Siddhartha

by Hermann Hesse

sees the world as being perfectly interconnected, without a gap, clear as a crystal, not dependent on chance, not dependent on gods. Whether it is good or evil, whether life in it is sorrow or joy, is not the immediate question—perhaps it is a question of no importance. But the unity of the world, the connectedness of all events, the fact that all things, great and small, are bounded by the same current, by the same law of causality, becoming, and dying—that shines brightly forth from your sublime teachings, O Perfect One.

And yet, according to your own doctrine, this unity and consequentiality of all things is interrupted in one place; through a small gap there flows into this unified world something strange to it, something new, something that did not previously exist, and that cannot be shown or proven: it is your doctrine of overcoming the world, of salvation. But by this small gap, by this small breach, the whole eternal and unified world law is once again shattered and canceled.

seemed to him that to recognize causes is precisely what thinking means, and that only thereby do feelings become firm realizations, which are no longer lost, but become substantial and begin to diffuse their contents.

now his liberated eyes tarried on the near side; he saw and appreciated the visible, he sought a home in this world; he did not seek essence or aim for any “beyond.” The world was beautiful when looked at in this way, without a quest for the transcendent; it was so simple, so childlike.

Even if the body was certainly not the self, and the play of the senses was not it, nevertheless, thought was not the self, either, nor was the intellect, nor acquired wisdom, nor the acquired art of drawing conclusions and spinning new thoughts out of preexisting ones.

During the night, while sleeping in the straw hut of a ferryman by the river, Siddhartha had a dream:

Anyone can work magic, anyone can attain his goals, if he can think, if he can wait, if he can fast.”

“I can think. I can wait. I can fast.”

At times he heard, deep in his heart, a very faint, still voice that quietly admonished him, quietly lamented, so it could barely be perceived. At such times he became aware for an hour or so that he was leading a strange life, that he was doing nothing but playing a mere game, that although he might be serene and might sometimes feel joy, true life was nevertheless passing him by without touching him. The way a ball player plays with the ball, so did he play with his business, with the people around him, watching them, finding amusement in them; his heart, the wellspring of his being, was not in it. The wellspring flowed elsewhere, as if far from him; it flowed on and on invisibly, and had nothing more to do with his life.

Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf, which drifts and turns in the air, and sways, and zigzags to the ground. But others, just a few, are like stars; they travel a fixed route, no wind reaches them; their law and their route lie within themselves.

Only slowly, amid his growing riches, had Siddhartha himself taken on something of the nature of the child-people, something of their childlikeness and of their anxiety. And yet he envied them; he envied them more, the more he became like them. He envied them for the one thing that he lacked and they had, for the importance they were able to attach to their life,

Never had it become so unusually clear to Siddhartha how closely sex is related to death.

samsara;

There was nothing left for him but to obliterate himself,

om,

“Om!” he said to himself: “Om!” And once more he knew about Brahman, he knew about the indestructibility of life, he knew about all the divine things he had forgotten.

Siddhartha said: “It is the same with me, too, friend, as with you. I am going nowhere in particular. I am merely journeying. I am wandering.”

The wheel of created forms turns swiftly, Govinda.

Is it not as if, slowly and wandering far from the direct path, I have changed from a man to a child, from a thinker to a child-person?

But today, of all the secrets of the river, he saw just one, which gripped his soul. He saw: this water flowed and flowed, it kept on flowing, and yet it was always there; it was always and at all times the same and yet new every moment! Oh, if he could only grasp that, understand that! He did not understand or grasp it; he merely felt the stirrings of a premonition, a distant recollection, divine voices.

the river was in their way, and the ferryman existed only to take them past that obstacle quickly. For some among those thousands, however—just a few, four or five—the river ceased to be an obstacle; they heard its voice, they listened to it; and the river became holy for them, as it has become for me. Let us now seek repose, Siddhartha.”

Above all it taught him how to listen, to listen with a quiet heart, with an open, expectant soul, without passion, without a desire, without judging, without forming an opinion.

On one occasion, he asked him: “Have you, too, learned that secret from the river: that there is no such thing as time?”

Oh, was not all suffering time, then?

om

both listening to the water, which was not water to them, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, of eternal Becoming.

No, a true seeker, one who truly wished to find, could accept no doctrine. But the man who has found what he sought, such a man could approve of every doctrine, each and every one, every path, every goal; nothing separated him any longer from all those thousands of others who lived in the Eternal, who breathed the Divine.

the indestructibility of all life, the eternity of every moment.

Was his father’s piety, were his teachers’ admonitions, were his own knowledge and questing, able to save him? What father, what teacher, was able to protect him from living his own life, sullying himself with life on his own account, burdening himself with guilt on his own, drinking the bitter potion himself, finding his own path?

These people were lovable and admirable in their blind loyalty, their blind strength and tenacity. They lacked nothing; the scholarly thinker was only superior to them in one detail, in one tiny way: he possessed the awareness, the conscious idea, of the oneness of all life.

Gradually there blossomed, gradually there ripened within Siddhartha the realization, the knowledge, of what wisdom really was, what the goal of his long quest was. It was nothing but a preparedness of the soul, a capability, a secret art of conceiving the idea of oneness at every moment, in the midst of life’s activities: the ability to feel and absorb oneness. This blossomed within him slowly; he saw it reflected in Vasudeva’s aged child’s face: harmony, knowledge of the eternal perfection of the world, a smile, oneness.

Had not his father died long ago, alone, without ever seeing his son again?

master of listening.

To show this listener his wound was the same as bathing it in the river until it became cool and at one with the river.

While he still went on speaking, still went on making admissions and making confession, Siddhartha felt more and more that it was no longer Vasudeva, no longer a human being, who was listening to him; that this motionless listener was absorbing his confession as a tree absorbs rain; that this motionless one was the river itself, God himself, the Eternal itself And while Siddhartha ceased to think about himself and his wound, this realization of Vasudeva’s altered state took possession of him; and the more he felt and penetrated this, the less strange it became and the more he saw that everything was in order and natural, that Vasudeva had been so for some time now, almost always, but that he himself had not altogether realized it; in fact, he saw that he himself was just barely different from Vasudeva. He perceived that he now saw old Vasudeva the way the common people see the gods, and that this could not last; he began to take leave of Vasudeva in his heart. And all this while he went on speaking.

was all interwoven and knotted together, interconnected in a thousand ways. And all of this together, all the voices, all the goals, all the longing, all the suffering, all the pleasure, all the good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of this together was the river of events, the music of life.

“When someone seeks,” Siddhartha said, “it is all too easy for his eyes to see nothing but the thing he seeks, so that he is unable to find anything or absorb anything because he is always thinking exclusively about what he seeks, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by that goal. Seeking means having a goal. But finding means being free, remaining accessible, having no goal. You, venerable one, are perhaps really one who seeks, because, pressing after your goal, you fail to see many a thing that is right before your eyes.”

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness.”

Whenever the sublime Gotama spoke about the world in his sermons, he had to divide it into samsara and nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. You have no alternative, there is no other method for a man who wants to teach. But the world itself, what exists around us and inside us, is never one-sided. A person or an action is never totally samsara or totally nirvana; a person is never totally saintly or totally sinful. Because we are subject to illusion, it does actually look as if time were something real. Time is not real, Govinda; I have learned that over and over again. And, if time is not real, the span that seems to exist between world and eternity, between sorrow and bliss, between evil and good, is also an illusion.”