BDHA X STOIC

Similarities

Of course there are many differences between Buddhism and Stoicism, but here I focus on some of the similarities that seem most striking to me. The overarching commonality is the diagnosis of the human condition. The Buddhist word for this (which is also the first ‘noble truth’) is dukkha: suffering or unsatisfactoriness. The description of dukkha is this:

birth is dukkha,
ageing is dukkha,
illness is dukkha,
death is dukkha;
union with what is displeasing is dukkha;
separation from what is pleasing is dukkha;
not to get what one wants is dukkha.

The main idea is that unsatisfactoriness is inseparable from life. Even if we have a great life we are all going to get what we don’t want and will eventually lose what we want and love. So given the way reality is (impermanent and dukkha), we are completely deluded when we believe, as we do, that the things of the world can make us happy or determine our unhappiness. In Buddhism these things are known as the eight worldly conditions:

• gain and loss
• fame and disrepute
• praise and blame
• pleasure and pain

The Stoics would have been very comfortable with the view that attachment to the things of the world is misguided. Diogenes Laertius left us the following list of Stoic indifferents (which we mistakenly think of as good or bad):

life, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, fair fame and noble birth, and their opposites, death, disease, pain, ugliness, weakness, poverty, ignominy, low birth, and the like.