The Buddha and the Bard by Lauren Shufran

Author:Lauren Shufran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mandala Publishing
Published: 2023-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

THE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH

“TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE”: POLONIUS ON RIGHT VIEW

This above all—to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

—HAMLET, ACT 1, SCENE 3

Polonius is perhaps the only character in Hamlet whose lines rival the prince’s for recognition and admiration. His son Laertes is returning to school in France, and Polonius has just arrived to bid him farewell. Laertes has been exchanging parting words with his sister Ophelia; and when their father enters, the brother utters “a double blessing is a double grace”: what luck to have my father twice bless my departure. It’s a line typically spoken with a ring of sarcasm, and the best Ophelias look back at their brothers knowingly because they anticipate what’s coming. After admonishing his son for his tardiness (“Yet here, Laertes? Aboard, aboard, for shame!”), Polonius goes on to delay him further with a series of precepts—injunctions to moral conduct—to carry with him back to France. The precepts concern integrity in thought, speech, action, and presentation; and they’re recognizable to many of us by now (“Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar”; “Give every man thine ear but few thy voice”; “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”). But the three lines above contain Polonius’s crowning advice. It’s a call, “above all,” to self-integrity.

Granted, this guidance on how to live expertly issues from a dubious character. Polonius is a busybody and a careful courtier who lives in a world of show; and these distillations of practical wisdom—sage as they are—are offered like a rehearsed string of clichés taken out of a schoolbook. I don’t suspect Shakespeare intended to give Polonius much dignity or emotional depth in this paternal offering. Yet what his character lacks in substance his words atone for. Be faithful to yourself, steadfast and unerring in who you know you are, the precept urges. Position your life so that it agrees with the standards you hold of yourself. And if you can do this, you will never be accused of insincerity or deceit. On the surface it’s a bit of a flowery tautology (saying the same thing twice): only be true, and you won’t be false. Yet there’s a meaningful causality here (“and it must follow, as the night the day”) that posits the self—that is, our Buddha Nature, unclouded by defilements—as the origin and genesis of all-things-true.

One of Buddhism’s principal teachings, and its Fourth Noble Truth, is the Eightfold Path: practical guidance on the cessation of suffering that extends back to the Buddha’s first discourse. It’s the antidote to the worldly knowledge we acquire—contained in the First Noble Truth—that suffering exists; and its elements are right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. (By “right,” think wise, skillful, or complete, rather than righteously “not wrong.”) The eight precepts in Polonius’s speech map rather magnificently onto the Eightfold Path, though that’s an exercise for another time.

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