BDHA X STOIC

Medical Metaphors

Both traditions saw themselves as providing a kind of treatment for this delusion. And to describe this they both adopted what we could call medical metaphors. The parallel is with medical explanations of physical afflictions. For instance, an infection is caused by bacteria and the therapeutic procedure is to reduce their population by taking a course of antibiotics, thereby restoring health. In a similar way, the disease that both traditions saw themselves as targeting is in broad terms human suffering; the cause is ultimately ignorance of how things really are and what’s truly valuable in life, which expresses itself in craving for and attachment to the things of the world; the treatment is following the path; the state of health is understanding and non-attachment, leading to tranquillity.

In particular, for the Stoics the disease was the faulty judgements that attribute good or bad to things other than virtue or vice (and which are inseparable from emotions, which are like the symptoms of the disease), and philosophy is the cure.

In Buddhism there are the four vipallāsas, or distortions of perception:

Sensing no change in the changing
Sensing pleasure in suffering
Assuming self where there’s no self
Sensing the unlovely as lovely.

We should, of course, do the opposite: appreciate that everything is impermanent, empty of self and inseparable from suffering, and therefore realise that what looks lovely on the surface actually isn’t.