Ryan Holiday knows there’s more to stoicism than its common definition as a synonym for spartan (cold, rigid, brutally harsh). He knows that if it really was just that stereotype, the philosophy wouldn’t have lasted so long. Nor would he be able to write numerous illuminating articles and two best-selling books on it. Which is why it is so disappointing that he could not pay Stoicism's Eastern cousin, Zen Buddhism*, a modicum of the same respect--dismissing it in a few sentences with the straw man stereotype of the monk-recluse alone in his garden on a cliff.

What Ryan does not mention is that feudal Japanese life, like caste-based Indian life or Imperial Chinese life--all lives Zen and Buddhism made better--was anything but a holiday. It was a grueling, hierarchical and wretched existence full of familial obligations and draconian laws. These were the ties that bound people together in a land where resources were scarce and disaster was always a couple of bad harvests and a disgruntled warlord's rebellion away. It would be very easy under such repressive and oppressive regimes for leaders to tyrannize their subjects and engage in needless bloodshed, as many did.

But there was one group of people whom the daimyos and despots not only feared, but who were capable of changing their hearts and slaking their bloodlust: Zen monks. Those gardens weren't celestial pleasure domes where Orientalists like Coleridge might have escaped from reality, but places of meditation where emperors and commoners alike sought advice, gained mental clarity and even sparked creativity, not unlike the bedside of Marcus Aurelius or the olive tree under which Socrates and his friends sat.