attention to the present moment

The concept of “mindfulness” resonates through Buddhist discourse,

and is one of the dimensions of moral conduct in the Noble Eightfold
Path. According to Jay Garfield, the term “mindfulness” “denotes the
joint operation of … two cognitive functions: attention (smṛti) and in-

19 These exercises, practices, or “technologies of the self,” are differently categorised by

the different authors (amongst those who accept, contra Cooper, that they exist, that is):
Hadot himself gives different lists, whether drawn from Philo or Plutarch (Hadot 1996,
82-85), his own reflections, or based upon the Stoic division of philosophical discourse
into physics, logic, and ethics (cf. also Hadot 2010, 214-223; Foucault at times divides
them into forms of meditation (melētē), writing (graphein) and bodily exercises or tests
of endurance (gymnazein) (Foucault 2006, 425-6); whilst Sorabji gives an eclectic but ex-
haustive list spanning: sceptical exercises, character exercises, Pythagorean self-review,
Stoic distinguishing between what is within versus outside our control, Stoic meditations
on impermanence, practices of abstinence, Epicurean distraction, memorisation tech-
niques, letter-writing, criticism of and by others (especially amongst the Cynics), Epicu-
rean confession, desiring with reservation amongst Stoics and the Church fathers, Aristo-
telian dramatic catharsis, peripatetic and other therapies for specific emotions like anger,
re-labelling of events, viewing oneself as if one were an indifferent other, mnemonic ex-
ercises concerning past events, practices of premeditating future challenges in the Stoics,
or Epicurean cultivations of hope and anticipation, exercises in valuing the present, ab-
stracting from past, present, and future, prolongation and delaying. (Sorabji 2000, 211-
242). We remain neutral on the issue of the final count here, focusing only on three cen-
tral kinds of Stoic exercise which show the comparisons with Buddhist concerns.
22

trospective vigilance (samprajanya).” Here, attention involves “the fix-

ation of attention on an object;” and introspective vigilance is then “the
careful maintenance of that attention and of the attendant attitudes and
motivations” (Garfield 2013). This is a succinct description of the man-
ner in which the two attentive functions support and, to use Garfield’s
term, “enable” each other. Meditative attention, including introspec-
tive vigilance, is a cultivated focusing of awareness that enables the
practitioner to be more aware of their mental states; especially their
intentions and motives.

Mindfulness meditation is outlined by the Buddha in the Dis-

course on Mindfulness (Satipatthana Sutta Walshe, 1995, 335-350). In
this Discourse the Buddha lays out in great detail the mental and phys-
ical processes and phenomena towards which the meditator directs his
or her attention. The practice involves the application of mindfulness
(sati) and clear awareness (sampajanna) to the contemplation of the
Four Foundations of Mindfulness or four foci of the meditation prac-
tice: 1) Body; 2) Feelings; 3) Mind; and 4) Mind Objects. The instruc-
tion is the same for the four foci:

[The meditator] abides contemplating body as body internally,

contemplating body as body externally, contemplating body as
body both internally and externally. He abides contemplating
arising phenomena in the body, he abides contemplating van-
ishing phenomena in the body, he abides contemplating both
arising and vanishing phenomena in the body. Or else mindful-
 23

ness that there is a body is present to him just to the extent nec-
essary for knowledge and awareness. He abides independent,
not clinging to anything in the world. (Walshe, 1995, 336) 20

In this meditative practice, practitioners aren’t looking for an

answer to some proposed problem. Nor are they paying attention to
their experience for the purpose of producing a theory or explanation
about why things behave in the way they do. They are merely observ-
ing things as they are in the ‘here and now,’ and in this observation,
“getting an experiential handle” on the impermanence and transitory
nature and inter-dependent nature of the psycho-physical components
that self is comprised of. Practitioners of this form of meditation aim
to learn, thereby, to recognize and systematically observe the individ-
ual components of human experience. In a way which we will see is
notable, looking towards the Stoic tradition, the process of mindfully
attending to experience is assisted by applying simple and generic la-
bels to the phenomena that are observed, shorn of the baggage of hopes
and fears usually tethered to them. As Buddhist nun Ayya Khema
(1987, 16) explains:

When thoughts arise, look at them, give them a name. Whether

it’s a correct label or not doesn’t matter. Any label during med-
itation means the thought needs to be dropped. When you have
learned to label in meditation, you will be able to label thought
as wholesome, profitable, skillful or otherwise in daily living

20 To take an example, with respect to the body one may serially attend to one’s breathing
and to the position of one’s body - whether it is upright, settled or prostrate. With respect
to feelings one identifies whether that feeling is pleasant, painful or neither pleasant nor
painful and so on.
24

also. When you know it’s not skillful or wholesome, you can let
go of it. 21

Pierre Hadot, almost single-handedly, has pointed to the empha-

sis in Stoic literature on cultivating attention (prosochē) to the present
moment: a theme which inescapably calls Buddhist mindfulness to
comparative mind. (cf. Sorabji 2000, 238-240) The wider Greek and
Roman emphases on happiness as involving a whole life (eg: Seneca
Letter 92.2, LS 63F1, 396; Aristotle, NE, I.7) seems to speak against any
such focus on the present moment. 22 Nevertheless, Hadot points out,
we know from the doxographic sources that the leading Stoic Chrysip-
pus enigmatically maintained that, just as a small circle is no less ‘cir-
cular’ than the largest exemplars of its geometric kind (Hadot 1996,
226), so “[i]f a person has wisdom for one instant, he is no less happy
than he who possesses it for an eternity.” (Plutarch, Common Concep-
tions, 1062a; at Hadot 1996, 228) 23 Epictetus’ Discourses, certainly,
contains a remarkable chapter Peri Prosochēs, ‘On Attention’ which has

21 See II above concerning this distinction between skillful and unskillful responses to the
objects, impulses, and feelings which present themselves to us.
22 Aristotle’s famous remark is “But we must add 'in a complete life.' For one swallow

does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not
make a man blessed and happy.” We note, contra the idea that Aristotle at least was
clearly interested in theory, as against kinds of living, that Aristotle NE I.7; NE I.5 is al-
ready concerned with contrasting different kinds of life, as against activities, in trying to
discern the ends of man. The Stoic would rejoin, to Aristotle, that a life is made of mo-
ments; so a life cannot be well lived unless it is compromised of moments well lived; but
there is unquestionably a tension here between the peripatetics and the Stoics which we
can only flag here. Aristotle accepts the popular Greek sense that a life can be harmed
post-humously, since a judgment on eudemonia includes a person’s reputation, where the
Stoics are a good deal more sceptical about the importance of fame, dependent upon oth-
ers, as a constituent of happiness truly conceived.
23 Plutarch similarly reports to us in On Common Conceptions that for the Stoics, “a good

is not increased by the addition of time, but even if someone becomes prudent for a mo-
ment, in respect of happiness he will in no way fall short of someone who employs virtue
for ever and lives his life blissfully in virtue.” (Plutarch On Common Conceptions,
1061F; LS 631, 396)
 25

as its object the importance of cultivating a habitual, constant attentive-

ness, in every moment and task of life. “When you have remitted your
attention for a short time,” Epictetus warns:

… do not imagine this, that you will recover it when you choose
… For first, and what causes most trouble, a habit of not attend-
ing is formed in you; then a habit of deferring your attention.
And continually from time to time you drive away, by deferring
it, the happiness of life, proper behavior, the being and living
conformably to nature. … ‘To-day I choose to play.’ Well then,
ought you not to play with attention? ‘I choose to sing.’ What,
then, hinders you from doing so with attention? Is there any part
of life excepted, to which attention does not extend? (Epictetus
Discourses IV.12)

That to delimit the present moment, and its concerns, should be

of imperative ethical importance for the Stoics follows logically from
the diagnosis above of the pathē as “adding” unnecessary evaluative
commentary to what we experience. As the Stoic tabulation of the
pathē reflects, there is a temporal component to what we “add” to
things, when we are moved by passionate fear or desire. Fear moves
beyond what is given to us, pre-empting undesirable future eventuali-
ties. Likewise, desire adds to what (or who) we immediately perceive
exciting anticipations of their future enjoyment. Yet, the Stoics observe,
we cannot yet change the future. Many things we fearfully or desir-
ously anticipate do not come to pass. In Epictetus’ language, the future
(like the past) “does not belong to us.” So it is not philosophically ra-
tional to exert our attention upon them, if this means a loss of attention
26

to those matters we can affect. (cf. Sorabji 2000, 228-242) This is why
Seneca directs us:

Two things must be cut short: the fear of the future and the
memory of past discomfort; the one does not concern me any
more, and the other does not concern me yet. (Seneca, Letter 78,
14; at Hadot 1996, 228)

In several of the Meditations, Marcus enjoins himself to

perigraphō (delimit, circumscribe) his attention on the present mo-
ment. (eg Marcus Aurelius, Meditations III.10; VII.54; IX.6) Remarka-
bly, this involves in one exercise a process of carefully, silently giving
things a name (onoma) or definition (horon), as they are, analytically
dividing their parts: a practice very similar to that we have seen recom-
mended in Buddhist mindfulness practice. 24 To concern ourselves with
future and past is to overburden ourselves, especially since even the
worst sufferings can only ever be experienced in moments, each of
which by itself can be borne, aided by the ability to calmly observe and
itemize what it is we are facing:

Do not disturb yourself by thinking of the whole of your life. Let

not your thoughts at once embrace all the various troubles
which you may expect to befall you: but on every occasion ask
yourself: what is there in this which is intolerable and past bear-
ing? … In the next place remember that neither the future nor
the past pains you, but only the present. But this is reduced to a

24 Cf. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations III.11: “To the aids (parastēmata) which have been
mentioned let this one still be added:—Make for thyself a definition (poieisthai horon) or
description of the thing which is presented to thee, so as to see distinctly what kind of a
thing it is in its substance, in its nudity (gymnon), in its complete entirety (holon), and tell
thyself its proper name (onoma), and the names of the things of which it has been com-
pounded, and into which it will be resolved.” On this naming exercise in the Roman Sto-
ics, see Foucault 2006, 294-299.
 27

very little, if you only circumscribe it … (Marcus Aurelius Medi-

tations, VIII.36) 25

ii. impermanence

According to Buddhism, one aspect of mindfulness practice is thus the

cultivation of a non-choosing awareness. It enables the practitioner to
be fully present to whatever is happening, avoiding preferring any one
emotion, sensation, thought etc. over another. The key to this exercise
is the understanding that “things”, whether feelings, bodily sensations,
psychological states, “just are,” independently of the stories we embroi-
der about them. But this philosophical task of “seeing things as they
are” in the present moment also has an at least analytically divisible,
second dimension: that of confronting the sheer transience of each of
the thoughts, feelings, attitudes, etc. that emerge, and typically disturb

25 The promise of being able to cultivate such attentiveness, Marcus tells us, is very
great—indeed, very close to the ethical goal of Stoicism more widely, as a eudemonistic
philosophy:” … if you separate from yourself the future and the past, and apply yourself
exclusively to living the life that you are living - that is to say, the present - you can live
all the time that remains to you until your death, in calm, benevolence, and serenity.”
(Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, XII.3.3-4) Or again: “All the happiness you are seeking
by such long, roundabout ways you can have right now … I mean, if you leave all of the
past behind you, if you leave the future to providence, and if you arrange the present ac-
cording to piety and justice.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations XII.1.1-2)
28

the emergence of a mindful non-choosing awareness. As Ayya Khema

(1987, 16) again explains:

The technique of labeling and letting go allows the practitioner

to see the constantly changing nature of thought and on a prac-
tical level in daily life act on what is beneficial and recognize and
let go what is not. (italics ours)

When the practitioner gets beneath the interpretative filters

that typically shape his or her experience, that is, what Buddhism
claims he or she discovers is that all phenomena are impermanent,
lacking any singularly defining characteristics, without ‘self’ or solid
core, and in constant inter-reaction. We saw this in Part II. It accord-
ingly doesn’t make philosophical (or, in the medium- or longer-term,
practical) sense to cling to these thoughts or emotions. Instead, attach-
ments form reified “stumbling blocks” to veridical understanding. In
other words, in the practice of labeling and letting go, the practitioner
is accordingly aiming at an experiential disclosure of the key Buddhist
teachings of impermanence, no-self, and dependent co-origination.
Through meditative practice, she sees for herself, in her own experi-
ence and not merely as a theoretical conclusion, the importance of not
attaching to any of the four foundations: body, feelings, mind and mind-
objects.

The Buddhist emphasis on impermanence, as a theme of medi-

tative experience, is again much more widely known than what is, nev-
ertheless, a similar emphasis we can find in Roman Stoicism. Again,
Marcus Aurelius is the clearest case here, although Stoic physics always
looked back to Heraclitus’, famous for emphasizing the ceaseless flux of
phenomena. The importance of the Stoic student actively realising the
impermanence of things can also be seen to be theoretically motivated
by the key practical distinction emphasized by Epictetus at the basis of
 29

Stoic practice: between things within and beyond our control

(eph’ēmin). (Epictetus Encheridion 1) When we desire something ur-
gently, the Stoics like the Buddhists note that the very force of our pas-
sion leads to a kind of irrational hope or demand that it should some-
how not age, be vulnerable, alienable, or mortal. Yet, for the Stoics as
for Buddhism, all physical things (including our own bodies) are sub-
ject to constant change or metabolē. 26 While we might “win awhile”, in
time we will be forced to confront this. As Epictetus thus enjoins us,
concerning how we relate to those we love:

… remind yourself that you love a mortal, something not your own; it
has been given to you for the present, not inseparably nor forever, but
like a fig, or a bunch of grapes, at a fixed season of the year, and that if
you yearn for it in the winter, you are a fool. If in this way you long for
your son, or your friend, at a time when he has not been given to you,
rest assured that you are yearning for a fig in winter ... (Epictetus, Dis-
courses III. 24. 84-7; cf. Encheiridion 3)

Marcus Aurelius for these reasons directs himself, in the imper-

ative, to “acquire a method for contemplating how all things are trans-
formed into each other, concentrate your attention on this ceaselessly
and exercise yourself on this point.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
X.11; VIII.11; IX.25; X.9; Hadot 2002a, 155, 155 n.1) Indeed, in a way
which directly parallels the Buddha’s nine “cemetery contemplations”
for young monks in the Satipatthana Sutta, Marcus calls up all the force
of his imagination to make his realization of this transience existen-
tially vivid. “And further, monks, … if a monk sees a body dead one, two,
or three days; swollen, blue and festering, thrown in the charnel
26We note that for the Stoics, things each have relative permanency in times, and they are
unafraid of using the language of ‘forms’ or ‘substances’ (ousia), as for instance at Mar-
cus Aurelius, Meditations III.11. We return to the issue of different metaphysics, which
seem to stand in relative independence from the convergent practices, in our Concluding
remarks.
30

ground,” the Buddha advises in the Satipatthana Sutta, “he then applies
this perception to his own body thus: ‘Verily, also my own body is of the
same nature; such it will become and will not escape it’ (Satipatthana
Sutta, “Nine Cemetery Contemplations”) “When you regard each sub-
stance,” Aurelius likewise enjoins himself in nearly identical terms, “im-
agine that it is already being dissolved, is in the midst of transfor-
mation, in the process of rotting and being destroyed.” (Marcus Aure-
lius, Meditations, X.18) Such exercises belong to what Hadot has called
“practical physics”. (eg Hadot 2002a) And as in Buddhism, the point of
such practical physics is not a self-lacerating “pessimism.” (Cf. Hadot
2002a) It is the attempt to see things steady and to see them whole:

Just in the same way ought we to act all through life, and where
there are things which appear most worthy of our approbation,
we ought to lay them bare (apogymnoun) … and cleanse them
(katharon) of the account (historian) by which they are exalted.
For outward show is very seductive (paralogistēs), and when
you are most sure that you are employed about things worth
your pains, it is then that it cheats you most. (Marcus Aurelius
Meditations VI.13)

iii. exercises in non-attachment or ’reservation’

We have several times skirted how, in Buddhist thinking, the danger of

attachment is paramount. Beginning with the self, human beings habit-
ually grasp on to ideas of permanence and constancy and then form at-
tachments to these reifications. To achieve insight into “the nature of
things,” and to avoid the twin vices of aversion and ignorance, it is cru-
cial to break down these ontological and epistemological attachments.
The paradoxical injunctions in Buddhist conundrums, so prominent in
 31

the Zen tradition—like ‘the path of no-path’; ‘that spiritual cultivation

cannot be cultivated’; and ‘the practice of no practice’—are each point-
ers to not forming attachments to any reified aspect of reality: even to
Buddhist practices or teachings themselves. To become attached to
these practices of teachings themselves, they emphasize, is to practice
from ignorance and confusion and not to be in accord with “things as
they are,” no less than by becoming attached to other external, reified
things.

One of the most striking and instructive examples of how understand-

ing impermanence and non-attachment is generated in Buddhist mind-
fulness practice is the ‘Reflections on the Repulsive parts of the Body,’
alongside the already-mentioned ‘Nine Cemetery Contemplations’. In
these ‘reflections’, mindfulness and clear awareness are applied to the
transitory nature of the body, with a view to impressing forcibly upon
the monk the need for non-attachment, even to his own physical form.
The practitioner is instructed to “review this very body from the soles
of the feet upwards and from the scalp downwards, enclosed by the
skin and full of manifold impurities.” The Buddha goes on to list the
various impurities and repulsive parts of the body once “the surface has
been scratched” and compares the body to “a bag, open at both ends”.
The Sutta points out that no one, as the bearer of such a body, is exempt
from such damage and decay: “verily my own body is of the same na-
ture; such it will become and will not escape it.” (Walshe, 1995, 338)
This contemplative exercise serves, as above, to highlight the transitory
nature of the body and the false impressions that we have of beauty and
appearance. It is heightened by a further ‘deconstructive’ exercise
32

wherein the practitioner imagines the different decomposing stages of

the body after death. 27

Like the Buddhists, the Stoics in the West have consistently been
chided by critics for their allegedly unfeeling, fatalistic, indifference to-
wards the wider world, coupled with their allegedly proud, self-inter-
ested attention to their own ethical perfection. (Brooke 2012, 1-12)28
Yet the Stoics, unlike their more extreme Cynic cousins, never advo-
cated a principled rejection of all external things or of “the world”. A
sizable part of the ancient Stoic literature on ethics deals instead with
the issue of how the Stoic should select or not select these indifferents:
many of which, like food, shelter, water, and so on, are natural necessi-
ties for creatures like us and necessary for cultivating virtue; and many
others, like political responsibility, which may be necessary instru-
ments for performing virtuous actions. (Stobaeus Anthology 7e, at In-
wood & Gerson 2008, 135;Reydams-Schils 2005, 59-69) Nevertheless,
what the Stoic should cultivate is a kind of inner reservation towards
all externals he either selects or opts to avoid, so that “he acts with re-
serve and encounters no obstacles which are not anticipated.” (Sto-
baeus Anthology 2.155.5-17; LS 63W1, 419; Epictetus Encheridion 12,

27 For the deconstructive aspects of Buddhist practice see Davis, Leesa S. 2010 Advaita
Vedānta and Zen Buddhism: Deconstructive Modes of Spiritual Inquiry. (London and
New York: Continuum).
28 Part of the arguable misunderstanding involved here no doubt comes from the term ad-

iaphora which the Hellenistic Stoics used to describe all things which fall beyond virtue
and vice, and the subject’s volitional choice (impulses, actions, judgments). Literally
meaning something like “undifferentiated things”, the force of the term is to highlight the
Stoic observation that, despite the illusory hopes we are often encouraged to invest in ex-
ternal things (especially power, money, beauty), their possession by itself cannot make a
person happy, absent a kind of practical wisdom about how to select and use or enjoy
these things. (cf. Long 1996, 23-32) These things are for the Stoics ‘beneath good and
evil’ in this sense. Just as gaining one or other of them can never bring with it “instant
eudemonia,” neither does losing any of them necessitate unhappiness. We recall again
Epictetus’: “Men are disturbed not by things, but by their judgments concerning things.”
(Epictetus, Ench. 5, start; cf. II above).
 33

33.13-14) In a famous passage, Seneca explains this attitude of hypex-

airesis or exceptio as follows:

The wise man sets about every action with reservation: ‘if noth-
ing happens which might stop him.’ For this reason, we say that
he always succeeds and that nothing unexpected happens to
him: because within himself he considers the possibility that
something will get in the way and prevent what he is proposing
to do. (Seneca, On Benefits 4.34.4, at Donini & Inwood 1999,
737)[ ]

Probably the most famous exercise to cultivate this inner re-

serve is the famous premeditation malorum. The Stoic is enjoined in
this exercise to anticipate all likely obstacles or disappointments that
might foil her in her tasks in the day ahead (Seneca Letter 24; Seneca
On Anger II.10) ); or, in Marcus, to:

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with

interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and self-
ishness--all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is
good or evil …” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations II.1)

Whatever the trouble, Seneca assures us that measuring it in advance

in our mind will soften its sting. Indeed: “You will thus understand that
what you fear is either insignificant or short-lived.” (Seneca Letter
34

24.1) Epictetus enjoins a more direct daily form of exercise in disen-

chanting appearances, to be undertaken as we walk 29 (cf. Foucault
2006, 298-9):

Against this kind of thing chiefly a man should exercise himself.

As soon as you go out in the morning, examine every man whom
you see, every man whom you hear; answer as to a question,
"What have you seen?" A handsome man or woman? Apply the
rule: Is this independent of the will, or dependent (proaireton)?
Independent (aproaireton). Take it away … Has the proconsul
met you? Apply the rule. What kind of thing is a proconsul's of-
fice? Independent of the will, or dependent on it? Independent.
Take this away also: it does not stand examination: cast it away:
it is nothing to you. (Epictetus Discourses III.3; cf. Sorabji 2000,
215-216)

It can hardly be over-stated how close this “cast it away” of Epictetus

brings us to the key Buddhist virtue of detachment.

Concluding Remarks

Pierre Hadot nearly always kept his trained philologist’s caution con-
cerning comparative analysis of the Western schools that were his ob-
ject of scholarship, and Eastern traditions. Nevertheless, late in What
is Ancient Philosophy?, Hadot confessed that continuing research and

29 In the Zen Buddhist tradition there is a form of walking meditation that enables practi-
tioners a “break” from the long hours of seated meditation. Known as kinhin (literally
“sutra walk) this is another way of mindfully focusing on the present moment of each
step “to practice walking meditation is to practice walking in mindfulness” (Hanh, 1985)
 35

discussions with scholars of Eastern thought later in his life had con-
firmed exactly the kind of point we have been contending for here:

Now, however, …it seems to me that there really are troubling

analogies [sic.] between the philosophical attitudes of antiquity
and those of the Orient. These analogies cannot be explained by
historical influences; nevertheless, they do perhaps give us a
better understanding of all that can be involved in philosophical
attitudes ... (Hadot 2002b, 278) 30

We, no more than Hadot, are making no claim here to a direct or

indirect influence of Buddhism upon the Stoics. We have tried to
demonstrate in this paper several cognate points, on the basis of textual
evidence gleaned from both traditions, and speaking to their compara-
ble ‘metaphilosophical’ conceptions of philosophy as, ideally, informing
the whole lives of students, by way of recommended philosophical and
existential practices. To recall, we first (in Part 1) argued that the Bud-
dhist diagnoses of the three kleśas of attachment, aversion, and igno-
rance are remarkably echoed in the Stoic tradition’s understandings of
unhappiness as involving unfulfilled desires to possess or avoid exter-
nals. Second (in Part II), we claimed that the Buddhist attention to de-
veloping awareness of one’s thoughts, feelings, and desires, and culti-
vating “skilful” forms of these, find remarkable parallels in the Stoic di-
agnoses of the pathē, and calls for practitioners to learn to separate im-
pressions (phantasiai) from the affect-engendering opinions (hypo-
lypseis, dogmata) we form about these impressions. The Roman Stoic
texts, we then thirdly have shown (in Part III) are comparable to the

30 In another late interview, Hadot felt licensed to comment that what he calls ‘spiritual
exercises’ were “practiced in every age, in the most widely diverse milieus, and in widely
different latitudes: China, Japan, India; among the Christians, Muslims, and Jews.”
(Hadot 1996, 282, cf. 279)
36

Buddhist Suttas in three, very practical ways. First, the Roman Stoics
urge themselves and us to cultivate attention to the present moment.
Second, they call themselves and us to philosophically recall the transi-
ence of all things, including our own mortality. 31 Thirdly, we showed
how Marcus, Epictetus and Seneca all recommend that people practice
cultivating a sage ‘reservation’ or detachment concerning everything,
except (for the Stoics) the pursuit of virtue and harmony with the world
as it is in itself—again, a spiritual attitude students today are generally
more familiar with through the widespread currency of Buddhism in
Western culture.

We close now with some qualifications and honest avowals of the limits
of this analysis. Firstly, while we have tried to show that there are sig-
nificant, hitherto-too-little remarked comparison between the soterio-
logical concerns and practical prescriptions of Stoicism and Buddhism,
this work stands as a necessary preliminary to further studies, more
adequately specifying the differences between these two philosophical
and spiritual traditions. In Part II, we remarked Buddhism’s stress on
the lack of any stable Self, which is not a Stoic teaching. The Stoics, it is
true, do stress the impermanence of experience, and Marcus and Epic-
tetus enjoin themselves and us to repeatedly call this universal flux, and
our own transient mortality, to mind as we saw in Part III. But the Sto-
ics’ sense of the providential ordering of the physical Whole, and their

31 Considerations of space prevented us from pursuing this famous exercise of the me-
mento mori, for which the Stoics have been widely attacked as ‘morbid’. To take exam-
ples of this practices from only one of the classical texts, in Marcus Aurelius Meditations,
see II.12; IV.5; VII.32; VI.4; VI.10; IV.14 [on death as natural, as natural indeed as
birth]; II.2; II.4; II.6; II.11; II.17; III.1; III,14 [on death as imminent, given the passage of
time, a recollection which recommends attentiveness to the present moment (see Part
III)].
 37

comfort with what we might call ‘ ousia (substance)-talk’ clearly differ-

entiate the traditions.

This difference at the level of philosophical doctrine, metaphysics or

physics, thus raises the larger questions which surround Pierre Hadot’s
recovery of the practical, existential dimension of Hellenistic and Ro-
man philosophies. (cf. Cooper 2012) This is that of the relation in phi-
losophies practiced as manières de vivre between philosophical dis-
course, systematizing philosophers’ reasoned understandings of the
nature of things, and their practical recommendations concerning how
to remove illusions and cure us of unnecessary desires or attachments.
In the case of comparisons between Buddhism and texts from the Stoic
tradition, these questions are made particularly pointed by what seems
to us to be the second, very great difference between the Eastern and
Western philosophies: viz. that although we know that the Stoics did
recommend certain exercises of endurance or physical abstinence to
cultivate the “understanding that a man's peace of mind does not de-
pend upon Fortune; for, even when angry she grants enough for our
needs.” (Seneca Letter 18.7; Foucault 2006, 435-436), it remains that
we have no written evidence in the Stoic or doxographic texts suggest-
ing anything like the kinds of bodily practices of directed sitting and
breathing so prominent in different forms of Buddhism, as the experi-
ential means of cultivating mindfulness and non-attachment. Instead,
the Stoic “meditations” are described well by Foucault, when he com-
ments that they involve a concentration of the mind, without directives
concerning posture or the control of breathe:

… appropriating a thought and being so profoundly convinced

of it that we both believe it to be true and can also repeat it con-
stantly and immediately whenever the need or opportunity to
do so arises. It involves then ensuring that this truth is engraved
in the mind is such a way that it is recalled immediately the need
38

arises, and in such a way that we have it … ready to hand.” (Fou-

cault 2006, 357)

We would need to be very careful in assigning causality to ex-

plain this key difference, given clichéd claims concerning the West’s al-
leged “rationalism,” against the more “mystical,” intuitive and sensuous
East. The Stoics, no less than the Buddhists, are metaphysical monists
for whom the mind is embodied or the body minded: and the spiritual
exercises are nothing if not exercises in habituation 32, whose philo-
sophical explanation often drawing on medical analogies, and analogies
drawn from the training of animals, as well as the crafts of the day—in
other words, very mundane and embodied practices. The Buddhist tra-
dition, for its part, contains highly developed dialectical texts, powerful
forms of discursive argumentation concerning the limits of discourse,
and a series of distinct discursive practices, like the famous koans in
the Zen tradition—or the forms of rational arguments the Pyrrhonian
philosophers in Alexander’s retinue may have drawn on to found their
own ‘Western’ school of scepticism. (Kuzminski 2007, 2008)

This paper then aims at being simply a groundwork, opening out

on to further work to more precisely understand the comparative fea-
tures of Stoic and Buddhist philosophies. But from here on, it hopes to
have established, this comparative work will need to proceed on the
basis of what the texts suggest is a more adequate metaphilosophical
footing: one not closed to the way Stoicism (and perhaps other lineages
in the pre-modern, Western philosophical heritage) were meta-philo-
sophically a good deal closer to Buddhism than previously thought,

32 This is the very mundane observation Cooper (2012) completely misses, as Sharpe
(2014) has argued.
 39

aiming ‘to see things as they are,’ both as a theoretical end in itself, and
as a practical means for individuals to live better, wiser lives.

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