Nothing external — the body, property, children, station, life itself — is a person's property: all of it is given him for use by the Whole (nature, the gods, fortune) and is recalled in its season. Hence the therapeutic conclusion: loss is not "losing" but the return of what was entrusted. Whoever remembers that he held what was another's (ἀλλότριον) gives it back without a wrench, for he is not giving back his own.

The locus classicus is Epictetus, Enchiridion 11: "Never say of anything 'I have lost it,' but 'I have given it back' (ἀπέδωκα, not ἀπώλεσα). Is your child dead? It is given back. Is your wife dead? She is given back. 'My estate was taken.' — Then that too is given back." Cf. Ench. 1 (externals are ἀλλότρια) and Ench. 15 (at the banquet of being, take what is offered courteously; do not grab, do not clutch at what departs).

Distinguish it from the neighbouring doctrines by axis: dichotomy-of-control is the axis of control (what is and is not up to us); this doctrine is the axis of ownership (what belongs to us: of externals, nothing — all is merely lent). One says "it is not in your power to keep it," the other "it was never yours to lose."

Epictetus, Ench. 11 (the principal text), 1, 15; Disc. 1.1; 4.1 (on freedom — not to attach oneself to what is another's); Seneca, Ep. 98.11 ("fortune gives nothing into ownership — it only lends"), Cons. ad Marciam 10 (all is given on return), Cons. ad Polybium. The Stoic axiology of the indifferent (TERMadiaphora) and the doctrine of "what is up to us" (dichotomy-of-control) — LS 58, 62.

In Marcus the doctrine is more often cast as a return to nature than as Epictetus's verbal device:

• 08-33 — ἀτύφως λαβεῖν, εὐλύτως ἀφεῖναι: "receive without conceit, release without clinging" — the external as a loan, not a property (the principal locus).
• 04-14 — the part is "taken back" (ἀναληφθήσῃ) into the seminal reason of the Whole: life returns whence it was drawn.
• 07-56 — to reckon oneself already dead: the remainder of life is "surplus," like a returned debt, lived according to nature.
• 06-15 — the giving-back of breath to the element from which it was taken: even the pneuma is on loan.
• Beyond the formatted corpus — Med. 10.14 (one who has entrusted himself to nature, content with the assigned), 11.34 (a direct echo of Epictetus Ench. 11 on the child), 12.11.

The doctrine is the reverse side of TERMthe reserve-clause: the reserve governs the coming (to reach for the preferred "with a reservation," knowing it is returnable), this doctrine the going (when the returnable is recalled, to give it back without murmuring). Both are rooted in the TERMindifference of externals and in the acceptance of fate. In Marcus the mechanism of return is TERMtransformation: nothing perishes, all passes back into the Whole (see the grateful departure and the memory of death as practices this doctrine underwrites). Its therapeutic point: to draw the sting of "mine" from loss by showing that what was lost was another's, only for a time grown dear.