Pyrrho's Way: The Ancient Greek Version of Buddhism

by Douglas C. Bates

It is not events that disturb us, but what we believe about them.

In ancient Greece, a group of philosophers developed highly effective techniques to change our thoughts for the better, allowing practitioners to achieve inner peace. They called their philosophy "Pyrrhonism" after the founder of their school, Pyrrho. Pyrrho traveled to India and brought back with him ideas from Buddhism, reshaping them to fit into Greek philosophy. Pyrrho agreed with the Buddha that delusion was the cause of suffering, but instead of using meditation to end delusion, Pyrrho applied Greek philosophical rationalism.

Pyrrho's Way lays out the Pyrrhonist path for modern readers, giving clear guidance on how to apply Pyrrhonist practice to everyday life to achieve inner peace. If Buddhist wisdom has ever appealed to you, but you found Buddhism's paradoxes and endless hours of meditation to be a barrier, Pyrrhonism is for you.

"... succeeds in making a difficult and obscure philosophy not only intelligible but, more to the point, something to be practiced in a way that can make a difference to your life here and now." -- STEPHEN BATCHELOR, author of The Art of Solitude.

"... an intelligent, readable book that succeeds in its goal of introducing Pyrrhonism as practice." --CHRISTOPHER BECKWITH, author of Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia

322 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2020

Reviews

[April]

To be brutally honest I did not finish this book. I tried, got most of the way through, but it wasn't for me. The book takes basic secular Buddhist ideas appealing to Westerners and applies them to Ancient Greek philosophy. I was hoping for more in depth history, cross over, and Buddhist analysis.

[Socraticgadfly]

First, the title is simply untrue. Bates ignores multiple issues raised by the great majority of modern teachers of philosophy and history of philosophy on several related issues.

One is the "translation" issue, ie, how much difficulty there was, per the cited phrase from that time that three translators were needed between a Greek and a gymnosophist. Five hundred years later, at the time of Sextus Empiricus, or 600 at Plotinus? Perhaps different, much easier, with the spread of the Greek language into Iran and parts of central Asia under Hellenization. At this time, and no, I don't think it's generally an overstated problem.

Second is where I see Bates first becoming mendacious, and yes that. (This is based on reading the freely posted first four chapters of his book.)

He says: "Even in antiquity Westerners looked to India for wisdom. We know the Neoplatonist philosopher, Plotinus, tried to go there but had to turn back."

Mendacious? Yes. First, Plotinus lived more than 500 years after Pyrrho. Second, especially even before the Achaemenid Empire put Greeks in indirect contact with what is today India, the Hellenic Greek world looked to ...

Egypt and Babylon for wisdom, not India.

Third, going back to the first point, Bates ignores (but surely knows) that we have nothing written from Pyrrho, not a lot from his student Timon, that the chain of intellectual custody from then to the foundation of Pyrrhonism is then, and that Diogenes Laertius is somewhere between somewhat untrustworthy and highly untrustworthy. Related to that, and to point 1 again, Bates cherry-picks modern philosophers to support his position and ignore these issues.

Fourth, and tangental? Buddhism is a religion.

Fifth, going off a list of cited authors at his website tied to the book? Stephen Batchelor is mendacious. And, on a lesser level, it's arguable Doug Bates is the same, trying to hide Buddhist evangelism under the cloak of philosophical reinterpretation.

I'll be writing much more at my one site, but I don't need a BuGoy peddling such ideas.

I refuse to put this on my philosophy shelf.