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Luxury Beliefs and Buddhist Idiot Compassion

Douglas C. Bates
7 min readAug 11, 2024

A few perceptive readers of my book Pyrrho’s Way: the Ancient Greek Version of Buddhism have noticed that while Buddhism and Pyrrhonism have a great deal of overlap, one thing that is conspicuously present in Buddhism is compassion, but this is not so in Pyrrhonism. This is not to say that compassion is absent in Pyrrhonism, but it is not present in the prominent way it is in Buddhism.

As in Buddhism, the teachings of Pyrrhonism are promulgated for philanthropic purposes to relieve suffering. So, there’s an overlap with respect to that aspect of compassion. However, this is in no way unique in Greek philosophy. Platonists, Aristotelians, Cyrenaics, Cynics, Epicureans, and Stoics would all say they were compassionate. A careful reading of their surviving texts will confirm this, but it’s nothing like the focus on compassion that can be found in Buddhist texts from antiquity.

Ancient Greek philosophy can be boiled down to a single idea: be rational. Buddhism is said to boil down to two ideas: be enlightened and be compassionate. Perhaps this is because the philosophy of Buddhism is structurally connected with the religion of Buddhism. The Buddha was never just a great philosopher; he was a holy man, as were subsequent Buddhist philosophers until the modern era. This just wasn’t structurally possible in the West. The existing pagan religions…

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Douglas C. Bates
Douglas C. Bates

Written by Douglas C. Bates

Ancient Greek philosophies of life. http://www.pyrrhonism.org Author of “Pyrrho’s Way: The Ancient Greek Version of Buddhism.”

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