The Buddha: A Drama in Five Acts

About

Paul Carus, editor of The Open Court and a pioneering figure in Western Buddhism, wrote this dramatic poem on the life of Siddhartha Gautama in 1894. The play follows the prince's awakening, temptation, and enlightenment in a verse form influenced by Wagner's music-drama and Goethe's Faust. As drama it is more literary than theatrical, but as a document of the first serious Western engagement with Buddhist thought as a subject worthy of high literary treatment, it has considerable historical interest. Carus was among the first Western writers to present Buddhist doctrine on its own terms rather than as exotic curiosity.