Shakespeare's Bodhisattvas: A Buddhist Approach to Spiritual Disease, Medicine and Caregiving in King Lear

DOI

10.4324/9781003601326-9

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2027

Publication Title

The Universal Shakespeare Creed: Readings in Shakespearean Religious, Spiritual, Ethical and Social Practice

First Page

131

Last Page

156

Abstract

While Shakespeare’s King Lear asks fundamental questions that lie at the heart of all religious and philosophical traditions, the tragedy’s representation of suffering as disease and wisdom and compassion as antidotes invites a Buddhist approach to understanding the play’s profundities. From a Mahayana Buddhist perspective, Lear’s world appears overcome by the diseases of delusion, hatred, and greed, yet a deeper spiritual reality can be found in the curative agency of bodhichitta, the ‘awakening heart-mind’ or ‘the mindset of enlightenment’, which arises in Cordelia and Edgar. They can be understood as Shakespeare’s bodhisattvas, ‘awakening beings’, who altruistically seek to heal spiritual disease and suffering through compassionate care. This chapter investigates how the medicine of Dharma, which takes both figurative and literal dimensions in Mahayana texts, can be related to the therapeutic and transformative uses of imagination, language, and body employed by Cordelia and Edgar in their role as caregivers, or ‘foster nurses of nature’. Striking remedies such as Cordelia’s ‘remediate’ tears and Edgar’s Dover cliff ‘miracle’ can be seen anew through the lens of the bodhisattva’s great compassion (mahakaruṇa) and skilful means (upaya). The revelation in King Lear of bodhichitta as ‘sovereign remedy / That perfectly allays all maladies’, to echo the Indian sage Shantideva, is Buddhism’s offering to Shakespeare’s religious afterlives.

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