Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse - A Deep Dive
“Spiritual enlightenment may not be taught, only experienced, and each individual must tread their own personal path toward truth.” So says the back sleeve of this great small book.
I had first heard of Siddhartha about 15 years ago when I became half-heartedly interested in Buddhism. I thought that the book was a biography and I only recently became aware that it was a novel – or in my opinion – more like a great poem.
It is beautifully and lovingly written. Only a hundred pages long, it took me a week to read because I hung on every syllable. Like the characters in the book, I searched for the deeper meaning, the secret in the words.
At first I was confused because Siddhartha Guatama is the first Buddha – the highest Buddha. In this book, by the German Nobel Prize Winner Hermann Hesse, there are other Buddha’s that achieve enlightenment before Siddhartha. There is Gotama – the great teacher and Buddha with many followers. Siddhartha, in this book, rejects his teachings. Then there is the Ferryman – who to me, in this story – is the real Buddha, the true first Buddha. Something in me tells me to reject Gotama as the Buddha and my limited knowledge of the real Siddhartha – distracted me from the whole point of these words.
Everyone has the Buddha in them all the time – equal Buddha – equal potential for enlightenment, however, we are all on our own path. Because one chooses the path of a humble monk over the path on one who marries, works, has children – does not make him closer to achieving enlightenment. One does not have greater potential for peace because he is pious. The demonstration of this – the brilliant way in which it is explained – is why this book is considered to be one of the greatest books of all time.
Hesse’s Siddhartha spends the first half of his life searching for that ONE thing that he is missing – the one thing he needs to know to attain peace and happiness. He decides, quite rightly, that no one can teach it to him – not even Buddha himself. He goes on to experience lust, greed, and everything that is the opposite of what you would think a great and perfect man would do and experience. He suffers – again and again he suffers. Each time he suffers he comes to experience a profound peace with that of which made him suffer. For example – it was not until he rejected teachings that he finally let go of the thought that enlightenment is “learned”. It was not until he experienced lust that he was able to let go of any desire to make love. It was not until he experienced the feelings of greed and gambling and having much to eat and drink that he was able to let go of the desire for money and rich food and the numbness of wine. It was not until he truly wanted to die that he let go of his attachment to life or death as we know it. It is at this point that he hears the “Om”. He hears it in the river water – it speaks to him, “Om” – Om is all of the thousands of voices in the universe converging together as ONE thing, one perfect thing.
He meets the Ferryman, Vasudeva – one who I feel from the very first time they met – at almost the beginning of Siddhartha’s journey to enlightenment – that he had the light – that peace – that Siddhartha so desperately wanted to find.
On the banks of this river, after the realization of the “Om” or the first glimmer of the idea of “Om” (he does not achieve true understanding of this just yet) – he again sees the Ferryman, Vasudeva and asks if he can learn to be a Ferryman too. They spend the rest of their lives together – in peace and happiness until one day, Siddhartha’s lover Kamala arrives with the son that he did not know he had. She has been bitten by a snake and is dying. Left with this boy who has never known poverty – Siddhartha becomes desperate for his love and acceptance. In return he only gets hate and resentment from the boy. Eventually the boy runs away, stealing from Vasudeva and leaving Siddhartha is grief and terrible sorrow. This is Siddhartha’s last suffering and he knows that the suffering is yet just one more blossom of truth that he needed to experience on his journey. He suffers for an eternity – for an eternity the truth fails to blossom – until one day Siddhartha, while standing by the river, heard it laugh at him and his foolishness. He suddenly remembered, by looking at his reflection in the water – that many years ago – he had left his father to go on his own journey – left his father, grief stricken and pained and suffering – just has he was suffering now because of his own son’s journey that was different from his own. It was a circle. It was karma. And he laughed and The river laughed…Yes, so it was, everything came back, which had not been suffered and solved up to its end, the same pain was suffered over and over again.”
Siddhartha sat down with Vasudeva and told him his story of how he heard the river. Vasudeva (both were old men at this point) said, yes, you have heard but you have not quite heard everything yet, “Siddhartha made an effort to listen better. The image of his father, his own image, the image of his son merged, Kamala’s image also appeared and was dispersed, and the image of Govinda, and other images, and they merged with each other, turned all into the river, headed all, being the river, for the goal, longing, desiring, suffering, and the river’s voice sounded full of yearning, full of burning woe, full of unsatisfiable desire. For the goal, the river was heading, Siddhartha saw it hurrying, the river, which consisted of him and his loved ones and of all people he had ever seen, all of these waves and waters were hurrying, suffering, towards goals, many goals, the waterfall, the lake, the rapids, the sea, and all goals were reached , and every goal was followed by a new one, and the water turned into vapour and rose to the sky, turned into rain and poured down from the sky, turned into a source, a stream, a river, headed forward once again, flowed on once again…”
“Siddhartha listened. He was now nothing but a listener, completely concentrated on listening, completely empty, he felt that he had now finished learning to listen…And everything together, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of it together was the flow of events, was the music of life. And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to the river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great son of the thousand voices consisted of a single word , which was Om: the perfection.”
“In this hour, Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate, stopped suffering. On his face flourished the cheerfulness of a knowledge, which is no longer opposed by any will, which knows perfection, which is in agreement with the flow of events with the current of life, full of sympathy for the pain of others, full of sympathy for the pleasure of others, devoted to the flow, belonging to the oneness.”
I am so moved by this story. Simple is the thought. Great is the thought – not so simple is the journey
