SOURCE: “The Cause of Suffering and the Birth of Compassion in Julius Caesar,” in A Buddhist's Shakespeare: Affirming Self-Deconstructions, Associated University Presses, 1994, pp. 96-113.

In the following essay, Howe interprets Julius Caesar in terms of Buddhist conceptions of samsara (the endless cycle of worldly life and death) and compassion arising from the acceptance of life as suffering.

In several subsequent plays, Shakespeare enlarged his exploration of both the frightening and the fortunate implications of this awareness of our confusion about the self and the world. Indeed, as he began more and more to emphasize the tragic mode of perception, his shift may seem natural. Tragedy (and history, as we have seen with Richard III) is specifically the discourse of the empowered. Linking themselves to the inexorable turning of the wheel of fortune, its principal characters place the ebb and flow of political power in the foreground. As a...