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Greg Lopez on Stoicism and Buddhism (Episode 56)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this conversation Caleb speaks with Greg Lopez. Greg is a practicing secular Buddhist and Stoic. He’s also the co-author, with Massimo Pigliucci, of A Handbook for New Stoics.
They discuss Greg’s struggle to combine the two philosophies, and different accounts of mindfulness.
(02:12) Buddhism and Stoicism
(12:25) Daily Practice
(16:05) Varieties of Mindfulness
(21:20) Stoic Mindfulness
(33:13) The Notion of Self
(38:21) Karma
(42:45) Eclecticism
***
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoicism and Buddhism
00:00:00
Speaker
And so most of the time, the Stoics and the Buddhists would agree that whatever is going on externally and internally is beyond your control. It's outside of what you can directly control 100% of the time. And interestingly, the Stoics and the Buddha seem to define what a self is in the same way.
00:00:19
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of Stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be in in-depth conversation with and experts. In this conversation, I speak with Greg Lopez. Greg is a practicing secular Buddhist and Stoic.
00:00:43
Speaker
He's the co-author with Massimo Pilhiucci of a handbook for new Stoics. And, as you'll hear in this conversation, he's deeply read in the early Buddhist texts, as well as the classics of Stoicism. This is the first of a set of conversations we're having about Buddhism and Stoicism.
Combining Buddhism and Stoicism
00:01:02
Speaker
This combination has been frequently requested
00:01:05
Speaker
by listeners. Thanks for getting in touch with us on that front, all of you that have. And please send any further recommendations or feedbacks to stoa at stoameditation.com. And of course, be sure to share this podcast with a friend and leave a review on Spotify or Apple podcasts.
00:01:26
Speaker
In this episode, Greg and I talk about his struggle to combine the two philosophies and different accounts of mindfulness. I think you'll find it a useful intro for thinking about how to combine the two philosophies in a systematic way and some of the benefits and questions that arise from trying to harmonize to fundamentally distinct worldviews.
00:01:55
Speaker
Here is our conversation. Welcome to Stoic Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros, and today I am speaking with the researcher and author, Greg Lopez. Thanks for joining. Thanks for having me, Caleb. Well, you describe yourself as a practicing secular Buddhist and Stoic. What does that mean?
00:02:20
Speaker
It means probably more confusion than is necessary, but perhaps we'll get to that. So I guess we could break it down into the words of which the sentence consists.
Secular Buddhism Explained
00:02:30
Speaker
So secular is kind of of our age. And to my knowledge, the term secular Buddhism was coined by Stephen Batchelor. And he has a methodology of putting things to the side that you find in the Buddhist scriptures, which may have come from the cultural milieu of the Buddha.
00:02:49
Speaker
And even with putting those things aside, there are still a massive amount of practical things that one can do within Buddhism. And so I don't personally adhere to any metaphysical claims extending from Buddhism and instead kind of see it more as a
00:03:05
Speaker
I guess a phenomenological philosophy where you take a look at your experiences and the framework which is presented in the early set of sutas called the Pali Canon since they're written in a form of Sanskrit called Pali.
00:03:20
Speaker
Things that are written there can be mostly applied to psychology and they're not making claims about what exists. They're not making ontological claims. Instead, they're making a framework for how to work with one's mentality and how to progress along the path. The Buddha said, I only
Foundations of Stoicism
00:03:34
Speaker
teach suffering in its end, which was in reference to the fact that a lot of people were trying to challenge him on ontological claims and sometimes he sat in silence.
00:03:42
Speaker
and simply didn't necessarily approach those things. Other times he did, and it's hard to know exactly what was in the historical Buddha's head at all, but it seems that he was mainly focused on psychology and its progression. So that's the secular Buddhist aspect. In short, it is
00:04:00
Speaker
putting metaphysical claims to the side. And my particular practice focuses on the early Pali Canon and what's written in there, focusing on the practical things, although there are secular Buddhists who can also practice other traditions from Buddhism going from Mahayana to Vajrayana as well. Then the Stoic, I think people are probably familiar with that given the title and audience for your podcast, so I'll skip that unless you have specific questions about it.
00:04:27
Speaker
Yeah. Well, so would you say that your Buddhism is in league with the project of people like Owen Flanagan, who has this book called Buddhism Naturalized, which picks out particular themes from Buddhism and rejects anything that might even have the whiff of supernaturalism? To what extent are you in the same league as that sort of project? I would say roughly in the same league as that.
00:04:55
Speaker
Would, is there something that you might distinguish yourself, say to distinguish yourself from that project or?
Harmonizing Differences in Ethics
00:05:01
Speaker
I'm not necessarily interested in as much in the trying to harmonize Buddhism and Buddhist practice with natural ontological claims, like trying to come up with correlates in brain science and stuff. I think that's an important project, but it's not particularly what interests me since I am not an active research scientist taking a look at brain scans of meditators.
00:05:22
Speaker
In that case, I try to focus mainly on the phenomenology, and any metaphysical claims related to it are of little concern to me in my practice. Yeah, so more of the practicing side and less on how does the count of personal identity in Buddhism match up with our best theories on psychology or neuroscience or what have you?
00:05:46
Speaker
Yeah, so not so much the latter and more the former. I kind of take what is in the polycanon as a model for practice. And like the saying goes, all models are false, but some are useful. And my working presumption is that this model is useful for practice.
00:06:04
Speaker
What are some of the similarities between Buddhism and Stoicism? I'm always hesitant to answer that question because I think overall either a very broad view, if you paint with a broad brush, you can make anything similar to anything else. They're both personal practices to some degree and they're both in the business of mental cultivation and development. I will probably leave it there in terms of
00:06:28
Speaker
the difference is they I think they're actually quite quite different at the end of the day and it took some work which is still an active project on my part to try to harmonize these two in terms of practice overall I would say that
00:06:42
Speaker
Buddhism, at least early Buddhism, before the idea that came along with the Mahayana of the so-called Bodhisattva ideal, where one postpones one's enlightenment in order to help all sentient beings achieve enlightenment, that's not something that I roll with because I'm focused mainly on the early text and the
00:06:59
Speaker
Theravada-ish interpretation of things. However, the pre Bodhisattva ideal Buddhism seems to resonate a lot more with Epicureanism than Stoicism in my view, that things like morality and stuff early on, you can make a reasonable inference that things like virtue and practice are practicing in the virtues are an instrument to nirvana in early Buddhism. However, it's a very circular description because nirvana
00:07:28
Speaker
is described as the cessation of three mental characteristics, greed, hatred, and delusion. And one could argue then that those mental characteristics are what fuels unethical behavior, so it's kind of a virtuous circle in a sense. However, the gradual path that's explained in the early Pali text about how to ideally progress along Buddhism tends to seem to place virtue as a way to quiet your mind and your life so that then you can sit down, meditate, and ultimately gain insight.
00:07:56
Speaker
So yeah, they're pretty different, whereas stoicism places virtue first and foremost. There's also the question of whether this word virtue is actually talking about the same thing at all. The arote is excellence in Greek, and that's what we translate as virtue. However, I think that's a poor translation because it has too many connotations that don't necessarily translate to modern English. To me, it feels a little bit of a
00:08:20
Speaker
Victorian prudishness, like, oh, I will remain chaste until marriage and stuff like that. And I don't think that's what the Stoics were getting at when they were talking about virtue. They were talking about the most excellent form of a human being overall. On the other hand, sila, the thing that's translated to kind of virtue in Buddhism is mainly associated with kind of rights, like rituals, doing things. And the main practice of
00:08:42
Speaker
virtue in Buddhism to start with that you do early on is trying to adhere to the five precepts, which are just deontological rules. You should do this, and it's not because this is wrong, specifically killing, stealing, lying, refraining from mental intoxicants that could cloud the mind. These are all examples of kind of hard and fast rules, deontological rules to follow, and that's the version of
00:09:06
Speaker
virtue that we see in early Buddhism, and are they talking about the same thing? I don't necessarily think so. They have different interpretations of what to do there. Yeah, so I suppose a lot of people come initially, maybe to have some form of Westernized Buddhism in mind.
00:09:22
Speaker
and they know a decent amount of stoicism and they'll think, well, both of these traditions focus on limiting desires in particular way.
Managing Desire in Both Philosophies
00:09:33
Speaker
They both have contemplative practices associated with them and they find that
00:09:41
Speaker
both fit in with a kind of mindfulness type practice. And at that level, I think a number of people find a decent amount of synergy, if you will, where they feel like the practice might reinforce each other or at least close enough that they benefit from learning about each. What's your take on that approach?
00:10:04
Speaker
So you may want to refresh my memory on the specific aspects you went along with along the way, but I do have things to say, for instance, about desire. So if we take the Epictetus framework of Stoic practice, which is one of many possible ways to frame Stoic practice, so let's focus on that. He has three disciplines that were named by the scholar Pierre Hadeau quite well, in my view, although they're not named in the how Arian captured Epictetus's lectures.
00:10:31
Speaker
And so those disciplines are the discipline of desire, the discipline of action, and the discipline of ascent. And so Epictetus's training program is meant, in my view, to be built upon. It builds upon itself. You start with desire and move on from there. Buddhism, desire, cutting off desire at its root, is something that happens very late at practice and that goes, and it's done in a very different way than how the Buddhists tend to desire. And so there's, and how did they tend to deal with it?
00:11:00
Speaker
At a broad level again, yeah, you can say that it's about taming desire, but then so is Epicureanism, so is Cyrenaism, so is possibly Platonism as well. So again, it goes back and maybe perhaps you can go to modern philosophies and talk about existentialism or even utilitarianism, the fact that you should align desires with maximizing utility.
Practical Challenges of Dual Practice
00:11:20
Speaker
Okay.
00:11:21
Speaker
So it's every moral theory and practice that you can kind of think of. I think if you do a little bit of work, you can harmonize it at this broad level. And that's why I'm hesitant to necessarily say they are, they go together. And the reason why I harmonize them is probably half historical accident and half that
00:11:39
Speaker
The early formulation of Buddhism that resonated most with me was missing a key component of socialization, and I found modern practitioners tackling this problem and not tackling it to my satisfaction. I had trouble understanding what modern practitioners who want to fight for social justice in Buddhist circles in the modern Western Theravadan view
00:12:01
Speaker
their actions did not necessarily coincide with the early Buddhist view of withdrawing to the forest, meditating and working on your sila and just trying to focus on your desires. So because there was that gap, I decided, I thought that stoicism was a good place to plug in the Buddhist notions of morality with stoicism. And that's kind of how I've harmonized them.
00:12:25
Speaker
Got it, got it. So could you maybe say more about how the harmony ultimately worked? You know, it was a specific moment where you thought these aren't really meshing together in the way that people might probably say they do. Once you drill down into different accounts of desire or self or nature, what have you, what was sort of the next step of putting things in their proper place, as it were for you?
00:12:48
Speaker
So I started with Buddhism and still practice it today, and probably it's roughly my primary practice. Overall, I would probably say Buddhism is my more daily practice.
00:13:00
Speaker
And going back to the original point of kind of how people say that Buddhism and Stoicism can be harmonized and that they're kind of about the same thing. I think that I hypothesize that a lot of people who say that aren't necessarily practicing both daily, because at least for me, I come up with confusion a lot of the time. And that's why I mentioned that I'm making things more difficult for myself by doing this to some degree. Because if one wants to practice with something in the moment, you're presented with two different paths of dealing with it.
00:13:29
Speaker
And they, there are different ways of working with things that are coming up in our daily life. So for instance, should I, like, if I get a thought that is the Epictitan form of Stoicism would classify as like a strong impression that is going, it's a proto passion that leads to a proto passion. And then how do I work with that? Well,
00:13:51
Speaker
There are a couple of different ways to do that. The kind of discipline of a cent-epictinian approach is to say, oh, your impression, what's your propositional content? Let me see, tease that out and test whether it's true according to my rules, the rules that I learned in stoic training.
00:14:07
Speaker
It's very cognitive and it's reminiscent of modern cognitive behavioral therapy approach to clinical disorders. On the other hand, you have Buddhist stuff, which is kind of like walking around in your day, grounded to the body, so that your mind doesn't wander much to begin with. Then if a distracting thought comes up, there are five different methods of dealing with it given in a specific suta in Buddhism, the removal of distracting thought suta.
00:14:32
Speaker
And so when something comes up, I don't have the time necessarily to think about, hmm, what's the best way to analyze this? And this leads to moments of confusion. So that's how they, that's one point going back to your original question of how sometimes I realized that there's like a conflict between them because there are different ways of dealing with things in the moment. Otherwise,
00:14:53
Speaker
I would probably say just by learning about them in more detail led me to suspect that they're not necessarily the same. They conflict on a lot of different points, enough to almost make it not worthwhile to say that they're going at the same thing and you could pick and choose methods from each. Instead, I think because I practice it, so I do believe that you can try to harmonize them.
Mindfulness in Buddhism vs. the West
00:15:17
Speaker
But when it comes to eclecticism, I'm more a believer that one should try to
00:15:21
Speaker
put things together in a harmonious whole rather than picking and choosing what works for one because the both stoicism for sure and to a lesser extent buddhism may claim that where like when something works for you the question is why does it work for you you're probably comparing the outcomes to your desires and stoicism as well as a lot of the other hellenistic philosophies including epicureanism and serenaicism believe that our base set of desires are inculcated by a sick society
00:15:50
Speaker
And so when you're saying, oh, this works for me because it aligns with my desires, it's like, but are your desires really healthy for you to live a good life? Why are you comparing what works for you to your natural desires? Maybe they're not necessarily the best set of desires to have. Yeah, I think when people are initially thinking about the concealing, the conciliates between Stoicism and Buddhism, I think the version of Buddhism they have in mind is something like this Westernized
00:16:18
Speaker
form of Buddhism that may not even reference any of these earlier texts in a person's knowledge base, but instead is full of different claims about, broadly speaking, mindfulness, and then perhaps some idea of the self should be addressed, if not completely dissolved or eroded.
00:16:44
Speaker
Right. Yeah, I agree. And I kind of tackle this a little bit in the my essay on modern stoicism satay and prosoke, which go over the two forms of supposed mindfulness and compare them. And in the first part of that essay, I go over three kinds of or two, like a few kinds of mindfulness and I kind of distinguish between
00:17:02
Speaker
two main forms. I would say I call it psychological mindfulness, I believe, and Buddhist mindfulness, early Buddhist mindfulness. And the history is interesting because mindfulness came into the Western awareness, at least in the psychological and medical community, in part primarily through a form of Theravadin meditation. So it's sort of aligned with
00:17:24
Speaker
some of the stuff I look at, although I tend to look at the early suttas because some of the Theravadan practices from Sri Lanka and stuff are not necessarily aligned with the early suttas and rely on a later Buddhist work called the Visuddhi Maga. But this idea of mindfulness was kind of secularized and brought about by Jon Kabat-Zinn and other workers as well as people who went to
00:17:46
Speaker
Asia in the 60s and decided to kind of bring Buddhism to the United States and other English-speaking Western locations. So that form of psychological mindfulness kind of is to kind of see your thoughts as thoughts and observe them non-judgmentally. And that seems to go against how the Buddha in the early Pali Kannan describes aspects of mindfulness.
00:18:13
Speaker
So you actually are supposed to judge them. One of the major, one of the major things that the Buddha said to his son, Rahul and instructing him was to sort out your thoughts into those that are harmful and not harmful and as well as your bodily actions and your verbal actions. And so you're kind of doing that constantly. And so there is a judgmental component
00:18:34
Speaker
And the kind of quality that mindfulness pretty much means, it's open to interpretation to some degree, and I'm leaning heavily on Tanisaro Biku's exposition of what sati mindfulness means in the Pali Canon. And my understanding is that it's kind of just like keeping something in mind at this very simple level. You could just keep something in mind, and that's all you're doing.
00:18:54
Speaker
And you could do that with anything. You could keep hateful thoughts in your mind. You could keep the video game you're playing in mind. You could be mindful about anything. But what makes it a Buddhist practice is that it's so-called right mindfulness. I'm not a fan of the translation of right mindfulness. It's samasati. Sama is a cognate with the English word sum. So it more means complete, like the end, like the gikbaro Greek terms of the end, the telos, the final version, the final boss version of mindfulness.
00:19:23
Speaker
is to keep four specific things in mind, one's body in various ways, one's, it's in the poly, it's vedana, I would probably call it like valences, mental valences, whether you're automatically judging something as good, painful, pleasant, or neither of those.
00:19:38
Speaker
as well as your mind states. And then a fourth thing called dhammas, which is very hard to translate. And I would probably frame it as framing your experience in terms of Buddhist theory, looking at your moment to moment experience in terms of the four noble truths, the five hindrances and how to work with them, stuff like that.
00:19:57
Speaker
So by doing, being, keeping those things in mind, you are practicing Buddhism. Now that is very different from the prosoke that comes up in Epictetus, which is where people get a lot of this idea of Buddhist, Stoic mindfulness from. Yeah. So it sounds like, I just want to make sure that I understand this Buddhist form of mindfulness. It sounds like, so on one hand you have the psychological version, which is the,
00:20:19
Speaker
I think overlaps nicely with what I've been calling this sort of westernized Buddhism. If you will, you feel like John Kabat-Zinn, people go on to develop mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, define this idea of non-judgmental awareness or objective awareness, where you see things as they are often without value judgments or at least without unnecessary
00:20:44
Speaker
value judgments. And it doesn't have any normative ideas of seeing things in the right way other than just, you know, just having objective awareness being the right way to see things. Whereas this Buddhist version is a much thicker, more detailed version of how to approach the world. So you're not just
00:21:03
Speaker
seen things non-judgmentally, but instead keeping, as you said, these four things in mind. Body, valence, states, and then these Buddhist principles or rules, I suppose. Yep, that sounds like an accurate description to me.
00:21:21
Speaker
All right, and then we're moving on to the stoic form of mindfulness. So another you all have claimed that brusoke maps on nicely to the, you know, of course, mindfulness always a nebulous term as they're finding out, but at least has mapped on to a similar space of these sorts of terms. It's often translated just as attention.
00:21:43
Speaker
And the thought is, as you see it in many stocks, they think attention is important. But then the question is, to what extent is that, does that map onto these other two versions of mindfulness we mentioned? Right. So to give some credit to that view, I'd probably say that attention is important to both of them. We can say Sati and Prasokay are both important and kind of forms of attention in a sense. So that's good. And I would probably say that.
00:22:13
Speaker
Attention is somewhat important in Stoic practice, and there's an entire book or entire chapter in the discourse is called on attention. So perhaps it was important to Epictetus, although I would say that the attention is only kind of mentioned in this one single chapter. And if it was super important, if it's like the core spiritual practice of Stoicism,
00:22:36
Speaker
You'd expect it to be mentioned up there with a lot of the other things that are mentioned by Epictetus, like what I guess Donald Robertson calls the Stoic Fork, which is often called the dichotomy of control, although I think that is rightfully falling out of favor as a translation of what Epictetus was really trying to say because it's so easily misunderstood.
00:22:54
Speaker
But there is a chapter on attention within Epictetus's discourses. So, yeah, it was important and Epictetus did say, like, this thing was important. Whereas Sati kind of is mentioned all over the Pali Canon, it's quite important that there are arguably even more important things than Sati in Buddhism. Probably using Sati to get to the Jhanas is actually what you want. That's the final stage, a kind of meditative absorption where you can actually do work and
00:23:20
Speaker
see how your mind works, and my understanding is if you kind of get into this state enough, you naturally get sick of it, and you can also mold your mind better in this kind of state.
Stoic Mindfulness and Character
00:23:29
Speaker
That's the end goal of Buddhism. In Stoicism, it's quite clear that there are three, I guess, foundations of prosoke, to make an analogy to the four foundations of mindfulness or sati that I discussed earlier.
00:23:44
Speaker
So for Buddhism, again, the four things that you are mindful of in order to be doing Buddhist practice are your body, just paying attention to how it is in various ways and its nature in some ways, valences, emotional valences, mind states, as well as dhammas, and then like kind of how the patterns of your mind is another way to think about it. Whereas in Discourses 4.12,
00:24:09
Speaker
Epictetus specifically gives three foundations of prosoke and those things are, and I think I have it pulled up the hard translation. So he says, in the first place, you should pay attention to those general principles that you should always have at hand so as not to go to sleep, to get up or drink or eat or converse with others without them. Namely, that no one is master over another's person's choice and that it is in choice alone that our good and evil lie.
00:24:37
Speaker
So the first foundation of stoic prosoke, stoic mindfulness, if you want to call it that, is propositions. It is propositions that you keep at hand, and this idea of having short phrases at hand and maxims that Seneca calls them are things that are, that's a common theme in at least imperial late stoicism, where you study stoicism, you get a deep understanding, but you keep these quick phrases to remind yourself in every instance. And these things are propositions. These are things you say to yourself.
00:25:06
Speaker
There are things you say to yourself, quite a few things actually, that you do in Buddhist practice too, but you're mainly noting current present moment phenomenon. You're not necessarily holding giant principles in mind like you are with Stoicism. The next thing, the next foundation of Stoic mindfulness is our roles. Epictetus says, next we must remember who we are and what name we bear and strive to direct our appropriate actions according to the demands of our social relationships and so on.
00:25:36
Speaker
And so this is a big thing that is one of the main themes of Epictetus's second discipline, the discipline of action as Pierre Hadeau calls it. And the goal here is in every moment to notice what your social relationships are and what names you're bare and then act appropriately in accordance with them.
00:25:53
Speaker
When you do this, you are fulfilling one of the main ways to progress as a stoic, which is by repeatedly doing so-called appropriate actions over and over again, and that's kind of how you make progress, by having the correct mind state and choosing indifference wisely over and over again, although you would actually technically be wise until you're a sage in classical Buddhism.
00:26:15
Speaker
But if you keep on doing this over and over again, that's how that's like one way to frame all of stoic practice is by selecting appropriate actions according to your role and who you are over and over and over again. And that's how you make progress. So the second foundation of stoic mindfulness is your roles. That is nowhere to be seen in Buddhist mindfulness.
00:26:35
Speaker
And the third one is finally how we should preserve our proper character while doing so. And I think this is probably a reference to our major role that overrides all of the roles according to Epictetus in his system, which is our human role. That human beings are naturally pro-social and rational.
00:26:55
Speaker
not all beings actually are in practice, but the ideal form of a human being is like that. And the Stoics, since the very close to the beginning, would probably argue that these are the defining characteristics of what makes for a human being. We could be
00:27:10
Speaker
strong we can lift weights and look nice in the gym and stuff like that but you'll never be as strong or muscular as a gorilla you're not going to be very good in the grand scheme of things at being strong you can try to run fast and run sprints and stuff like that but you're never going to be as fast as a cheetah
00:27:26
Speaker
So these things that people focus on in terms of aesthetics and health and things like that, there are other healthy things. There are other things that could run and run much faster than the fastest runner can. So people who focus on them are not focusing on the things that are core to human beings. So the stoic analysis dictates that the two core things are rationality.
00:27:46
Speaker
The ancient stokes may say that most animals don't have any rationality. We can update that with modern science and say there's still a big difference between human rationality and a crows rationality. Yeah, crows can be clever and use basic tools, but they can't build a rocket and land on the moon.
00:28:02
Speaker
So, and it's not just because they don't have opposable thumbs. So there's a big gulf there. That's something that humans excel
Rationality and Social Cooperation
00:28:08
Speaker
at. So to become an excellent, a virtuous, an arate human, one focuses on one's rationality. But we can't do this alone. Elon Musk or whoever you admire or don't admire necessarily didn't build a rocket to go up into space all on his own. He didn't mine the ore into all that kind of stuff.
00:28:24
Speaker
Anybody who does well in terms of being a human does so in cooperation with other humans, building on previous knowledge and working together in a special way. We don't have to be social like bees or ants do, we're social like humans are, like intelligent primates are. And so let's try to do that really, really well. And if we do that kind of stuff, we fulfill our human role. And Epictetus gives a couple of examples of falling into two other roles where we're no longer human, the
00:28:52
Speaker
Sheep and the wild beast where a wild beast it lashes out and things like that that pushes reason to the side and breaks social bonds Therefore when you give in to passions, you're literally less human in that moment on the other hand when you try to please your belly as Epictetus may say or when you try to be lazy you're kind of or passive you're being a sheep and Sheep aren't good humans. They're cheap. So why acting like a sheep act like a human? So those are the three foundations of stoic prosoke
00:29:20
Speaker
In short, I can concede that there are hints of paying attention and being mindful to things in both Buddhism and Stoicism, but the four foundations of Buddhist mindfulness differ drastically from the three foundations, as I would call them, of Stoic mindfulness.
00:29:39
Speaker
Well, it seems broadly they have the in common attentions importance and then now that you're paying attention What do you keep in mind now or what's what's the next play? What's the next move if you will so I suppose Like yeah, it's important to that too So like you can make these analogies if you want to but you can make the analogies with a lot of stuff And so I guess what's the motivation for doing so?
00:30:05
Speaker
Right. Yeah, I suppose if someone thinks it's important to improve their attention and these traditions have practices to do so, then they would look into them and find ways to improve their attention. And they may also find ways to do that through non-philosophical traditions as well. I wouldn't see any problem with doing that.
00:30:28
Speaker
I guess it depends because again, you can improve your attention and then use it to hurt people more. You could improve your attention in order to get a good video game score or get famous somehow or get wealth. Both the Buddhist and the Stoics will probably frown upon that use of attention.
00:30:44
Speaker
Yeah, so of course there's the question, should you improve your attention? All things considered. And then there's the question, what service will your attention be? And certainly they'll be different accounts of where one should put one's attention.
00:31:02
Speaker
I would disagree. I think that that leads to more harm than good. If one puts attention before what you're going to be paying attention to, one is focusing on the skill, the life hack first, and then they're like, okay, now what can I do my attention to? It's probably, I would say that both Buddhism and Stoicism would want you to focus on the virtues and the basics of their theory first in terms of being a rational human being in Stoicism's case, or essentially just laying that basic foundation down for morality first in Buddhism.
00:31:32
Speaker
Got it. Yeah, so you might be putting more into what I'm saying about I'm intending to communicate. So I think you can have different ways to improve one's biceps and look into different exercises for just maxing out the biceps, which isn't to say that all you should be doing is maxing out the biceps. Presumably, if you're in that game to begin with, you care about some broader notion of fitness. So I certainly agree that
00:31:57
Speaker
Attention isn't the only thing that matters, but all I am claiming is that it's part of what does matter and that one can look into different accounts of how to improve one's attention. And so long as one has a larger picture of what this is in service for, I could see that being a very worthy project.
00:32:21
Speaker
On the other hand, I've described this at a level of generality where we can imagine concrete people and I think the two of us would agree that some concrete people, they want to improve their intention. Maybe we prefer they focus on something else or they come up with this broader idea first of what are they doing at all to begin with. Maybe they're too much like the person who's just trying to
00:32:45
Speaker
build a bigger bicep without having a better idea of fitness. Does that make my claim a little bit more sense? I think we could roughly agree. Would you then agree with the short version from a stoic framework that attention isn't indifferent? Attention is an indifference.
00:33:04
Speaker
I would say that, yeah, that's how you use intention. That is what matters. That seems right to me. Okay. Cool. Then we probably are on the same page. Yeah, I think that's right. So have you noticed another tension? I'm curious with the accounts of the cell and stoicism and Buddhism, how has that played out for you?
00:33:26
Speaker
99% of the time, there's no kind of difference, and the self doesn't really play a role in either. So interestingly, I think in my 2020 stoic con talk on it's nothing to me a reappraisal. I think it's on YouTube. You can kind of search that title and find it.
00:33:43
Speaker
I actually at the end of the talk gave a comparison between Stoic and Buddhist forms of selfhood. And so most of the time, the Stoics and the Buddhists would agree that whatever is going on externally and internally is beyond your control. It's outside of what you can directly control 100% of the time.
00:34:02
Speaker
And interestingly, the Stoics and the Buddha seem to define what a self is in the same way. And so there we go. There's a similarity that seems pretty clear to me. The Buddha has a sutta where he goes through what are called the five aggregates, which are the Buddhist model of how to break down a person or whatever phenomenological experience.
00:34:21
Speaker
And he goes through each one of those and asks somebody like, so can you can control it? Like for instance, form, which is related to one's body, is that a self? If it is a self, then you can grow 10 feet if you want, you can grow hair as long as you want, and then suck it back in later on. You could do anything you want with your body, but that doesn't seem to be the case. And then his conclusion is that since you can't do anything you want, you don't have complete control over form or the body.
00:34:46
Speaker
then that's not a self, and he goes through all the others like that. Epictetus seems to have a very similar definition of what the self is, what makes you as a human being, but his answer is there is a self, and that self is the proheresis, the possible synonym to the hegemonicon, but maybe not, there may be slight differences there, but Epictetus's term is proheresis, the ruling faculty, the faculty of choice, whatever you want to translate it as.
00:35:13
Speaker
And that is you, according to Epictetus. That is a self. And it is a self in exactly the same way as the Buddha would say it was a self, in that you have complete control
Understanding the Self
00:35:22
Speaker
over it. But this is a very tiny, small sphere of what you are. Epictetus lays out the things, the core of what is ultimately up to you, the functions of the Proharesis that it can completely control. They are desires and aversions, which I often consolidate to just conscious goals. Like you can control your conscious goals.
00:35:42
Speaker
then you have impulses, which are the urges to act, not the actions themselves. I can choose to raise my hand if I want to, and given that I have okay musculature and neurology, I can do that. If somebody severed the correct nerve, I could no longer do that. It is not under my complete control. So impulses to act, but if I could want, I could choose to
00:36:04
Speaker
agree to want to raise my hand or I could choose to let that go. That's up to me in Epictetus's framework. And the third thing are hoopolepsies, which are opinions. I guess it's a little unclear on what they are. I would probably say they're conscious thoughts or opinions on things. You can choose to frame things in a certain way and make conscious thoughts.
00:36:24
Speaker
So that is the realm which is completely up to the Prohorisis. Everything else is not. And this is kind of an important point that I sometimes highlight to people interested in Stoic practice that a lot of what goes on in your mind is not up to you according to classical Stoic theory even. Epictetus says when he's describing his third discipline, which Pierre Hadogue calls the discipline of ascent, that
00:36:46
Speaker
The goal of that is to be able to kind of be in control even when you're drunk, asleep, or have melancholia, which a lot of people translate as depression, but it probably means something more like a general mental illness more broadly, having too much black bile. So that's the goal. And the goal is to strengthen this proheresis as much as you can. So
00:37:10
Speaker
Right now, like most people who aren't sages, their process is feeble. And with training, it gets stronger and stronger and so can get a better grasp on these goals, these impulses to act, and these opinions. And slowly over time, if you focus on that, it gets stronger at it. So going back to the original question of selfhood in Buddhism and Stoicism,
00:37:32
Speaker
They're in contradiction. The Buddhists would say there is no thing that is under one's complete control that persists through time. They come through different traditions, and so the Buddhists were working with this idea of Atman, which comes from Proto-Hinduism, and there's a little bit of sociology you need to take into account when comparing these things, but
00:37:54
Speaker
Overall, that Atman is something that is persistent and eternal. It's the core you as well. And they say that thing doesn't exist. And Epictetus would say, yes, the Proheresis. So they disagree. That being said, most of the time, if one practices both, you'll never encounter this contradiction. Because if you're not a sage and I'm not, then you can't firmly even control those things that are up to you in theory. So that's the thing to work on. Right, right.
00:38:22
Speaker
I do think often people sometimes don't realize that one doesn't have as much control over the mind as one might initially think if one reads particular stoic quotes in isolation or not in their full context. It's not just a matter of snapping one's fingers and
00:38:43
Speaker
coming up with a whole new belief set. It's a matter of years and years of work where you have to deal with your biology, the way you've been socialized, every past judgment you've made, and it's more a matter of steering a ship rather than flipping a switch or immediately jumping tracks.
00:39:03
Speaker
Yeah,
Karma and Personality Development
00:39:04
Speaker
I would agree. And also that's another interesting possible somewhat similarity between Stoicism and Buddhism is that early Buddhism specifically defines karma as kind of action. So karma isn't this thing that's in the modern milieu of kind of like what goes around comes around. Instead, karma, how I think of karma is as intentional inertia. If one chooses over and over again to do something, it becomes easier with time.
00:39:28
Speaker
And if you choose to do something that's harmful to yourself or others, that becomes easier and easier with time. And that's what karma is. And also there are some actions that reflect back on you, but it's mainly that's the main connotation as I take it. Stoicism also talks about this. I think the best single place for a consolidated version of all the scattered places where stoicism talks about this is in Margaret Graver's book, Stoicism and Emotion, where she goes over, if I recall correctly,
00:39:52
Speaker
these kinds of different stages of how a personality solidifies and becomes ill or diseased. And some characters in Stoic theory were beyond hope because they became so solidified that they can't be changed any longer. But Buddhism and Stoicism would both agree that taking a look and trying to practice what you actually want to practice and what you think is healthy for you in the long run is the most useful thing to do.
Stoic Camaraderie: Chrysopus and Cleanthes
00:40:20
Speaker
So what's your favorite Stoic story?
00:40:22
Speaker
Goodness, there are quite a few of them. The one that sticks with me, and I actually don't even remember the source. I think it may be a Diogenes Lyrtus, but I'm not a hundred percent on that. But there's this really sweet story about Chrysopus and Cleanthes.
00:40:40
Speaker
When people go over the historical Stoics, for the most part, a lot of them, given our limited viewpoint, but a lot of them seem like edgy and kind of a little prickish at times. Zeno was a shipwrecked merchant who, you know, did some questionable, possibly questionable things like how his relationships to the Cleanthes was where he made
00:40:59
Speaker
In order to pay, Cleanthes had to work as a water bearer, and the interesting thing is, if I understand correctly, the relationship between Cleanthes and Zeno was very similar to that of an own slave and an owner, where the slave could work outside of the relationship and earn pay, but have to give a lot of it to the master.
00:41:20
Speaker
And it seems to have connotations of that, and that's kind of eh. And then Chrysopus was known to just be an arrogant guy. And they both come from wealth and all these kinds of things. So overall, like when I try to think of like good historical Stoics who are like, I don't want to have a beer with them, or they just seem like nice people. Like Marcus Aurelius is one.
00:41:37
Speaker
And the other is Cleanthes. I disagree with him greatly on his kind of god stuff. I'm a secular Buddhist, so I don't kind of believe in any of that stuff. But Cleanthes just seems like a good guy in general. And he was also a pugilist and was known to be slow. Slow is not the same as stupid. It was harder for him to think on his feet for whatever reason, perhaps because of his past, perhaps not. And so there's this story of Cleanthes when he was the head of the Stoa. Chrysippus was his student and these people were coming over to the Stoa.
00:42:07
Speaker
I forget who they were. I think they may have been Platonists, but I'm not positive. And they were challenging Cleanthes and picking on him. And he was like, stammering, trying to come up with stuff. And Chrysopis said, he said, you know, our master's not, he's not going to respond to you because you're not worth the time. Why don't you, why don't you pick on one of his peons like me? And then Chrysopis took him on. And that just seems kind of sweet. It's one of the few examples where Chrysopis seems, besides his death story of him dying, laughing, which is also pretty cool. But it's a, it's a
00:42:33
Speaker
nice sweet thing that is both stoic in that it's a little edgy, but also kind of caring and sweet and also makes chrysopus a little more human as well. So probably that's my favorite stoic story, at least the one that comes to mind. Excellent. Good. Yeah. Thanks
Eclectic Philosophy Approaches
00:42:47
Speaker
for sharing that. That's a good one that we haven't noted before on these, these conversations. Excellent. Well, is there anything else you'd like to share or add?
00:42:56
Speaker
No, I don't think so. I think we kind of covered the basics. I guess maybe I guess to close, I guess there's that there's an open question amongst a lot of people like should one pick and choose and practice. And I think that's an ongoing question that can only really be resolved through.
00:43:11
Speaker
more people picking and choosing and practicing and reporting the results. So I encourage people, I personally feel like I'm somewhat at a disadvantage because I have that pause that I mentioned and confusion when things come up and how to deal with them. And how I became a Buddhist stoic was somewhat my historical accident, although there is a way to work with it. But I mildly suggest to people that if they're looking for eclecticism,
00:43:36
Speaker
it sometimes make things harder. So be careful with one's eclecticism as a word of warning. That being said, there are a lot of things one can borrow from other traditions and stoicism is full of them. I mean, it is a cobbled together philosophy that took a couple generations of stoic heads to even begin to be coherent. I mean, Zeno picked up the ethics from the cynics and then picked up the logic from other people and then picked up the physics from the
00:44:01
Speaker
So he picked and chose and didn't necessarily put things together, and it was Chrysopis who kind of made it unified. And so I am a fan of eclecticism when you want to just know the reasons why you're doing it and also unification. So that's kind of my take-home message there.
00:44:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's useful. I think often in these conversations or broadly speaking and self-help, there's always people favor, I think, in general an eclectic approach to solve either specific issues or just because there are so many interesting traditions, people in the world to learn from. But it is always useful to hear that there are risks with that approach. There are some cons, even though you do get to encounter a lot of good knowledge along the way.
00:44:49
Speaker
You agreed. Excellent. Thanks so much for chatting. Thank you for the invite. Nice talking to you, Caleb.
00:44:56
Speaker
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00:45:26
Speaker
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00:45:45
Speaker
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00:46:09
Speaker
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