Shakespeare practice

You can read literature with a Dharma eye, to develop insight. And you can work on issues along the way as well. For instance, I noticed my mind wandering when I was reading Richard the 3rd. Just like when my mind wanders when I'm watching my breath. Second, I noticed a need for patience, a very important virtue. I wanted Shakespeare to get to it, I lost the pleasure in the moment and language and drama. So I get to work on concentration and patience. But it's the insight that I like. Here is Queen Margaret (Margaret of Anjou) on impermanence:

I call'd thee then vain flourish of my fortune;
I call'd thee then poor shadow, painted queen;
The presentation of but what I was;
The flattering index of a direful pageant;
One heaved a-high, to be hurl'd down below;
A mother only mock'd with two sweet babes;
A dream of what thou wert, a breath, a bubble,
A sign of dignity, a garish flag,
To be the aim of every dangerous shot,
A queen in jest, only to fill the scene.
Where is thy husband now? where be thy brothers?
Where are thy children? wherein dost thou, joy?
Who sues to thee and cries 'God save the queen'?
Where be the bending peers that flatter'd thee?
Where be the thronging troops that follow'd thee?
Decline all this, and see what now thou art:
For happy wife, a most distressed widow;
For joyful mother, one that wails the name;
For queen, a very caitiff crown'd with care;
For one being sued to, one that humbly sues;
For one that scorn'd at me, now scorn'd of me;
For one being fear'd of all, now fearing one;
For one commanding all, obey'd of none.
Thus hath the course of justice wheel'd about,
And left thee but a very prey to time;
Having no more but thought of what thou wert,
To torture thee the more, being what thou art.
Thou didst usurp my place, and dost thou not
Usurp the just proportion of my sorrow?
Now thy proud neck bears half my burthen'd yoke;
From which even here I slip my weary neck,
And leave the burthen of it all on thee.
Farewell, York's wife, and queen of sad mischance:
These English woes will make me smile in France.

This is from Act 4, Scene 4. Queen Margaret was King Henry VI's wife, and then Edward took over, and then Edward died, and his brothers were erased, so that Richard could step into being king. So what we have in this part of the scene is Queen Margaret (H6) Queen Elizabeth (EIV) and Richard's mother all talking about how horrible he is. Then in parallel to Act 1, scene 2 (where he tried to get the widow of the murdered man to marry him), he works to convince the mother of the princes Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth, that he should marry princess Elizabeth to consolidate the regime.  Another harrowing dialogue of the oily Richard trying to persuade of marriage to make a queen.

I probably alternate between this blog and my Shakespeare blog, where I read through Shakespeare chronologically, and now I am on my second reading of Shakespeare with the 2020 Shakespeare Project.

Puritans in Shakespeare's time

Malvolio in Twelfth Night:

"Malvolio suffers within a joyous world; it is against his will that he becomes part of the fun when he is duped and made to appear ridiculous. As a character, he represents a historical group, then growing in power, whose earnestness threatened to take the joy out of life (and, incidentally, to close England's theaters.)" (A Reader's Guide to Shakespeare" by Joseph Rosenblum)

My response: In my Buddhist community we are not pushed to renounce before we have matured to the point where we don't even need to renounce, we have just moved past or transcended the whatever. The danger is blocking our energy and being not really integrated. I think this insight had not yet reached this spiritual community, and they pushed to ape spiritual advancement.

Archbishop Scroop from Henry IV part 2

I've always been interested in the specious reasoning of so-called spiritual people to be violent.

Here is the justification from Archbishop Scroop for warring:

we are all diseas'd
And with our surfeiting and wanton hours
Have brought ourselves into a burning fever,
And we must bleed for it; of which disease
Our late King, Richard, being infected, died.
But, my most noble Lord of Westmoreland,
I take not on me here as a physician;
Nor do I as an enemy to peace
Troop in the throngs of military men;
But rather show awhile like fearful war
To diet rank minds sick of happiness,
And purge th' obstructions which begin to stop
Our very veins of life. Hear me more plainly.
I have in equal balance justly weigh'd
What wrongs our arms may do, what wrongs we suffer,
And find our griefs heavier than our offences.
We see which way the stream of time doth run
And are enforc'd from our most quiet there
By the rough torrent of occasion;
And have the summary of all our griefs,
When time shall serve, to show in articles;
Which long ere this we offer'd to the King,
And might by no suit gain our audience:
When we are wrong'd, and would unfold our griefs,
We are denied access unto his person,
Even by those men that most have done us wrong.
The dangers of the days but newly gone,
Whose memory is written on the earth
With yet appearing blood, and the examples
Of every minute's instance, present now,
Hath put us in these ill-beseeming arms;
Not to break peace, or any branch of it,
But to establish here a peace indeed,
Concurring both in name and quality.

Buddha and Shakespeare

Not sure if I can swing a narrative for all these links. I've been obsessed with Shakespeare lately and recently explored the antisemitism in Merchant of Venice. So today I just googled Buddha and Shakespeare.

Here is a link about how we create our worlds with our minds, with Hamlet quote.

Wise Attention points out that Shakespeare helps us to imagine different perspectives. They are both heroes of consciousness for him.

This person looked for similarities after being on retreat.

Here is a review of Buddhism, Shakespeare, and deconstruction.

Here is a review of Whacking Buddha: The Mysterious World of Shakespeare and Buddhism, by Mark Lamonica.

There is another book Buddha and Shakespeare. It came out in 2004 and there are no reviews of it on Amazon.

I had thoughts on how to avoid harm after reading Jo Nesbo's Macbeth.

I've also explored the idea of fathers giving away daughters in marriage and the oppression of women.

Shakespeare has replaced my study of the suttas, and Dharma. I don't know if it's possible to have overload but since 2004 I've been reading a lot of Dharma and I wanted to cast a wider net. I read as a Buddhist now.

And yet I still like to hear biographies of Thai Forest Monks.

Judgmentalism

From Love's Labor's Loss: Berowne act 4, sc 3:

"You found his mote, the King your mote did see,
But I a beam do find in each of thee"


This reference is from  Matthew 7:1-5

1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Love's Labor's Loss

"Therefore, brave conquerors, for so you are
That war against your own affections
And the huge army of the world's desires,
Our late edict shall strongly stand in force."

My thought about the above quote from Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Loss, in a Buddhist context, is that transcending desire, in a healthy way, is one of the fruits of deep meditation, but that aping and pretending to be there when you are not, can be quite painful. We try to do an end run around obstacles and get to the fruits without paying the price. Adolescents use asceticism to cope with life's richness. Guess I wish I could develop to the adolescence phase.

Aristotle says friendship is about the love of virtue. That's what I take away from him. Hanging out with guys who want to advance knowledge and learn is the great aspiration in Love's Labor's Loss.

Friendship is also about saying the hard dark truths about someone. The only problem is that it's easy to be judgemental and not hide your disgust at lack of virtue, at mistakes--which pushes people away and isn't an act of friendship. We have to be aware of our projections, our disgust at others can be really disguised disgust at our own projected traits that we don't own.

Friendship is complicated. When you're younger it's about playing together. As you get older it's more, concern and deeper conversations come into it. Friendship can be about someone you feel comfortable confessing your deep dark secrets and your shames. Deep thought is friendship, that is was I got from Sara Jenkins book on friendship.

The fantasy of the spiritual community providing deeper friendships was ripe for me to become disillusioned about. It's just like everywhere else, and humans are human. Even so, a shared project draws people together, so sangha is about the aspiration of deepening the spiritual practice.

Learning about friendship is also learning about the limits to it, and your fantasies about it. This may be masochistic of me, but I really think that a lot of life is about disillusionment of false ideas. So a friend will not ameliorate all your problems or be an always available safe harbor that if you can just get there, everything will be alright.

I've been thinking a lot about the idea that Republicans don't want to give out "free things" from the government because people lack discipline. Virtue should be rewarded, not lack of virtue. This viewpoint lacks compassion. As usual, the Republican ideas are good personally, but not so great writ large, when people are suffering. Because you can't imagine suffering the way people suffer does not mean they don't suffer. Government is about taking care of us, how ever "us" is defined, usually with borders, but also increasingly with ideas of citizenship. There are always limits and I appreciate that government can't solve every problem, and I appreciate that expanding government can't go on infinitely. I also appreciate that meddling in people's lives can be annoying.

A hindrance to friendship is capitalism. If it's not taking up all our time to make ends meet, then money can be an issue in playing and can be a bone of contention. I saw a man try and help out another who was stuck in the snow. In the process he smashed the other car. He weaseled out and denied he hit the car, and a family in financial crisis had to pony up for the expense. People don't want to be responsible financially when they are helping out. I could see that getting in the way of friendship.

We need time, emotional energy, curiosity, tolerance and many things to be a friend, but also interest in the other. Friendship dies when it's always about giving to the other or a patriarchal or matriarchal  view of a person. But nobody is always equal so there will be some of that.

In Love's Labor's Loss, these friends end up falling in love despite trying to stay away from it. In his previous play Shakespeare has a friendship where the friend tries to steal his friend's lover, threatened to rape her, and then almost instantly they make up at the end. Can you name that play?

As a fun exercise, go away and do something for 5 minutes, and then write down Love's Labor's Loss. I've had the dickens of a time getting it right, there are so many ways to mess it up.