The philosophies of Epicurus and the Buddha aim to free us from suffering by helping us to recognize how ignorance and delusion lead us to pursue harmful desires. Since the problem lies in our attitudes, the solution is to change our attitudes. Like doctors healing the sick, they offer therapeutic practical advice, to remove the groundless opinions and the unhealthy desires that cause suffering. Although various misconceptions may lead us to conceive of these two thinkers as quite different with respect to values and ethics, there are remarkable similarities. Indeed, their practical advice for how to live has the same normative basis: they counsel us to avoid craving and clinging, so that we avoid the harmful ways of living that make most people unhappy. Epicurus and the Buddha advocate a selective elimination of desire, and on the same basis. As we choose how to live, we are like gardeners weeding out harmful desires and cultivating healthy desires that will make our lives flourish. This article clarifies the notions of craving and clinging, which are often conflated in Buddhist studies, and uses them to improve on our understanding of Epicurus’ categorization of desires.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American Transcendentalist, is known as “the American Confucius”. He is also deeply influenced by the Confucianism from Confucius to Mencius, moreover, there is a constructive dialogue and engagement between them. However, it can not be inferred that Confucianism is also transcendentalism. First, Confucianism is based on “One-worldness”. Second, Confucianism is a kind of Guanxi-ism (relationism), so it is not individualism. Third, Confucianism is not intuitionism, but has the“structure of emotion-reason”. Fourth, Confucianism is not focus on “Oversoul”, but towards a pan-aestheticism based on the integration of Rites and Music. However, there are many similarities between American Transcendentalism and Chinese Confucianism: first, the harmony between man and nature; second, the returning to the human nature of goodness; third, the pursuit of “Moral Perfectionism”; fourth, the emphasis on the realization of beauty.

The first noble truth in Buddhism points toward a purely phenomenal experience. Though purely qualitative in nature, the experience of suffering has an existential aspect. As stated in the second noble truth, suffering has a cause that relates to our situatedness in the world. Notwithstanding, the cause of suffering has to be something external to the mental state of suffering itself. Some of the more recent studies on mental states suggest two different positions on the nature of mental states. One may view mental states as self-referential, reflexive and purely qualitative in nature; alternatively, one could view them as transitive as pointing towards something external, beyond and other than themselves in terms of their cause or the like. The former of these positions is known as internalism, while the latter is named externalism. Nyāya school of Classical Indian Philosophy presents a unique position in this regard. They view pain and pleasure as objects of cognition rather than their content. As such, an act of perception becomes a mere transitive act, a mere operator or the lowest common denominator of all mental acts without having content in themselves. Buddhist logician, however, views mental states as pure qualitative states. As such, they seem to embrace internalist position regarding mental states. This paper attempts to demonstrate that this position if prescribed to Buddhism, renders their second noble truth problematic.