Siddhartha (Modern Library Classics)

by Hermann Hesse

Upanishads of the Sama-Veda, spoke of this innermost, utmost thing: splendid verses. “Your soul is the entire world”

Did not the ancient source of all springs flow within his own heart? This was what must be found, the fountainhead within one’s own being; you had to make it your own! All else was searching, detour, confusion.

Bitter was the taste of the world. Life was a torment.

Siddhartha saw a single goal: to become empty, empty of thirst, empty of want, empty of dream, empty of joy and sorrow. To let the ego perish, to be “I” no longer, to find peace with an empty heart and await the miraculous with thoughts free of Self. This was his goal. When all ego had been overcome, had perished, when every longing and every drive in his heart had fallen silent, only then could the Utmost awaken, the great secret, that innermost core of being that is no longer Self.

“What is meditation? What is leaving the body? What is fasting? What is holding the breath? It is all an escape from Self, it is a brief respite from the torment of being Self, a brief numbing of the pain and senselessness of life.

O Govinda, it seems to me that of all the Samanas that exist, there is perhaps not one, not a single one, who will reach Nirvana. We find consolations, we find numbness, we learn skills with which to deceive ourselves. But the essential, the Path of Paths, this we do not find.”

It has taken me long to learn this, Govinda, and still I am not quite done learning it: that nothing can be learned! There is in fact—and this I believe—no such thing as what we call ‘learning.’ There is, my friend, only knowing, and this is everywhere; it is Atman, it is in me and in you and in every creature. And so I am beginning to believe that this knowing has no worse enemy than the desire to know, than learning itself.”

the eldest of the Samanas was not well disposed to it. He had heard that this alleged Buddha had once been an ascetic and lived in the forest but had then returned to a life of luxury and worldly pleasure; he did not think much of this Gautama.

No one will ever attain redemption through doctrine! Never, O Venerable One, will you be able to convey in words and show and say through your teachings what happened to you in the hour of your enlightenment.

This is why I am continuing my journey—not in order to seek a different, better doctrine, for I know there is none, but to leave behind me all teachings and all teachers and to reach my goal alone or perish.

I will no longer follow Yoga-Veda, or Atharva-Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine. I’ll be my own teacher, my own pupil. I’ll study myself, learn the secret that is Siddhartha.

But he, Siddhartha: Where did he belong? Whose life would he share? Whose tongue would he speak? From this moment when the world around him melted away and left him as solitary as a star in the sky, from this moment of cold and despondency, Siddhartha emerged, more firmly Self than before, solidified. This, he felt, had been the final shiver of awakening, the final pangs of birth.

How beautiful the world was when one looked at it without searching, just looked, simply and innocently.

All these things had always been there, and yet he had not seen them; he had not been present. Now he was present, he belonged. Light and shade passed through his eyes, star and moon passed through his heart.

“it is a very beautiful river. I love it above all else. Often I have listened to it, often gazed into its eyes, and always I have learned from it. You can learn a great deal from a river.”

Love can be begged, bought, or received as a gift, one can find it in the street, but one cannot steal it.

Anyone can perform magic. Anyone can reach his goals if he can think, if he can wait, if he can fast.”

He envied them the one thing they possessed that he was lacking: the importance they were capable of attaching to their lives, their passionate joys and fears, the happiness, uneasy but sweet, of their eternal infatuations. For infatuated they were—with themselves, with women, with their children, with honor or money, with plans or hopes. But this childish joy and childish folly he had not learned from them, this one thing remained unlearned; all he was learning from them were unpleasant things that he himself despised.

His face was still more clever and spiritual than others, but it seldom smiled, and one after the other it was taking on the traits one so often observes in the faces of the wealthy: that look of dissatisfaction, infirmity, displeasure, lethargy, unkindness. Slowly he was being stricken with the maladies that afflict rich people’s souls.

He noticed only that the bright and certain inner voice that once had awoken within him and accompanied him unceasingly in his days of glory had fallen silent.

he felt himself surrounded by deep sadness. Devoid of value, it seemed to him, devoid of value and meaning was this life he’d been living; nothing that was alive, nothing in any way precious or worthy of keeping, had remained in his hands. Alone he stood, and empty, like a shipwrecked man upon the shore.

He was so lost, so befuddled and bereft of knowledge as to have been capable of wanting to die, of letting this wish, this childish wish, grow large inside him: the wish to find peace by annihilating his body!

Remember, my friend: The world of shapes is transitory, and transitory—highly transitory—are our clothes, the way we wear our hair, and our hair and bodies themselves.

This was precisely the form of the enchantment that the Om had wrought within him as he slept: He loved everything and was filled with joyous love for all he saw, and he realized that what had so ailed him before was that he had been able to love nothing and no one.

fasting—waiting—thinking. These had been his possessions, his power and strength, his sturdy staff; it was these three arts he had studied in the assiduous, laborious years of his youth, to the exclusion of all else. And now they had abandoned him; not one of them remained, not fasting, not waiting, not thinking. He had sacrificed them for the most miserable of things, the most transitory: for sensual pleasure, for luxury, for wealth!

I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the most foolish of all thoughts, the thought of suicide, to be able to experience grace, to hear Om again, to be able to sleep well and awaken well. I had to become a fool to find Atman within me once more.

All my self-hatred has now come to an end, along with that idiotic, desolate existence! I praise you, Siddhartha. After all these years of idiocy, you for once had a good idea; you did something; you heard the bird singing in your breast and followed it!

He saw that this water flowed and flowed, it was constantly flowing, and yet it was always there; it was always eternally the same and yet new at every moment!

This was one of the greatest among the ferryman’s virtues: He had mastered the art of listening.

I thank you also for listening so well to me! Rare are those who know how to listen; never before have I met anyone who was as skilled in listening as you are. This too I shall learn from you.”

It was the river that taught me to listen, and it will teach you as well. It knows everything, the river, and one can learn anything from it.

he learned from the river, which taught him unceasingly. Above all, it taught him how to listen—how to listen with a quiet heart and a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinion.

Often they sat together in the evenings beside the riverbank on the tree trunk, sat in silence, both listening to the water, which for them was not water but rather the voice of Life, the voice of Being, of the eternally Becoming.

“You have experienced sorrow, Siddhartha, yet I can see that no sadness has entered your heart.”

soft is stronger than hard, water stronger than rock, love stronger than violence.

They were lacking in almost nothing; the one thing possessed by the thinker, the man of knowledge, that they lacked was only a trifle, one small thing: consciousness, conscious thought of the Oneness of all things.

Slowly blossoming, slowly ripening within Siddhartha, was the realization and knowledge of what wisdom and the goal of his long search really was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, a capacity, the secret art of being able at every moment, without ceasing to live, to think the thought of Oneness, to feel Oneness and breathe it in.

In this hour Siddhartha ceased to do battle with fate, ceased to suffer. Upon his face blossomed the gaiety of knowledge that is no longer opposed by any will, that knows perfection, that is in agreement with the river of occurrences, with the current of life, full of empathy, full of fellow feeling, given over to the current, part of the Oneness.

“It is no jest. I am saying what I have found. One can pass on knowledge but not wisdom. One can find wisdom, one can live it, one can be supported by it, one can work wonders with it, but one cannot speak it or teach it.

to learn to love the world and stop comparing it to some world I only wished for and imagined, some sort of perfection I myself had dreamed up, but instead to let it be as it was and to love it and be happy to belong to it.

Today, however, I think, This stone is a stone; it is also animal, it is also God, it is also Buddha. I do not honor it and love it because it might one day become this or that, but because it already and always is all things—

I can love a stone, Govinda, and also a tree or a piece of bark. These are things and things can be loved. Words, however, I cannot love. This is why doctrines are not for me. They have no hardness, no softness, no colors, no edges, no smell, no taste; they have nothing but words.

The river seemed to him a god, and for many years he did not know that every wind, every cloud, every bird, every beetle is just as divine and knows just as much and can teach just as much as the river he so revered.

To see through the world, to explain it, to scorn it—this may be the business of great thinkers. But what interests me is being able to love the world, not scorn it, not to hate it and hate myself, but to look at it and myself and all beings with love and admiration and reverence.”

I know I am in agreement with Gautama. How could he not know love, he who recognized all humanity in its transitoriness, its insignificance, and nonetheless loved human beings so much that he devoted a long, laborious life to the sole purpose of helping them, teaching them?