Stoicism and the Four Noble Truths

Over the last decade or so an alliance of sorts has formed between the modern Stoic movement and a variety of Buddhist popularizers, especially those influenced by the secular Buddhist movement. It has been noted that both Buddhists and Stoics sought 1) to quiet their desires and minds through various techniques, 2) to impose on themselves a strict simplicity in thought, word, and deed, and 3) to take hold of a super-ordinary freedom. This point of view has been put forth in articles, books, and videoes. While no one reasonable claims that the two are identical (that Zeno would have become Bikkhu Zeno upon hearing a sermon, or that the the Buddha, had he traveled to Greece, would have set up shop under the Stoa) it often seems to me that the similarity is overstated between these two venerable traditions. As an experiment of sorts, I decided to imagine what a Stoic would think of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism—how we would react and respond to the essential tenets of Buddhism, that were supposedly the core message of the very first sermon the Buddha taught after his Awakening.

As a caveat, I should state that the varieties of Buddhist thought and practice are wildly complex and diverse. For the purposes of this paper I will try to stick to the oldest and simplest form of Buddhism, known as Theravada Buddhism. Similarly, it is not clear that all of the Stoics agreed upon basic topics like theology, cosmology, or even ethics. Stoicism certainly changed as it went from a philosophy discussed under the Athenian Stoa to the expression of pure Roman virtue (what the Romans called Latinas—Latin-ness) embodied in someone like Cato the Younger. Again, for the purpose of this essay, I will try to take the most basic from of Stoicism that has come down to us in the limited sources we have.

    
With that caveat in mind, let us look at each of the Four Noble Truths in turn and see what a Stoic would have to say. The First Noble truth is that life is suffering or distressing. The word being translated (dukkha) is notoriously hard to translate with just one English word, but the idea is that life is indelibly marked by loss, change, unsatisfactoriness, and a lack of fulfillment. Buddhism is not claiming that life is never pleasant, or that we never experience happiness, because we surely do. But our pleasure and our happiness seem to be fleeting and momentary; our desire for more pleasure or better happiness is constantly thwarted by time and ability. At first blush a Stoic, I believe, would see in this claim a false value judgment. Life is all we have and everything we experience is experienced in the context of life. To claim that all of life is suffering is to make the claim that fate ought to be some other way. But perhaps a better understanding of the first Noble Truth is that life is suffering for the unenlightened, for all but the Stoic sage. If this is the case, then the Stoic practitioner would more or less agree. For most of us, life is experienced as unsatisfactory in many ways. So far, the two are in agreement.

    
The second Noble Truth is that the origin of suffering (dukkha) is found in desire or craving. What this means is that our experience of the world as unsatisfactory is the direct result of our craving more and more things—a more stable, happy feeling, a more intense pleasure, a better quality of life. These desires lead us to a state in which whatever we have is not enough. While the Stoic might agree with a part of this, Stoicism has no problem with desire in itself. The problem arises when we desire that which is not in our control, when we desire against fate, one might say. For the Stoic, a desire for virtue, tranquility of mind, goodwill toward others, and the ability to identify ourselves with reason are all good desires, an oxymoron for the Buddhist. This is where the divergence of the two ways of life start to appear.

    
The Third Noble Truth is that the end of suffering comes with the cessation of desire or craving. Because the origin of suffering and unhappiness are found in craving and desire, if we eradicate desire and craving from our life, the suffering and unhappiness will also be eradicated. Here, like the second Noble Truth, the Stoic will only partly agree. The problem is not all desires or cravings. It would be positively un-Stoic to eradicate our desire for virtue, self-control, or a cosmopolitan attitude. The source of unhappiness and suffering, as I stated earlier, is not simply desire, but to desire what fate does not grant us, or to desire against nature. In fact, amor fati, the love of fate, is really a desire that everything in the world be the way it is. That is quite a strong desire the Stoic would have you cultivate, a sort of desire that for the Buddhist is still problematic.

    
The Fourth Noble Truth is probably the hardest to discuss in detail because it covers so much. The final Noble Truth is that the the way to end craving and desire (and thereby the way to end suffering and unhappiness) is to follow the Eightfold Path: right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. To delve into what all of these right ways of living are would take us far from our goal in this short essay, but many of the precepts the Buddhist promotes are also promoted by the Stoic. Being careful what you say, being attentive of what you do for a job, developing mindfulness, and so on. The one which would not be agreed upon, however, is right view. Part of what Buddhists mean by 'right view' is that there is no self (the doctrine of anatman, as it is typically understood). The Stoic firmly believes in a 'self', namely reason or logos, which is identical to fate, God, and nature. The goal, as Seneca discusses, is to identify ourselves with reason, with the God that lives inside of each of us. By identifying ourselves more and more fully with the active element in the universe, we become more and more like a god, more and more identified with fate itself, and we become more in tune with our own human nature and more in tune with the Nature we find in the wilderness. The Buddhist, on the other hand, tells us that there is no self, that to identify with any part of our self is a mistake, which will only lead to suffering and endless rebirth. It is precisely this view about the self that separates the Buddhist and the Stoic at the doctrinal level.¹ The Stoic is insistent that we have a self or a real human nature with which it is our duty to identify ourselves. The Buddhist takes enlightenment to be a step out of nature, out of the complex web of karmic cause and effect (what the Buddhists call 'dependent arising') that determines our bodily and mental states

    
My point in this very brief essay is not that there are no similarities between Stoicism and Buddhism, because in practice there are many. The similarities between mindfulness and what the Stoics call prosoche, or attention, are many and Stoics would be unwise to ignore all of the useful teachings that Buddhists have provided about it. We should not let practical similarities blind us to doctrinal differences though, and the doctrinal differences seem to go very deep when considering the nature of the self. In reality the only way to truly know the extent of the differences between Buddhism and Stoicism on a doctrinal and existential level would be to get a Stoic sage and enlightened Bodhisattva to sit down and discuss their experiences. And while this seems very unlikely, modern technology grants us access to all of the essential Buddhist and Stoic texts that we may read ourselves, and put to use in our path towards self-betterment.

¹Later Buddhist schools, like the Mahayana, taught that we could discover the Buddha-Nature within ourselves, and that Buddha-Nature is the essence of the entire universe. This sounds a lot more like Stoicism, although it does not seem that the Buddhist would identify Buddha-Nature with reason. To further compare the doctrinal similarities (or differences) one ought to look at Stoic determinism and Buddhist dependent arising (or conditioned genesis), or the Buddhist virtues and the Stoic virtues.