Against The Buddhists From An Epicurean Perspective

Why the Buddhists Matter to Epicureans

Of all the traditions referenced in this book, Buddhism is the one most often described as Epicurus’s twin. Both, it is said, reject a creator god. Both teach that the fear of death can be overcome. Both counsel moderation and the limiting of desire. Both seek a calm mind, which Epicurus called ataraxia and the Buddha called Nirvana. Many people who come to Epicurus today come by way of meditation, mindfulness or “secular Buddhism,” and they expect to find the same teaching in a Greek dress.

They will not find it. Beneath the resemblances lie opposite answers to every question that mattered to Epicurus. The Buddha taught that life is suffering, that desire is its cause, and that the goal is to extinguish desire and escape from rebirth. Epicurus taught that life is good, that pleasure is the goal, and that the natural desires for pleasure are to be satisfied. The Buddha taught that the senses are “on fire” and that the disciple should conceive an aversion for them. Epicurus taught that the senses are the standard of truth. The Buddha refused to say whether the world is eternal or what happens to the saint after death. Epicurus held that a man cannot be free of fear unless he knows the nature of the universe. And the Buddha, while denying that there is any self, taught that the deeds of one life are punished or rewarded in the next, the very concern that Epicurus’s physics removes.

The Buddhists matter to Epicureans for three main reasons.

First, Buddhism is the tradition most easily confused with Epicurean philosophy today. The confusion runs both ways. Readers who think of Epicurus as a teacher of tranquility see a Buddhist in him, and readers who admire the Buddha see an Epicurean. Nietzsche himself grouped the two, at one time calling Epicurus “a typical decadent” driven by “the terror of pain.” An Epicurean who cannot understand why Nietzsche confused the two and explain the difference will find Epicurean philosophy absorbed into Buddhism.

Second, Buddhism is a philosophy of the extinction of desire, and it is the purest form of the view that pleasure is the problem. Plato, the Stoics and the Abrahamic religions subordinated pleasure to a higher good. The Buddha went further. In his teaching, craving for pleasure is the cause of suffering, and the cure is “the destruction, in which no passion remains, of this very thirst.” The “absence of pain” that so many modern writers make the Epicurean goal is very close to this Buddhist ideal, and very far from Epicurus.

Third, Buddhism keeps the afterlife while denying the soul. Epicurus freed men from the fear of punishment after death by showing that the soul is mortal. Buddhism agrees that there is no lasting soul, but teaches that “evil-doers go to hell; righteous people go to heaven,” and that rebirth continues until desire is destroyed. It shows that a philosophy can deny the immortal soul and still keep the fear that the immortal soul was used to teach.

The rest of this introduction follows the three divisions of Epicurean philosophy: the Canon, or how we know the truth; Physics, or the nature of things; and Ethics, or how to live. Each section states the Buddhist position in the words of the early Buddhist scriptures, the Pali Canon of the Theravada tradition, as they were first translated into English, and then sets out the Epicurean response. The passages are collected, with links to the printed pages, in Buddhism - Key Passages. Buddhism later took many forms across Asia, and not every school would put every point in the same way. But the teachings quoted here are the common foundation of them all.

Buddhists and Epicureans: The Historical Record

The Buddha and His Scriptures

Siddhattha Gotama, called the Buddha, “the Awakened One,” lived in northern India in the fifth century BC, a century or more before Epicurus was born. He left home, practiced severe austerities, gave them up, and after a night of meditation declared that he had found the way to the end of suffering. He spent the rest of his life teaching and founded an order of monks. His teachings were passed down by memory and written down in Sri Lanka in the first century BC, in the language called Pali. That collection, the Pali Canon, is the oldest complete body of Buddhist scripture.

Pyrrho in India

The Greeks first met Indian philosophy through Alexander’s army. Diogenes Laertius reports that Pyrrho of Elis, the founder of Greek Skepticism, followed Alexander “as far as the Gymnosophists, in India, and the Magi,” and that after his return he taught “the doctrine of incomprehensibility, and of the necessity of suspending one’s judgment.” We do not know whether the Indian sages Pyrrho met were Buddhists. But his calm indifference, his denial that anything is good or bad by nature, and his suspension of judgment have reminded many readers of Indian teaching. Pyrrho’s disciple Nausiphanes was the teacher whom Epicurus later rejected (see Against The Skeptics).

Ashoka and the Greek Kings

In the generation after Epicurus’s death, the Indian emperor Ashoka converted to Buddhism and had his edicts carved on rocks and pillars across his empire. In one of them, from about 260 BC, he claims to have sent his teaching of Dhamma to the Greek kings of the West, naming Antiochus, Ptolemy, Antigonus, Magas and Alexander. Whether any Buddhist teacher ever reached the Mediterranean is unknown. But the Buddhist and Epicurean schools were alive at the same time, in kingdoms that knew of each other.

Milinda and the Greeks

The meeting of Greek and Buddhist thought that we can document took place in India. The Questions of King Milinda records the conversations of the monk Nagasena with Milinda, the Greek king Menander, who ruled in northwest India in the second century BC. The king’s court includes “five hundred Yonakas,” that is, Greeks. Here a Greek king asks the Greek questions, about the self, about rebirth and about responsibility, and the Buddhist monk answers them. The most famous exchange, the argument of the chariot, is quoted below.

The Canon: The Senses on Fire

The Fire Sermon

Epicurus held that the senses are the first standard of truth and that the feelings of pleasure and pain are the standard of good and evil. The Buddha’s Fire Sermon teaches the disciple to turn away from both.

“All things, O priests, are on fire. … The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, that also is on fire.” With what are they on fire? “With the fire of passion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair.” The same is said of the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body and the mind. And so “the learned and noble disciple conceives an aversion for the eye, conceives an aversion for forms,” and for every sensation, “pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent.” Only then is he free, and “he knows that rebirth is exhausted … and that he is no more for this world.”

The Dhammapada puts the same teaching in verse: “Look upon the world as a bubble, look upon it as a mirage” (Dhammapada 170), and “‘All forms are unreal,’ he who knows and sees this becomes passive in pain; this is the way that leads to purity” (279).

Insight Above Inquiry

Buddhism is often praised as a religion of experience rather than faith, and in one sense it is. The Buddha did not ask his followers to believe in a creator. But the experience he valued was not the evidence of the senses about the world. It was the insight reached in meditation, in which the disciple sees that all things are impermanent, painful and without self. In the First Sermon the Buddha says that the Four Noble Truths were “not … among the doctrines handed down,” but that “there arose within me the eye (to perceive it), there arose the knowledge (of its nature).” That knowledge is the Buddha’s own, reached by a path that the disciple must follow on trust until he reaches it himself.

The Epicurean Answer

Epicurus taught that the senses are not on fire. They are the instruments by which nature lets us know the world and enjoy it. “Nor is there anything which can refute the sensations” (DL X.32), and “If you fight against all sensations, you will have no standard by which to judge even those of them which you say are false” (PD 23). The world is not a bubble or a mirage. It is made of real bodies moving in real space, and the senses report them truly. The man who conceives an aversion for the eye and for forms has not escaped a fire. He has thrown away the means of knowing what is true and of choosing what is pleasant.

Nor did Epicurus hold that pleasure is a fire to be put out. The feeling of pleasure is the standard “by which we judge every good” (DL X.129). Pleasures are to be weighed against the pains they bring, and some are to be passed over. But no pleasure is bad in itself (PD 8), and to turn away from all of them because they are “on fire” is to turn away from the only good that nature gives.

Summary: Two Different Canons

• The Buddhists: the senses and their pleasures are fires of passion. The disciple conceives an aversion for every sensation, sees that all forms are unreal, and reaches the truth by insight in meditation.
• Epicurus: the senses, the anticipations and the feelings are the standards of truth. The world they report is real, and the feeling of pleasure is the standard of good.

Physics: Impermanence, No Self and Rebirth

Questions That “Profit Not”

The monk Malunkyaputta demanded that the Buddha tell him whether the world is eternal or not, finite or infinite, whether the soul and the body are the same, and whether the saint exists after death. The Buddha refused. He compared Malunkyaputta to a man shot with a poisoned arrow who will not let the surgeon draw it until he knows the name and caste of the archer and the wood of the bow: “That man would die, Malunkyaputta, without ever having learnt this.” The Buddha has not explained these things “Because, Malunkyaputta, this profits not, nor has to do with the fundamentals of religion, nor tends to aversion, absence of passion, cessation, quiescence, the supernatural faculties, supreme wisdom, and Nirvana.” What he has explained is “Misery … the origin of misery … the cessation of misery … and the path leading to the cessation of misery.”

The parable has some merit in that the study of nature is worthless unless it serves life, but Epicurus drew the opposite conclusion. For Epicurus, the questions the Buddha set aside are exactly the ones that free a man from fear. “If we were not troubled by our suspicions of the phenomena of the sky and about death, fearing that it concerns us … we should have no need of natural science” (PD 11). But we are troubled, and so “A man cannot dispel his fear about the most important matters if he does not know what is the nature of the universe, but suspects the truth of some mythical story” (PD 12). Whether the soul and body are one, and whether anything of us exists after death, are not idle questions about the archer’s caste. They are the arrow itself. The Buddha left them unanswered, and the doctrine of rebirth filled the gap.

Everything Is Impermanent

The Buddha taught that “All created things perish” and that “All created things are grief and pain.” Epicurus agreed with the first half. Every compound body, every living being and every world comes to be and passes away. But for Epicurus the atoms of which they are made are eternal, and the universe “always was such as it is now, and always will be the same” (DL X.39). And he denied the second half entirely. That things pass away does not make them “grief and pain.” A pleasure is no less pleasant for being temporary, any more than a banquet is spoiled because it ends. “Just as with food he does not seek simply the larger share and nothing else, but rather the most pleasant, so he seeks to enjoy not the longest period of time, but the most pleasant” (DL X.126).

The Chariot: No Self

When King Milinda asks the monk his name, Nagasena answers that “Nagasena” is “but a way of counting, a term, an appellation, a convenient designation, a mere name … for there is no Ego here to be found.” He proves it by asking the king whether the pole is the chariot, or the axle, or the wheels, or all of them together, or something besides them. Each time the king says no, and Nagasena concludes that the word “chariot” is only a name. “In exactly the same way, your majesty, in respect of me, Nagasena is but a way of counting … But in the absolute sense there is no Ego here to be found” (Milindapanha).

Epicurus also taught that a living being is a compound. The soul is “a body of fine particles distributed throughout the whole structure” (DL X.63), and it holds together only with the body. But he did not conclude that the compound is unreal. Of the properties of bodies he says that “we must not suppose that they are either independent existences … nor that they absolutely do not exist,” and that “the whole body in its totality owes its own permanent existence to all these” (DL X.69). A chariot is a real chariot while its parts are joined, and a man is a real man while his body and soul are joined. That he is made of parts and will one day come apart does not make him “a mere name.” It makes him mortal.

Rebirth Without a Self

Here the Buddhist doctrine turns back on itself. If there is no self, what is reborn? Nagasena answers that “Rebirth takes place without anything transmigrating,” as one lamp is lit from another. It is “not this same name and form that is born into the next existence,” but “by reason of this deed another name and form is born.” And yet the deeds of this life are punished in the next: “inasmuch as one is born into another existence, therefore is one not freed from one’s evil deeds.” The Dhammapada states it plainly: “Some people are born again; evil-doers go to hell; righteous people go to heaven; those who are free from all worldly desires attain Nirvana” (126).

Lucretius had already answered this. If the soul existed before our birth, “why are we unable to remember besides the time already gone, and why do we retain no traces of past actions? If the power of the mind has been so completely changed that all remembrance of past things is lost, that methinks differs not widely from death” (III.670–678). And even if the very atoms of our body were gathered again after death into the same arrangement, “this result even would concern us not at all, when the chain of our self-consciousness has once been snapped asunder” (III.847–851). “He whom evil is to befall must in his own person exist at the very time it comes … but since death precludes this … you may be sure that we have nothing to fear after death” (III.862–869).

By Nagasena’s own account, the being reborn is “another name and form,” lit from this one as a lamp from a lamp. On Epicurean principles that other being is not me, and what befalls it is nothing to me. The Buddhist who denies the self and still fears rebirth is afraid of what will happen to someone else. The doctrine keeps the fear of punishment after death while removing the one who would be punished.

Karma: A Moral Order in Nature

Rebirth according to deeds makes the universe itself a court of justice. Every good deed is rewarded and every evil one punished, if not in this life then in the next, and no one escapes: “Not in the sky, not in the midst of the sea, not if we enter into the clefts of the mountains, is there known a spot in the whole world where a man might be freed from an evil deed” (Dhammapada 127). Buddhism has no creator, but its law of karma does the work that providence and judgment do in the other religions.

Epicurus denied any such order. Nature produces pleasure and pain through the motions of atoms, not through the weighing of deeds. “The blessed and immortal nature knows no trouble itself nor causes trouble to any other, so that it is never constrained by anger or favour” (PD 1), and there is no other power in the universe to reward and punish. Justice exists, but it exists among men, as “a pledge of mutual advantage to restrain men from harming one another and save them from being harmed” (PD 31).

The Gods

Buddhism does not deny the gods. Its scriptures are full of them, and of heavens where the good are reborn to enjoy their reward. But the gods, too, are caught in the round of rebirth, and their heavens are places to be passed through, not a final goal. The translator Max Müller notes that the Buddha himself “enjoyed these pleasures of heaven, before he was born for the last time.” The goal is to escape from heaven as well as from earth.

The Epicurean gods are the reverse. They are not in the round of rebirth, because there is no round. They are living beings of perfect and lasting pleasure, and they are the model of the blessed life. The man who lives by Epicurus’s teaching “shall live like a god among men” (DL X.135). The Dhammapada has a verse that sounds like this: “Let us live happily then, though we call nothing our own! We shall be like the bright gods, feeding on happiness!” (200). But the Buddhist bright gods are beings who must one day fall, and their happiness is not the goal.

Ethics: The Extinction of Desire Against Pleasure

Life Is Suffering

The First Sermon begins with the noble truth concerning suffering: “Birth is attended with pain, decay is painful, disease is painful, death is painful. Union with the unpleasant is painful, painful is separation from the pleasant; and any craving that is unsatisfied, that too is painful. In brief, the five aggregates which spring from attachment (the conditions of individuality and their cause) are painful.” The translator T. W. Rhys Davids sums up the thought: “pain results from existence as an individual.” The Dhammapada calls the body “the greatest of pains” (203).

Epicurus held the opposite. Life is good, because the living being can feel pleasure, and Sextus Empiricus reports his reason: “it is far preferable to be alive because the good belongs to the sentient” (Against the Professors I.285). Pain is real, but it is limited: “Pain does not last continuously in the flesh,” and the worst pain is brief (PD 4). Existence as an individual is not the cause of pain. It is the condition of every pleasure.

Desire Is the Cause

The second noble truth names the cause of suffering: “that thirst (or craving), causing the renewal of existence, accompanied by sensual delight, seeking satisfaction now here, now there.” The third names the cure: “the destruction, in which no passion remains, of this very thirst.” Among the cravings to be destroyed is the love of this present life alone. Rhys Davids notes that the craving for annihilation at death, the view that “existence will cease therewith, and that there is to be no future state,” was the heresy he calls “the ‘let-us-eat-and-drink-for-to-morrow-we-die heresy’,” and that it has “very close analogies to … materialism.” The Epicurean view of death is one of the errors Buddhism exists to cure.

Epicurus taught the reverse. The desire for pleasure is not a disease to be cured, and there is nothing painful in it. It is the guide that nature gives every living thing from birth, the first and final directive of life: “we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure we return again, using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good.” The whole of Epicurean philosophy is built on that desire. Its purpose is not to extinguish it but to pursue it well, so as to gain the most pleasure and suffer the least pain over the whole of a life.

Nor did Epicurus think life a burden to be escaped. In the Letter to Menoeceus he speaks of “the desirability of life,” and he has hard words for the very doctrine on which the First Sermon is built: “much worse still is the man who says it is good not to be born.” The Buddha taught that birth is suffering and that the goal is never to be born again. Epicurus taught that to be born is to receive the chance of pleasure, and that the wise man enjoys his life to its end.

Desire becomes a problem only when the pursuit of it brings more pain than pleasure. That is why Epicurus sorted desires instead of condemning them. “Among desires some are natural (and necessary, some natural) but not necessary, and others neither natural nor necessary, but due to idle imagination” (PD 29). The natural desires are easily satisfied, and their satisfaction is pleasure: “The wealth demanded by nature is both limited and easily procured” (PD 15). The empty desires, for unlimited wealth, fame or power, can never be satisfied, because the wealth they demand “stretches on to infinity” (PD 15), and so they bring far more pain than pleasure. Even these are to be avoided not because desire is evil, but because their cost is greater than their return. “No pleasure is a bad thing in itself: but the means which produce some pleasures bring with them disturbances many times greater than the pleasures” (PD 8).

This is the deepest difference between the two teachers. The Buddha looked at the pains that follow some desires and concluded that all desire must be destroyed. Epicurus looked at the same pains and concluded that desire must be guided by reason, so that it leads to the greatest pleasure. The Buddhist cure removes the patient’s appetite for life. The Epicurean cure teaches him how to satisfy it.

”From Pleasure Comes Grief”

The Dhammapada’s chapter on pleasure states the Buddhist teaching in its sharpest form: “From pleasure comes grief, from pleasure comes fear; he who is free from pleasure knows neither grief nor fear.” The same is said of affection, of lust, of love and of greed. “Let no man ever look for what is pleasant, or what is unpleasant.”

Epicurus answered that pleasure brings grief only when it is chosen badly. “Since pleasure is the first good and natural to us, for this very reason we do not choose every pleasure, but sometimes we pass over many pleasures, when greater discomfort accrues to us as the result of them” (DL X.129). The answer to the pleasure that brings grief is a wiser choice of pleasures, not freedom from pleasure altogether. A man who is “free from pleasure” in the Buddhist sense has not escaped grief by understanding it. He has escaped it by giving up the only thing that makes life worth living.

”Let No Man Love Anything”

The sharpest contrast is over friendship. The Dhammapada teaches: “Let, therefore, no man love anything; loss of the beloved is evil. Those who love nothing, and hate nothing, have no fetters.” “From affection comes grief, from affection comes fear.” The Buddha himself left his wife and newborn son to seek enlightenment, and the highest life in his teaching is that of the monk who has given up home and family.

Epicurus taught that “Of all the things which wisdom acquires to produce the blessedness of the complete life, far the greatest is the possession of friendship” (PD 27). The Epicurean community was a community of friends, men and women, who lived and studied together and wrote to one another with affection. The loss of a friend brings grief, and Epicurus did not pretend otherwise. But he held that the pleasure of friendship is worth the risk, and that the memory of a friend who has died is itself a pleasure. To love nothing in order to lose nothing is to buy safety from grief at the price of everything good.

The Middle Path Is Not Pleasure

The Buddha’s Middle Path is often compared to Epicurean moderation. It avoids two extremes: “the habitual practice … of those things whose attraction depends upon the passions, and especially of sensuality—a low and pagan way (of seeking satisfaction) unworthy, unprofitable, and fit only for the worldly-minded,” and “the habitual practice … of asceticism (or self-mortification), which is painful, unworthy, and unprofitable.”

The resemblance is on the surface. Epicurus also rejected the profligate and the ascetic, but for a single reason: both fail to produce the most pleasant life. The Buddha rejected sensual pleasure as “low and pagan,” and asceticism as painful and unprofitable, because neither leads to the destruction of craving. The Middle Path is a middle way between two methods of reaching Nirvana. It is not a way of living pleasantly. It ends in the same place as the Fire Sermon: aversion for the senses and the end of desire.

Nirvana and Pleasure

The Dhammapada calls Nirvana “the highest happiness” (203–204), and some readers conclude that Nirvana and Epicurean pleasure are the same. They are not. Nirvana means “blowing out,” the extinction of the fires of passion, hatred and delusion, and with them the end of rebirth. It is reached by “aversion, absence of passion, cessation, quiescence” (the arrow). The disciple who reaches it “is no more for this world.”

Epicurus’s happiness through pleasure is the opposite of extinction. It is the life of a living being whose body is free from pain and whose mind is free from fear, and who therefore enjoys to the full the particular pleasures of food and drink, friendship, conversation and the study of nature. “The limit of quantity in pleasures is the removal of all that is painful” (PD 3), but that limit is reached in a full life, not in the blowing out of life. Epicurus “admits both kinds” of pleasure, the pleasure of motion as well as the pleasure of rest, “both in the soul and in the body” (DL X.136). Nirvana is reached by ceasing to want. Epicurean pleasure is reached by getting what nature wants.

Nietzsche’s Charge of Decadence

Nietzsche saw Buddhism more clearly than most of his contemporaries. He called it “a hundred times more realistic than Christianity,” because it “no longer speaks of the ‘struggle with sin’ but … of the ‘struggle with pain.’” But he called both “nihilistic religions … religions of decadence,” born of an excessive sensitivity to pain. And at those times when he focused on Epicurus’s advice on avoiding pain he put Epicurus with them: “Epicurus was a typical decadent: and I was the first to recognise him as such.—The terror of pain, even of infinitely slight pain.”

Nietzsche read Epicurus as a Buddhist, as a man whose goal was the avoidance of pain. That is the reading this chapter has argued against. Epicurus did not counsel men to flee pain at any cost: “we think many pains better than pleasures, since a greater pleasure comes to us when we have endured pains for a long time” (DL X.129). His goal was pleasure, and he faced pain as the price of it. Nietzsche’s charge is a fair charge against Buddhism, and against the “tranquil” Epicurus of the modern books. It is not a fair charge against Epicurus, and a fair reading of Nietzsche’s entire body of work affirms his deep affinity with Epicurus’s philosophy.

Where the Buddhists Help the Epicurean Case

The Buddhists are opponents on the central questions, but they share some ground with Epicurus, and their texts can be of limited use to Epicureans.

• No creator. Buddhism does not teach that the world was made by a god, and Nietzsche notes that in Buddhism “The concept ‘God’ was already exploded when it appeared.” Epicureans and Buddhists stand together against the creator of the Abrahamic religions and of Plato’s Timaeus.
• A compound mind. The Buddhist analysis of the person into body, sensation, perception, dispositions and consciousness, with no separate soul behind them, agrees with Epicurus that the mind is not a separate, simple, immortal thing.
• Against asceticism. The Buddha rejected self-mortification as “painful, unworthy, and unprofitable.” Epicurus would agree.
• Philosophy as medicine. The parable of the arrow treats philosophy as a cure for suffering, not as idle speculation, as Epicurus did: “Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man” (Usener 221).
• The Greek connection. The Questions of King Milinda shows Greek and Indian thought meeting face to face, and its chariot argument is one of the clearest statements anywhere of the view that a whole is made of its parts. This echoes the Sorites question of how many grains make up a heap, and Epicurus held firmly to the idea that both the grains and the heap are real to us.

The Buddhists’ Long Shadow

Schopenhauer and the Nineteenth Century

Buddhism reached the West in the nineteenth century through scholars such as Max Müller and T. W. Rhys Davids, whose translations are quoted in this chapter. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) found in it a confirmation of his own view that life is suffering and that the will to live must be denied. Through Schopenhauer, Buddhist pessimism entered European philosophy, and Nietzsche’s charge of “decadence” was aimed at it.

Modern Buddhism and the “Tranquil” Epicurus

In the twentieth century Buddhism spread in the West in a new form, often stripped of rebirth, hells and monks, and presented as a psychology of calm, meditation and “mindfulness.” At the same time scholars came to describe the goal of Epicurus as “tranquility” or the “absence of pain.” The two pictures met, and today Epicurus is often presented as a Greek Buddha, a teacher of detachment who sought calm by reducing desire.

Stoicism has been remade in much the same way. Its providential god, its world-soul and its fate have been set aside, and it is sold today as a practical psychology of calm and resilience, much as Buddhism is sold as a psychology of mindfulness. The modern reader meets the Stoic sage, the Buddhist meditator and the “tranquil” Epicurus side by side on the same shelf, as three versions of the same advice: want less, accept what comes, and keep your mind at peace. Epicurus belongs in neither company. Both the modern Stoic and the modern Buddhist are taught to quiet desire. The Epicurean is taught to satisfy it wisely.

That picture drops everything that made Epicurus himself. It drops pleasure as the goal, the senses as the standard of truth, the confident knowledge of nature, the pleasures of motion as well as of rest, and the friendships that Epicurus called the greatest possession wisdom can acquire. An Epicurean who has read the Fire Sermon, the parable of the arrow and the Dhammapada’s chapter on pleasure can no longer mistake the one teacher for the other.

The Sources

Source	Contents	Translation
Buddhist Suttas	The First Sermon and other discourses	T. W. Rhys Davids, Sacred Books of the East XI (1881)
Buddhism in Translations	The Fire Sermon, the poisoned arrow, The Questions of King Milinda	Henry Clarke Warren (Harvard, 1896)
The Dhammapada	The verses on rebirth, happiness, pleasure and impermanence	F. Max Müller, Sacred Books of the East X (1881)
Nietzsche, The Antichrist	Buddhism and Epicurus as “decadent”	A. M. Ludovici (1911)

The Most Important Passages for Epicureans

• The Middle Path and the Four Noble Truths: the First Sermon; the craving for this life alone as the “let-us-eat-and-drink-for-to-morrow-we-die heresy”: Rhys Davids’s note.
• The senses on fire, and aversion for every sensation: the Fire Sermon.
• Questions that “profit not”: the poisoned arrow.
• No self: the chariot.
• Rebirth without transmigration, and punishment for deeds: Milinda; Dhammapada 126.
• “From pleasure comes grief” and “Let no man love anything”: Dhammapada 210–216.
• “Nirvana the highest happiness”: Dhammapada 202–204.
• Nietzsche on Buddhism and on Epicurus as “decadent”: Antichrist 20 and 30.
• The Epicurean answers to rebirth: Lucretius III.670–678 and III.843–869.

About These Texts

The Buddhist passages are quoted from the first English translations of the Pali Canon, by T. W. Rhys Davids, Henry Clarke Warren and F. Max Müller, and each links to the printed page at the Internet Archive. The diacritical marks of the Pali names are omitted. Later translations differ in wording, often rendering Warren’s “priests” as “monks” and Rhys Davids’s “Bhikkhus” the same way, but not in substance on the points discussed here.