The Buddha

Here is one of the quiet wonders of the history of ideas. Around the same centuries that thinking was stirring in Greece that would one day become Stoicism, a man in ancient India, later called the Buddha, sat and worked out something with a familiar shape. The two had no contact. Greece and India were worlds apart, and the Stoics almost certainly never knew he existed. Yet they arrived, by their own roads, at much the same place: that much of our suffering grows from clinging to what we can’t hold, and that a steadier peace comes from meeting things as they are.

We put him here not because he was a Stoic, and not because he shaped them. He wasn’t, and he didn’t. We put him here because when two careful minds, a world apart, notice the same thing, it’s worth listening.

Your thoughts shape your world

The Buddha’s teaching, like the Stoics’, begins in the mind.

From the Dhammapada

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.

Marcus Aurelius said almost the same thing in Rome, that the soul takes the colour of its thoughts. For a child, it’s the gentle reminder that the story you tell yourself about a hard moment shapes how that moment feels.

Meet unkindness with kindness

From the Dhammapada

For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule.

This is the same idea Marcus kept giving himself: don’t answer unkindness by becoming unkind. When a friend is mean, meeting it with more meanness only feeds it. It’s a hard practice even for grown-ups, and a beautiful, difficult thing to offer a child: the strength it takes not to hand the hurt back.