Can anyone recommend a good book that is both an introduction to #Stoicism and a guide to practically implementing it in one's life? I'd love a recommendation. @bodhidave, any suggestions?
I don't know lots about contemporary Stoicism, but there's a fair amount on it these days. I've seen these two books recommended (as well as Pigliucci, who Alex has now mentioned).
Other possible authors:
Engberg-Pedersen
Simone Kotva
John Sellars
Matthew Sharpe
Steven Strange
A practice that's been most transformative of all for me is doing intensive meditation retreats (lasting at least 5 days).
It's without exaggeration to say, after 3 grad degrees in psych and world religion studies, I've learned more about the heart and mind and contemplative experience by sitting silently on a cushion for a week.
And I'm not much of a proselytizer, but I have little hesitation recommending a retreat at some point.
One more twitter transfer. I was intrigued by Husserl’s rather effusive praise of Buddhist thought in his review of the Pali Canon, "On the Teachings of Gotama Buddha," and wanted to know more about the backstory. Karl Schuhmann's chapter "Husserl and Indian Thought" in Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy has some details about this. According to Schuhmann, Karl Eugen Neumann's German translation of Sutta Pitaka was initially published around the turn of 20th cent. 1/ @philosophy#philosophy
As a side note of which I'm sure you're aware— as the Zen (Chan) tradition came to develop a sense of itself as a school, it took on the self-understanding that it was based, not on a text, but on a "transmission" of a "direct experience."
Intriguingly, the Zen school then of course came to record accounts of such experiences, appended poems and then commentaries to those, and ended up with its own sort of "scriptures"— the koan (gong'an) literature.