Posted: Feb 10, 2012 6:09 pm
logical bob wrote:Zwaarddijk wrote:A similar phenomenon probably has been involved when eastern religions got popular in the west. Especially Buddhism seems to be good at generating nice guotes. The specifics things you get along with buddhism may not be exactly of the same kind as in Stoicism, but there's still a large context involved in Buddhism, various forms of Hinduism, etc. Contexts that a lot of the more superficial western fans of these religions seldom have even the faintest clue about.
There do seem to be surprising similarities between Stoic ethics and Buddhist ethics, both holding that virtue is found in suppressing emotion and desire.
Not very surprising, ultimately. It seems philosophy both on the Indian subcontinent and in Greece formed around the same central questions (whereas Chinese and to some extent Semitic philosophy formed around other questions - although Semitic philosophy had been recast towards a more Indo-European/Hellenic mold by late antiquity). To what extent this is due to the questions having been central in even earlier Indo-European thought or due to Indo-Greek contacts even prior to Hellenism proper might not be resolvable. When Buddhist and Chinese philosophers first started interacting, the Chinese philosophers apparently were quite confused by the Buddhists - the reaction, allegedly, wasn't along the lines of disagreement over the answers to these central questions, but rather disbelief at why anyone would ask those questions in the first place.
However, my observation merely was that the nice quotes-aspect (especially when intellectual context is ignored) is probably a contributing factor to the respect Buddhism has in some subcultures in the west.