What this shows
The rows are not identical: they can't be, because each tradition is mapping the territory with a different instrument. Patanjali organises by the act you restrain. The Buddha organises by the precept you take on. The Stoics organise by the virtue you cultivate, of which any given action is an expression.
So Ahimsa and the first Buddhist precept line up almost exactly: both are about not harming living beings. But Ahimsa maps to Stoic justice rather than a single act, because for the Stoics, not harming is part of the larger question of what you owe to others as a rational, social being. Same conclusion. Different route in.
Brahmacharya is the clearest case of translation gap. In traditional yogic context it means celibacy; in modern practice it means the wise use of energy: sexual, creative, attentional. The Stoic word for this is temperance: not suppression, not indulgence, but right measure. Aristotle called it the golden mean. The Buddha called it the middle way. Three traditions arriving at the same insight: the disciplined middle ground is where a sustainable life actually lives.
And Aparigraha (non-grasping) is where Stoicism speaks perhaps most directly to modern life. Epictetus' core teaching is that suffering comes from trying to control what is not up to us. Aparigraha is that lesson applied to possessions, status, identity, outcomes. Want what you already have, as the Stoic William Irvine puts it: Patanjali's open hand in four words.
How far to go
The traditions agree on the diagnosis: suffering grows from clinging, from the grip on what we want and fear to lose. Where they part is the dosage. Once you know the grip is the problem, how hard do you pull the hand open?
The most radical answer came from Diogenes the Cynic. He owned almost nothing, slept in a large clay jar in the Athenian marketplace, and threw away his one wooden cup when he saw a child drink from cupped hands. Need nothing, he taught, and nothing can be taken from you. To need nothing at all, the Cynics held, is divine; to need only a little is the next best thing. There is real freedom in that. There is also a life lived in a barrel. The cure works, and almost no one can live on it.
Every other tradition here is a more sustainable dose of the same medicine. The Buddha tried the extreme himself, starving his body in the forest, and found it produced weakness, not wisdom; he stepped back to the middle way between indulgence and self-denial. Yoga makes the same correction in its own terms: Aparigraha is the open hand, holding life loosely while staying in it, not a cold detachment that mistakes withdrawal for freedom. The heat of discipline, tapas, is meant to be balanced by samatva, evenness of mind; Cynicism is tapas with the balance taken out. Stoicism is the clearest case: it grew directly out of Cynicism (its founder Zeno studied under the Cynic Crates), kept the insight that almost nothing external is needed, and made it livable inside an ordinary social life.
Both extremes fail. Indulgence feeds the grip, and modern psychology shows why: the hedonic treadmill means the satisfaction that purchases deliver washes out almost as fast as it arrives. The Cynic is half-right, then; he strips away exactly what the research finds least worth chasing. But the same research finds what does last: close relationships, meaning, absorbing work. And that is precisely what the barrel throws out along with the cup. Total renunciation builds a new identity out of having nothing. What endures is the trained middle. The maps differ; they meet in the centre.
Why this matters for practice
You are not being asked to choose between traditions. You are being shown that the same territory has been mapped, independently, by people working in different languages and centuries. When three maps drawn by separate cartographers describe the same coastline, the coastline is probably there.
What this means in practice: when you sit with a Yama, you are not following a sectarian rule. You are touching a piece of moral ground that humans have returned to again and again, because something in us recognises it.
The Stoics had a word (prosoche) for the moment-by-moment attention to your own judgements and choices. The Buddhists call it sati, mindfulness. The yogis call the broader work abhyasa, sustained practice. The acts these traditions ask of you differ in detail. The quality of attention they ask for is one quality.
Each Yama opens onto its own terrain. Start with the one that catches you: the one you read and felt a small flinch at, or a small recognition. That's where the practice is asking to begin.