Via GBF /// "The Bard and the Buddha: Finding Your Refuge in the World of Shakespeare" with Matthew Perifano

 

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A new dharma talk, from our very own Matthew Perifano, has been added to the GBF website and podcast.

The Bard and the Buddha: Finding Refuge in the World of Shakespeare - Matthew Perifano

In this moving and lyrical talk, Matthew Perifano shares how he found a sense of true refuge when facing deep grief and the uncertainty of life.

Matthew shares how he began weaving together the wisdom of the Dharma with the timeless plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare. He describes how his relationship with these texts evolved from a daunting college requirement into a vital mind-body practice that eventually helped him navigate the devastating losses of the AIDS epidemic. He suggests that when we lend our own voices and bodies to these words, we can discover that we are never alone in our suffering, finding a profound sense of compassion—or karuna—that transcends time and space.

Matthew illustrates how the insights of the Buddha are often hiding in plain sight within the Bard's greatest works, offering we several "Shakespeare Dharma" keys to unlock our own understanding of reality:

• Finding Refuge in Grief: He explains how Sonnet 30 helped him move through personal loss by revealing that our "precious friends hid in death’s dateless night" connect us to a universal experience of suffering, turning art into a path through pain rather than just an escape from it.
• Presence in the Ordinary: Drawing from his own "transcendent experience" while washing dishes and the poetry of Layman Pang, he reminds we that spiritual activity is found in the most basic daily affairs, like drawing water or carrying wood.
• The Trap of Papancha: He uses the jealous rants of King Leantes from The Winter's Tale to demonstrate papancha, or mental proliferation—the tendency of our minds to spin "nothing" into a suffocating storm of obsessive, illusory thoughts.
• Life as a Dream: He concludes with Prospero’s famous speech from The Tempest, which he calls "Shakespeare’s Diamond Sutra," to help we contemplate how all conditioned things are essentially "such stuff as dreams are made on".

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