[certeoun]

Reminds me of stoicism. If it's outside your control, don't bother too much. Face your challenges and do the best you can, being a better you.

[codemonkey-zeta]

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.

[jonaustin]

This idea is called the Perennial Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_philosophy

Aldous Huxley wrote a book about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy

[salt-thrower]

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.

[stevofolife]

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

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism

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.

[MaxBarraclough]

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,

> courage to change the things I can,

> and wisdom to know the difference.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer#Genuine_precur...

[astrophysics]

They did have a lot of contact. I read about it from some Buddhist scholar, but I can't remember where.

[mekoka]

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.