Great wisdom presents itself with different faces to different people throughout time, but maintains the same essence. That's what makes it wisdom. It is eternal and unchanging, it just takes perspective to see.
I had exactly the same epiphany while reading Meditations. I thought, "wow, this sounds an awful lot like the Buddhism I've read/heard about".
Again, after reading Ralph Waldo Emerson I saw the same wisdom with a different face. I realized that all these people throughout time came independently to precisely the same conclusions about how to live life as part of the great "wholeness" (for lack of a better word) to which we all belong.
My experience with Buddhism is mostly limited to interactions with an old Buddhist friend, but in terms of literature I found Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and J. D. Salinger's Teddy to be very palatable from a western perspective.
For stoic philosophy you can really do no better than Marcus Aurelius's meditations, specifically the more modern Gregory Hays translation. Epictectus's discourses are pretty good too, but are less pithy and have a lower signal to noise ratio when it comes to true wisdom IMO.
Emerson's Self Reliance, History, and finally The Oversoul will reveal the same wisdom from all the other works I mentioned.
It is very beautiful and interesting to me that Stoics and Buddhists arrived at very similar conclusions despite being thousands of miles apart and having little to no contact.
Seems like mainstream folks tend to give credits of life wisdom to Buddhism and Stoicism but let’s not forget the Bible also mentioned the same in the book of Luke: “Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.”
Luke 17:33 NKJV
https://bible.com/bible/114/luk.17.33.NKJV
As others said, Buddhists and Stoics were earlier. Some Christian writings were definitely influenced by those lines of thought though, yes.
Speaking for myself, another reason I enjoy Buddhism and Stoicism is that they feel more like pure, distilled wisdom. Especially Zen Buddhism. Christian writings are filled with excessive moralizing and mythology, which enables all sorts of problems.
There was some interaction between Greece and India, and it's possible some thought from the Indian subcontinent may have influenced the founders of scepticism.
While there isn't much direct evidence to support this theory, both philosophies have some ideas related to mindfulness that are too similar to me to be a coincidence.
Christianity has the same idea too, at least if you count the Serenity Prayer. Probably not an independent discovery though, I imagine its creator (a theologian) took the idea from Greek philosophy.
> God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Yes, this is the most stoic/zen prayer that I've ever heard from a Christian context. I like it a lot.
Unfortunately Christianity suffers from excessive moralizing and mythology, which turns me away from it. But it definitely has lines of thought that descended from stoic thinking.
Somewhat. At a higher level being a stoic, gets you closer to the Buddhist mindset. Buddhism tends to differ in its acknowledgment that the active practice of stoicism (as a discipline) is still a pursuit, and thus still a means to assert control.
I had exactly the same epiphany while reading Meditations. I thought, "wow, this sounds an awful lot like the Buddhism I've read/heard about".
Again, after reading Ralph Waldo Emerson I saw the same wisdom with a different face. I realized that all these people throughout time came independently to precisely the same conclusions about how to live life as part of the great "wholeness" (for lack of a better word) to which we all belong.
My experience with Buddhism is mostly limited to interactions with an old Buddhist friend, but in terms of literature I found Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and J. D. Salinger's Teddy to be very palatable from a western perspective.
For stoic philosophy you can really do no better than Marcus Aurelius's meditations, specifically the more modern Gregory Hays translation. Epictectus's discourses are pretty good too, but are less pithy and have a lower signal to noise ratio when it comes to true wisdom IMO.
Emerson's Self Reliance, History, and finally The Oversoul will reveal the same wisdom from all the other works I mentioned.