“It is impossible that happiness and yearning for what is not present can ever be united.”
This pithy proverb on desire and suffering does not come from the Pali Canon or the words of a Kadampa master of the Himalayan plateau. It is a quote from Epictetus (50–135 CE), a Roman Stoic. Stoicism was a movement started by philosophers who would meet to teach and debate at the stoa poikile, a painted portico with pillars from which the school's name derived, in the agora of Athens (a large public meeting place which was the center of cultural life). They studied logic and physics, but their primary concern was ethics. The goal was excellence, or virtue (arete) which they saw as synonymous with happiness (eudaimonia). Stoic disciplines aimed at removing delusion and disciplining our emotional life.
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