More Than Happiness: Buddhist and Stoic Wisdom for a Sceptical Age

by Antonia Macaro

The question for the secular-minded is how many Buddhist ideas can survive being uprooted from the religious soil in which they grew.

This was an important challenge!

It’s not by pursuing but by abandoning our desires that real satisfaction can be found.

The four noble truths each have a medical parallel: the disease is dukkha; the cause is ignorance/craving; the desired state of health is nirvana/cessation of dukkha; the medicine is the path.15

Reason, emotion and the body are more intricately connected than the Stoics could have known.

We should exercise our ability to improve ourselves by managing, rather than eradicating, our emotions.

The proper sources of joy and happiness are fundamental in one formulation of the Buddhist path found in the early texts. This consists of sīla (ethical action or morality), samādhi (concentration or meditation) and pañña (insight, understanding or wisdom).30 These three elements build on each other and are to be developed together. It has been argued that, among these three, morality and insight are the essential elements of the ultimate goal, while meditation is mainly a way to cultivate those.

‘Right view’ does not mean only subscribing to certain understandings of human life and the world, but also holding them with the right attitude. Even right views need to be held undogmatically.

‘I am of the nature to grow old; I cannot avoid ageing. I am of the nature to become ill; I cannot avoid illness. I am of the nature to die; I cannot avoid death. All that is mine, dear and delightful, will change and vanish.’