Similarities between stoicism and Confucianism

Recently for my class over the history of ancient philosophy I have started writing my final paper, which focuses on stoicism and stoic ethics. As I have been studying materials and writings from people like Seneca and Epictetus on stoicism I have noticed some similarities between stoicism and parts of Confucianism that we have gone over this semester. For example one of the main areas of stoicism is focusing oneself and bettering yourself through means like education. In many of the Confucian dialects we have read this semester I feel like there has been a big focus on education. One quote that stood out to me was, “I was not born with wisdom. I love the ancient teachings and have worked hard to attain to their level.” I think this is very similar the views of a stoic, and is similar to some of Seneca’s letters in which he speaks on education not just being means to an end, but something that should be done for its own sake. Another quote that connected more with this writings of Epictetus was this, “There were four things the master had eliminated from himself: imposing his will, arbitrariness, stubbornness and egotism.” Epictetus speaks a lot on stubbornness and egotism, as he says that we shouldn’t be stubborn and waste out time on things we can’t control, and we shouldn’t take pride in anything besides our own virtue. Although Stoicism and Confucianism have some obvious differences between them, I just thought that these little similarities would be interesting to blog about and this would give me a break from my big final paper.