Stoicism and Buddhism
There are interesting parallels between the Buddhist and the Stoic programs. Starting with a framework inspired by the Four Noble Truths:
- Both traditions agree that as an experiential matter life is suffering, we’re unhappy and we know it, or we think we’re happy but we’re mistaken, which is a form of suffering as well.
- The reason for suffering is that (a) we focus on the wrong things (aversion, attachment), and (b) we don’t perceive the world around us in the right way. Both Stoicism and Buddhism frame the suffering primarily as an input problem.
- We eliminate the suffering by eliminating the reasons that give rise to it: We need to focus on what’s good and bad, not on what’s indifferent and, critically, we need to learn to reliably distinguish between those categories in real world situations.
From there, the Stoics proceed as follows:
Every situation must be examined in light of internal standards: the virtues. We all experience illness, loss, injustice, fear, etc. The right way of looking at those events is as “Stoic challenges.” What means dealing with illness well? What’s the success criterion? Not getting well, but dealing with the illness virtuously. Of course we should call a doctor, everything else would be foolish (as in not pursuing a preferred indifferent), but the real test is not whether our health is restored but whether our honor remains intact throughout the process, whether we complained and felt sorry for ourselves or kept a stiff upper lip. We shift the success criteria from the outside world into the agent. That is the most fundamental Stoic/Socratic reframing: The only criteria that ultimately matter are within ourselves. The world can’t fail us in ways that truly matter. Only we can fail ourselves.
Perceiving the world properly is key. Once an impression appears in consciousness, much of the moral work is already done, because unconscious (upstream) perceptual processes have already framed and labeled the input: good, bad, dangerous, attractive, etc. Only constant (downstream) vigilance protects us from assenting to false impressions and thus form forming false beliefs about the world. False beliefs cause suffering.
We must stabilize our perception, because it doesn’t help us if our ability to discern correct from incorrect impressions only works most of the time. Imagine you are a musician playing in a band. If you can properly distinguish a 5th from a 4th most of the time you will not last long. Any trained musician must get these things right all of the time. That’s why training the mind to the point of perfect consistency is so important to the Stoics. Eventually, the conscious training will become automatic just as ear training becomes automatic, at which point we have properly updated our unconscious perceptual processes.
Part of perceiving the world correctly is understanding our agency correctly. Here, Buddhism is more radical than Greek thought, curing attachment and aversion not merely by having the agent want different things (the virtues) but by dissolving the agent as such. If there is no “me,” then there is no attachment that I have to the world. The Stoics went part-way down that path. The cosmos is an ordered, living entity in which everything is connected. We humans play our part, but we did not author our parts. The causally closed Stoic cosmos shares parallels with the Buddhist principle of dependent origination, although eventually Stoicism blinked and (arguably) carved out room for uncaused volition. However, the Stoic freedom of the hegemonikon is a far cry from the “autonomous individual” of later Western moral theory; the embeddedness of the agent in the cosmos is key to properly understanding what the agent is (and what it isn’t).