TL;DR: The West inherited Stoicism’s moral blueprint—virtue through reason—then wrapped it in Christianity’s sin-and-forgiveness cycle. Secularizing it left us with the blueprint but no safety valve, fueling perfectionism and guilt. The East’s Buddhist–Taoist nondualism skips the blueprint entirely, trusting the present as nature itself. Epicureanism sits in between, reasoning like the West but flowing like the East. The radical middle way? Rational Nondualism—using reason without losing touch with the immediacy of life.

Reason fulfilled, nonduality revealed—the radical middle way

There’s a certain irony in imagining the two great peacemakers of history—Jesus and the Buddha—locked in an ideological showdown.

The scene is absurd: two serene figures under a Bodhi tree, each patiently waiting for the other to speak, neither quite willing to throw the first philosophical punch. Eventually, they’d probably both smile and say something about love, compassion, or the futility of disputes. After all, “In matters of taste,” the old saying goes, “there can be no disputes.”

This is even more true for religion. Try changing someone’s mind about the supernatural, and watch the sparks fly. These beliefs are woven into us from early on, often becoming the scaffolding of our identity. Even those who reject certain doctrines usually do so in a way that still carries the imprint of the old architecture.

But this post isn’t about taste or religion. It’s about philosophy—about the deep structures of ethics and the essence of “nature” itself. And here, we must admit, Jesus and the Buddha stand for two quite different traditions that have, for centuries, shaped the moral imagination of East and West.

The fun part? Once you strip away religious doctrine, you find something like an ancient philosophical wrestling match between Stoicism and Epicureanism—and at its heart, a question that is still unresolved today: What is nature?

Stoicism and Christianity: the West’s conceptual virtue machine

Stoicism, the philosophical DNA of much Christian ethics, is all about virtue through reason. To live well is to live “according to nature”—but for the Stoics, nature is logos: a rational, divinely ordered structure. It’s God’s will, fate, the perfect plan.

This means there is always a right conceptual answer to any moral question—if only we could think hard enough to find it. It’s a philosophy of discipline: discover the universal law, then conform your life to it.

Christianity took this Stoic skeleton and clothed it in theology. “Virtue” became obedience to God’s commandments, with the perfect conceptual answer revealed in Scripture rather than discovered by human reason alone. If you failed, you repented; if you repented sincerely, you were forgiven. The system worked—so long as you believed the metaphysical premise that there is a divine lawgiver.

But once the West secularized, that premise collapsed. We kept the Stoic machinery—find the right principle, live by it absolutely—but lost the mechanism for redemption. The result? A culture on an epic guilt trip, without a place to turn for absolution except for doubling down on moral perfectionism.

Modern Stoic-influenced thinkers like Jordan Peterson echo this: “Become the best possible version of yourself,” “Speak the absolute truth,” “Stand up straight with your shoulders back.” It’s heroic, noble, and … exhausting. Without divine forgiveness, it’s also a recipe for chronic self-reproach. In secular Stoicism, Sisyphus is a hero instead of a dupe.

And here’s the catch: an airtight moral system has no pressure-release valve. In theory, Stoicism’s idealized self-discipline produces the sage—calm, unflappable, perfectly virtuous. In practice, the human mind has subterranean layers, and those layers are not always Stoic. Modern psychology, from Freud onward, has shown that repressed drives don’t vanish; they bide their time. The more airtight the moral code, the more pressure builds underground—until the “perfect moralist” finds themself blindsided by hypocrisy or swept away by compulsive, uncharacteristic impulses.

Even the most disciplined Stoic needs a way to step outside the system, to breathe. In ancient times, the religious frame offered it: confession, ritual, festival. Without that outlet, moral rigor risks calcifying into self-judgment so severe it undermines itself. That’s the paradox—without some recognition of our own fallibility, virtue becomes brittle. And brittle virtue doesn’t bend—it snaps.

Epicureanism and Buddhism: nature without a master plan

Epicurus is the unsung Western cousin of the Buddha. Like the Stoics, he preached living in harmony with nature, but his “nature” wasn’t a rational blueprint. It was the reality of lived experience, preconceptual and immediate.

For Epicureans, the good life meant ataraxia—tranquil pleasure, the absence of unnecessary disturbance. Not hedonism in the caricatured sense of indulgence and excess, but a careful middle way, guided by natural inclinations and feelings rather than rigid conceptual ideals.

Pleasure, they realized, is immediate. The moment you try to capture it in a concept—define it, measure it—you’ve already lost it. The same holds for the Buddha’s teaching on the Middle Way: avoid extremes, trust the direct, unfiltered reality of the present.

The Buddha’s insight—that there’s no solid dividing line between “self” and “world”—places him firmly in the nondual tradition also championed by Lao Tzu’s Taoism. Both dissolve the subject-object split and see reality as one seamless, self-expressing whole. This Eastern strain of thought is radically different from the dominant Western approach: it is experiential rather than conceptual, rooted in direct perception rather than in abstract systems.

That’s why Epicureans, in Western philosophical terms, were the closest thing to nondualists. Despite their admittedly dualistic metaphysics, they understood that “virtue” isn’t about finding the perfect rational formula—it’s about coherence with nature, to go with the flow, here and now. Not forcing the moment into an abstract mold, but letting it unfold as it is.

The difference is that Epicureanism still spoke in the language of reason and argument—something it shares with Stoicism—which makes it more palatable to the Western analytic mind. Buddhism and Taoism, by contrast, skip the operating system entirely and run reality raw, unformatted. Placing these traditions side by side allows us to see not just how East and West diverge, but how each offers a distinct yet complementary way of understanding a life lived in harmony with nature.

Pancakes and the middle way

Let’s make this less abstract.

There’s a stack of twenty pancakes on the table.

The Stoic will search for the correct principle—how many pancakes is right to eat? They’ll weigh health, fairness, long-term consequences, perhaps consult Marcus Aurelius. Eventually, they’ll decide on the precise number that aligns with their concept of virtue.

The Epicurean will notice how they feel. Hungry? Eat until content, not stuffed. Not hungry? Eat none. They’ll trust their natural sense of enough, judiciously primed by rational beliefs, without running it through a conceptual algorithm.

The Stoic ethic is admirable—it aims for universality, consistency, and moral clarity. But it demands that you treat life like an exam you’re constantly trying to ace. The Epicurean ethic is lighter, but not lax. It assumes that human nature, unwarped by fear or greed, is a trustworthy compass.

The guilt problem

The Christianized Stoic model had a built-in hack for human fallibility: sin plus forgiveness. Without the supernatural component, though, the West’s secular Stoicism has no safety valve. We’re left with endless striving for an unreachable ideal, and endless guilt for falling short. If God is pure logos, “We Who Wrestle with God” (as Jordan Peterson puts it), must surrender before the fight even begins.

From the Epicurean–Buddhist side, this whole guilt structure looks unnecessary. Why see natural inclinations as sinful? Why believe that moral worth hinges on conceptual perfection? Why not start from the realization that we are nature in the raw present, and trust that coherence with it leads to well-being?

Nature: logos or Tao?

Here’s the crux.

For the Stoics (and their Christian heirs), nature is logos—the grand rational design. For the Epicureans (and their nondual Buddhist and Taoist kin), nature is Tao—the flowing and preconceptual present. One is a cosmic blueprint waiting to be decoded. The other is an immediate reality to be lived. Epicureans don’t need a transcendent truth.

The Stoic wants to understand nature to live according to it. The Epicurean wants to live nature to understand it.

Why the Stoic model breaks without the supernatural.

Jordan Peterson’s Stoicism works as long as you ignore the missing plank in the bridge: without God, the perfect conceptual answer to every question is no longer guaranteed to exist. The Stoic system depends on the premise of a complete, ordered moral reality—without it, you can spend your life searching for answers that aren’t there.

In classical Stoicism, the blueprint is perfection itself—logos as divine reason. God is the architect, the plan is flawless, and whatever happens fits the plan. So why is there evil in the world? For the Stoic with God, the answer is ignorance of the good. Those who stray from virtue do so because they don’t truly know it, and God may punish them as part of restoring cosmic order.

Remove God, though, and the structure tilts. If there is no divine perfection, then there is no absolute evil—only ignorance, error, and limitation in human understanding. And if there is no evil, there is nothing and no one to punish. The whole moral machinery loses its teeth. Without the supernatural frame, Stoicism becomes a patient teacher with no authority to expel the student. It can guide, but it cannot ultimately enforce, because the very concept of “deserving punishment” no longer makes sense in a purely deterministic universe.

Meanwhile, the Epicurean–Buddhist model doesn’t require omniscient moral order. It works with the reality we already have—immediate experience. Its ethics are not about solving the whole puzzle, but about living each piece with clarity and balance. This restores moral common sense: We can still call actions humanly evil and respond to them accordingly.

The historical overlap—and suppression—of nondualism in the West

It’s not that Christianity never recognized the nondual truth. The mystics saw it: Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing—even Søren Kierkegaard. They all knew the divine was not “out there” but here, immediate, inseparable from the present moment.

But these voices were often sidelined or persecuted. Think of John Scotus Eriugena, condemned for suggesting that God and creation were not two separate things. The Church, committed to the dual structure of Creator and creation, could not accommodate a fully nondual vision without undermining its own authority.

Plotinus and the One as present nature

Plotinus—regarded as the founder of Neoplatonism—takes us close to something like the Eastern Tao. In contrast to Plato, who often considered real what “can act or be acted upon,” Plotinus saw union as the hallmark of existence.

In his metaphysical system, all things emanate from this supreme, ineffable principle—the One—not from multiplicity but from unity itself. Whereas Plato located truth in forms as causal principles that give being and intelligibility to the world, Plotinus elevated unity itself as fundamental.

Yet even Plotinus framed the One as something transcendent—a pinnacle to ascend toward through inner purification and mystical union (“henosis”). Rational Nondualism reorients that idea: the One isn’t “elsewhere” or “above.” It is not something to climb toward, but the immediacy of the present. The One is the now. You don’t approach it—you can’t get away from it.

Rational Nondualism: the synthesis

Rational Nondualism takes what’s best in both traditions. From the Stoics, it keeps respect for reason, coherence, and integrity. From the Epicureans and Buddhists, it keeps trust in the immediate, preconceptual nature of experience.

The result is neither rigid perfectionism nor careless indulgence. Instead, it’s the middle way understood rationally: coherence with nature, where nature means the indivisible present.

In this synthesis:

• Virtue is not the application of a perfect conceptual formula, but alignment with the present flow of change.
• Reason is not an abstract judge over life, but an expression of life itself, grounded in immediate awareness.
• Nature is not a plan to be deciphered, but the ever-unfolding whole in which we live and act.

The present has no opposite

In Rational Nondualism, the present is not a “slice of time” between past and future—it’s timeless. It’s the only fact that cannot be negated. You can deny the past, doubt the future; but you can’t deny the presence of this moment without affirming it in the act.

This is where Stoic logos and Taoist flow meet. The “law” of nature is not written in some heavenly ledger. Rather, it’s written, if we can even use the word, in the immediacy of change. It’s as accessible as the smell of a rose, as ungraspable as the rose’s scent once you try to pin it down in words.

Back to the pancakes

If you eat mindfully, stopping when you feel satisfied, you’ve followed the Epicurean–Buddhist compass. If you consider fairness, nutrition, and the future supply of maple syrup, you’ve honored the Stoic–Christian map. The sweet spot—literally in this case—is where these converge in the present.

In Rational Nondualism, you don’t need to choose between the compass and the map. You notice the terrain you’re actually on.

Closing insight: beyond the showdown

If Jesus and the Buddha could meet without their followers’ baggage, I suspect there’d be no fight at all. The Stoic insistence on virtue and the Epicurean trust in nature are not enemies—they’re two hands of the same body. One points, the other touches.

The synthesis is simple: Nature is the present. Whether you call it God’s will, the Tao, the One, or just “right now,” it’s the indivisible ground of reason and feeling, discipline and ease.

And the best part? You’re already living it. No belief required, no blueprint to decode. Just presence, unconditionally: the radical middle way.

You can support Marcel’s work , find mindful gifts, and meet your maximum style potential at Marcel’s Booktique.

His books—in paper, pixel, and audio—can also be found at Amazon and other select retailers.

Looking for mindful & funny spiritual gifts, gear, deco, or gadgets? Why not check out the exclusive yet affordable Amazon Merch designs by Simply Nondual!

Share this article: