David Jon Peckinpaugh

Buddha and Shakespeare: Eastern Dharma, Western Drama David Jon Peckinpaugh

Buddha & Shakespeare recounts, in one of the more dramatic narratives that you will likely ever come across, the epic nature of both Love and War. Each of which befalls us, most often unexpectedly.

It is the story, then, of our being-human, as told through the lives of two princes who come to find themselves caught up in the throes of battles that seem to have found them, as much or more than they have found those battles.

One prince from the East: Siddhartha, Guatama, the Buddha-to-be.

The other prince from the West: Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, heir to Elsinore.

Both of these young men-children of royalty-find themselves transformed at the hands of a breath-stealing revelation. Siddhartha encounters suffering for the first time. Hamlet's world is devastated by a King's passing-and the news from his father's ghost that he has been the victim of a murderous conspiracy. Something is afoul. Something is not quite right in each of their worlds any longer.

We know that this one thing holds for both princes: that the worlds these young men had once inhabited will be home for them no more. That everything they had ever known up to the moment of revelation has just been radically transformed in relation to a knowledge of things that neither of them has ever had before. How this all plays out unfolds in the pages of Buddha & Shakespeare.

That nothing will be the same again. That everything has changed. That this is the exact same moment of revelation that confronts each and every one of us at some point in our lives: the impossibility of our ever going back; or pretending that we don't know what we know, and haven't seen what we have in moments of excruciating clarity.