Siddhartha

by Hermann Hesse

And there is nothing in this world I know less about than about me, about Siddhartha!”

“Writing is good, thinking is better. Intelligence is good, but patience is better.”

You don’t force him, beat him, and give him orders because you know that ‘soft’ is stronger than ‘hard’, that water is stronger than the rocks, that love is stronger than compulsion.

He understood them and shared their lives, which were not guided by thoughts and insight, but only by urges and wishes.

wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness.”

Knowledge can be transferred, but not wisdom. It can be found and lived, and it is possible to be carried by it. Miracles can be performed with it, but it can’t be expressed and taught with words.

the opposite of every truth is just as true!

sided. A person or an action is never entirely Samsara or Nirvana, and a person is never completely holy or sinful. It really seems like this, of course, because we are subject to the deception that time is something real. Time is not real, Govinda; I have experienced this many times over. And if time is not real, then the divide which seems to separate the world from eternity, suffering from bliss, and evil from good, is also a deception.”

“Listen well, my friend; listen well! The sinner—like I am and you are—is a sinner, but in time he will come to be Brahman again. In time, he will reach Nirvana and will be Buddha, and these ‘times to come’ are only a deception and a parable! The sinner is not on his way to becoming a Buddha and is not in the process of developing, even though our capacity for thought does not know how else to envision these things. No, the future Buddha is within the sinner now; his future is already completely there today. One has to worship within themselves, in you, and in everyone else the Buddha which is coming into being, that is possible: the hidden Buddha. The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect or on a slow path towards perfection; no, it is perfect every moment. All sin already carried divine forgiveness within itself, all small children already have the old person within themselves, all infants have death, all the dying have eternal life. It isn’t possible for any one person to see how far another one has already progressed on his path, because the Buddha is waiting inside the robber and the gambler, and the robber is waiting within the Brahmin. It is also possible through deep meditation to put time out of existence and to see all the life that was and is and ever will be as if they were all simultaneous; in that simultaneity is everything that is good, perfect, and Brahman. I therefore see whatever exists as good. Death is like life to me, sin is like holiness, wisdom ...

“This here,” he said playfully “is a stone. It will, after a certain time, perhaps turn into soil, and from soil it will turn into a plant, animal, or human being. In the past, I would have said: ‘This stone is just a stone; it is worthless and it belongs to the world of the Maya. And yet, because it might be able to become a human being and a spirit in the cycle of transformation, I also grant that it is important.’ This is how I might have thought in the past. But today, I think that this stone is a stone, and it is also an animal, a god, and Buddha; I do not venerate it because it could turn into this or that, but rather because it already is and always will be everything. The very fact that it is a stone and appears to me today and now as a stone is the reason why I love it and see worth and purpose in each of its veins and cavities, in the yellow and gray, in the hardness, in the sound it makes when I knock at it, or in the dryness or wetness of its surface. There are stones which feel like oil or soap, and others that feel like leaves or sand. Everyone is special and prays to the “Om” in its own way, and each one is Brahman, but at the same time they are just as much a stone, and are oily or juicy, and it is this very fact that I like and regard as wondrous or worthy of worship. But I won’t speak any more of this. These words are not sufficient for this secret meaning. Everything always comes out a little differently as soon as it is put into words. It gets distorted...

“Nirvana is not just a word, my friend. It is an idea.”