Neither Spinoza nor Taoism thinks about the good life as living for others. At the same time they link self-realization with a kind of egolessness. As pointed out by Paul Wienpahl, an American philosopher and scholar of Spinoza who was also a long-standing practitioner of Zen meditation, the seventeenth-century French philosopher and sceptic Pierre Bayle identified this affinity between Spinozism and Zen Buddhism.
