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More thought provoking stuff without the stoic fluff: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/


Stoicism is like Buddhism without the sitting meditation fluff.

I'm halfway through Meditations, and I do find that there are similarities. But when you look at intense practice of stoicism vs. buddhism, they promote different goals. Buddhism encourages you to abandon a normal life to dissociate yourself so you don't have to be reborn. Stoicism seems to be neutral on what to actually do with your life, besides the broad "be a good person and grow yourself" aspect.

Oh, and your vinegar is sour. My vinegar rocks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinegar_tasters


There are definite similarities, though I think Stoicism and Buddhism have fairly different philosophical motivations and conclusions. In particular, Stoicism tends to emphasize rationalism more, and is less suspicious of attachment to the self (if anything, being in favor of cultivating the self). It's a fairly complex topic and there are a dozen variants of both Buddhism and Stoicism, so that's probably wrong as a generalization, but it seems to me to be where the emphases are.

This random Google Books result expands on a comparison along those lines: http://books.google.com/books?id=yLQ-GQTcwVkC&pg=PA67




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