Siddhartha (Wisehouse Classics Edition)

by Hermann Hesse

"Your soul is the entire world,"

The source of all things had to be found, the source within us all, it had to be taken into ourselves! All else was mere seeking, mere straying from the path, mere delusion.

Siddhartha had but one objective: to empty himself, to empty himself of thirst, of desire, of dreams, empty himself of joy and sorrow. To die away from himself, to no longer be himself, to find peace by emptying his own heart, to stand open to the miracle by alienating his own thoughts, that was his objective. Once the whole of his self had been overcome and destroyed, once every need and every drive of his heart was silent, that was when the ultimate had to wake, the deepest part of his being, that which is no longer the self, the great secret.

But although these ways led him away from his self they always, at the end, led him back to it. Siddhartha fled from his self a thousand times, spent time in nothingness, in the animal, in a stone, but he was never able to prevent his return, the hour of his return was not avoidable, and he would find himself, once again, in the light of the sun or the moon, in shade or in rain, and Siddhartha and his self were there once again, once again the suffering of the circle of life was placed upon him.

At an earlier time, when the two young men had lived with the samanas, and performed their exercises together for about three years, there came to them through many ways and turnings a message, a rumour, saying; One has appeared that will be called Gotama, the noble one, the buddha. He will have overcome the pain of the world in himself and brought the wheel of rebirth to a halt. With his followers he travels through the land, teaching as he goes, without property, without a home, without a wife, wearing the yellow garb of an ascetic but with joy on his brow, a holy man, and brahmans and princes bow their knee to him and become his pupils.

Siddhartha lay his hand on Govinda's shoulder. You have failed to hear my deepest wish for you, Govinda. I will repeat if for you: I hope you will follow your path to its end, my friend! I hope you will find liberation!"

I hope you will continue to think about the teachings, you have a thirst for knowledge, but you should be warned of the thickets of beliefs and of quibbles around words. Beliefs are not important, they can be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can stay attached to them or throw them away. But the teachings that you heard from me are not beliefs and I was not trying to explain the world to them who have a thirst for knowledge. I was attempting something quite different, I was attempting to show how to gain liberation from suffering. This is what Gotama teaches, nothing else."

nobody can ever attain liberation by listening to the teachings of others!

This is the reason I will continue in my wanderings—not to find other teachings which may be better, for I know there are none, but to abandon all teachings and all teachers and either to attain my goal alone or to die.

It is not up to me to judge how others lead their lives. I can only judge my own life, I must choose for myself, must reject for myself. We samanas seek liberation from our selves, noble one. I fear, venerable one, that if I were one of your followers I might only seem to bring my self to peace, that my liberation would be illusory and my self would in fact continue to exist and grow bigger, as then I would have the teachings, would have my followers, would have my love for you, would have the community of monks and all this I would have made into my self!"

I was robbed by this buddha, Siddhartha thought, he robbed me, but he gave me much more. He robbed me of my friend, of him who had faith in me and now has faith in him, of him who was my shadow and is now the shadow of Gotama. But he made the gift to me, to Siddhartha, of myself.

He concluded that something had left him like a snake that sloughs its skin, that something within him was no longer there for him, something that had been with him all through his youth and had belonged to him: the wish to have a teacher and to hear teachings.

What I wanted to learn was my self, I wanted to learn the meaning and the essence of my self. I wanted to be rid of my self, wanted to overcome my self. But I was not able to overcome it, was able only to cheat it, was able only to flee from it, to hide from it. There is truly nothing in the world that has occupied my thoughts as much as this self of mine, this puzzle that I am alive, that I am separate from one and all, severed from them, that I am Siddhartha! And there is nothing in the world that I know less about than myself, about Siddhartha!

There is a reason why I know nothing about myself, a cause for Siddhartha remaining so strange and unfamiliar to me, just one cause; I was in fear of myself, I was in flight from myself! I sought Atman, I sought Brahman, I had resolved to break my self apart, to flay it apart so that in its innermost, least known part I could find the kernel within all shells, Atman, life, the divine, the ultimate. But in the process I lost myself.

I will learn by myself alone, be a student of myself, learn to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha."

Meaning and essence were not somewhere behind things, they were within them, in everything.

All these things had always been, and he had not seen them; he had not been with them. Now he was with them, he belonged to them. Light and shade ran through his eyes, through his heart ran star and moon.

Kamala laughed out loud and said, "No, worthy young man, he is not good enough! Not yet! He must have clothes, beautiful clothes, shoes must he have, fine shoes, he must have plentiful money in his purse, and he must bring presents for Kamala. Do you understand now, samana from the woods? Do you see?"

if you throw a stone into water it drops quickly to the bottom by the fastest route it can. Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he goes through the things of the world like a stone through water without doing anything, without making any effort; he is drawn, he lets himself fall. His objective pulls him to itself, for he allows nothing into his soul that might work against his objective.

Anyone can perform magic, anyone can attain his objectives if he is capable of thought, if he is capable of waiting, if he is capable of fasting."

He remembered the words of Kamala and was never the merchant's subordinate, he forced him to see him as his equal, even to treat him as more than his equal.

she taught him that you cannot receive pleasure without giving pleasure, that every gesture, every stroke, every touch, every look, every tiny part of the body has its secret, and waking those secrets will bring happiness to whoever knows about them.

Most people, Kamala, are like a leaf falling through the air and is blown from side to side, it twists, it staggers, till it hits the ground. There are others, though not many, who are like the stars, they follow a fixed course, no wind blows them, they have their laws and their path set within themselves.

Waking from this dream he felt himself possessed by a deep sorrow. Worthless, it seemed to him, worthless and meaningless was the life he had been leading; nothing living, nothing that was in anyway beautiful or worth keeping had remained with him. He stood there alone and empty, like a castaway on the shore.

The name of this game was sansara, a children's game, a game that it was good to play one, twice, ten times—but over and over again? Then Siddhartha came to see that the game was at its end, that he was no longer able to play it. A shudder ran down his body, in his innermost parts, as he felt that something had died.

he knew just one thing, that he could never go back, that this life that he had lived through many years was ended and gone, he had tasted its joys, sucked out its pleasures, till it disgusted him. The songbird he had dreamt of was dead. The songbird in his heart was dead. He had been entangled deep in sansara, he had drawn death and disgust into himself from every side, like a sponge sucking in water till it is saturated.

This was the great breakthrough that he had longed for: death, the destruction of the form he hated!

the holy word "OM", meaning "perfection" or "completion".

Siddhartha was deeply shocked. So this was the state he had come to, this was how lost he was, how confused. He was so forsaken by any kind of wisdom that he was able to seek death, that this whim, this childish whim, could have grown within him: to find peace by extinguishing his body! All that he had recently suffered, all the disillusionment, all the doubts, none of these things had the effect on him that Om had at that moment as it entered his consciousness: and he became able to see his misery and his folly.

I said I am on a pilgrimage, and that is what I am, on a pilgrimage."

Remember this, my friend: The world of forms is transitory, our clothes are highly transitory, just like the way we have our hair and the hair itself and our bodies themselves.

There was so much stupidity, so much vice, so much folly, so much disgust and disappointment and misery that I had to go through before simply becoming a child again and to be able to start anew.

But it was the right way, my heart tells me yes, my eyes laugh about it. I had to experience doubt, I had to sink down to that most foolish of thoughts, the thought of suicide, before I could experience mercy, before I could hear Om again, before I could sleep properly again and before I could wake properly again. I had to become a fool before I could find Atman within myself again. I had to commit sin before I could live again. Where will my path lead me from here? This is a foolish path, it goes round in loops, perhaps it goes round in circles. Whichever way it chooses to go, I will follow it.

I am at last free again and stand once more under the sky as a child? I have escaped, I have become free, and it is so good! How pure and lovely the air is here, how good to breathe it! There, the place whence I escaped, everything smelt of ointment, of spices, of wine, of excess, of lethargy. How I hated this world of the rich, of the world of luxury, the world of gamblers! How I hated myself for staying so long in this dreadful world! How I hated myself, robbed myself, poisoned and tortured myself, how I made myself old and bad tempered! No, I will never again delude myself, as I so much used to like doing, never again think that Siddhartha is a wise man!

"It is good," he thought, "to experience everything you need to know yourself. I learned as a child that wealth and worldly pleasures are not good. It is something that I have long known but only now experienced. And now I know it, I know it not only in my thoughts but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach. It is good for me that I know it!"

Siddhartha now also began to understand why his efforts against this Self were in vain when he was a brahmin, when he was a penitent. He had been hindered by too much knowledge, to much of the holy verses, too many rules of sacrifice, too much castigation, too much doing and too much striving! He had been full of pride, he had been always the cleverest, always the keenest, always one step ahead of the others, always the one who knew, the one who was spiritual, always the priest or the wise man. His Self had crept into this priesthood, into this pride, into this spirituality, it sat firmly there and grew while Siddhartha thought he was destroying it with fasting and penitence.

no teacher could ever have removed this Self. That is why he had had to go out into the world, to lose himself in fun and power and women and money, had had to be a businessman, a gambler, a drinker and to be greedy, till the priest and the samana within him were dead.

That is why he had had to continue to endure these years of loathsomeness, to bear the disgust, the emptiness, the meaninglessness, of a life that was lost and barren, right till the end, till the bitter doubt, till Siddhartha the sybarite, Siddhartha the greedy, was...

Siddhartha was impermanent, every form was impermanent. But today he was young, he was a child, and the n...

Most of all he learned from the river how to listen, to pay attention with a quiet heart, with a patient and open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgement, without opinion.

You could die for him ten times over, but you still would not take even the tiniest part of his destiny onto yourself."

There was nothing they lacked, there was no way that the wise man, the thinking man, was ahead of them except for one detail, one single tiny detail: consciousness, conscious awareness of the unity of all life.

"Perhaps I should ask you if you are not seeking too hard. Or ask if it is your seeking that prevents you from finding."

"When someone is seeking," said Siddhartha, "it is very easy for his eye to see nothing but the thing sought, that he is unable to find, unable to receive into himself anything because he thinks only of that which he seeks, because he has an objective, because he is obsessed with that objective. Seeking means having an objective, but finding means being free, being receptive, having no objective. It could be, venerable sir, that you are indeed a seeker, for in your efforts to reach your objective you fail to see many things that are close before your eyes."

Do you have a doctrine? Do you have a belief or a knowledge that you follow and which helps you through life and to do the right thing?" Siddhartha said, "My friend, you know that when I was a young man, living with you and the other penitents in the woods, that I had already begun to mistrust doctrines and their teachers, and so I turned my back on them. I have not changed my view. I have nonetheless had many teachers since that time.

wisdom cannot be taught. If a wise man tries to teach wisdom it will always sound like folly."

Knowledge can be taught, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it can be what carries you, it can work wonders, but it cannot be spoken and it cannot be taught.

In deep meditation, it is possible to remove time and to see all that has been, all that is and all that will be in one moment, and in that moment all is good, all is perfect, all is Brahman. That is why it appears to me that all that is is good, death appears to me as the same as life, sin appears to me the same as holiness, wisdom appears to me the same as folly, everything has to be thus, nothing needs anything more than my agreement, more than my will, my loving involvement, and so, for me, it is good, it can only advance me and can never harm me.

Words are not good for the invisible spirit, it always instantly becomes a little different when spoken about, a little false, a little foolish—and even that is something very good and something I like very much, something I fully consent to, that which one man sees as valuable wisdom will always seem to another to be folly.

There is nothing for nirvana to be; there is only the word, 'nirvana'."