Can one understand a subject without it's opposite?

[Angie]

Towards the end of the book, Govinda is with Siddhartha when he's explaining his rules and how he found enlightenment. Siddhartha breaks down how he believed that opposites cannot co-exist and by believing that, it had stopped him seeing the whole picture, "Whenever the sublime Gotama spoke about the world in his sermons, he had to divide samsara and nirvana [...] But the world itself, what exists around us, is never one-sided" (76). He furthers in his point by saying "a person is never totally saintly or totally sinful" (76).
Siddhartha explains the same idea that a person cannot believe in Heaven without believing in Hell, one needs the other. Enlightenment can't be found without truly understanding all concepts of good and bad and putting them together instead of keeping them on separate sides in a spectrum. By looking at it by just fragments makes its understandment more complex and difficult for people to see the whole picture. That extra layer of having to combine the opposites was finally discovered by Siddhartha after his voyage of living on opposite sides of the spectrum and by experiencing its failures, he noticed the incompleteness in both sides.

[Jackie]

I agree with Siddhartha, because this is how life works. Everything has it's "half". He needed to see the full picture to life before truly finding enlightenment. The river is what helps him achieve this also, visually breaking down how Siddhartha must find balance.

[Maisha]

I agree with Jackie that the river is an important influence in bringing clarity to Siddhartha. The river, being a symbol of unity, encourages Siddhartha to come to this realization in the excerpt, "Often before, he had heard all this, these many voices in the river, today it sounded new. Already, he could no longer tell the many voices apart....they all belonged together, the lamentation of yearning and the laughter of the knowledgeable one, the scream of rage and the moaning of the dying ones, everything was one, everything was intertwined and connected, entangled a thousand times. And everything together, all voices, all goals, all yearn" (Hesse 139). Through enlightenment, Siddhartha was truly able to understand the importance of looking at the individual voices in the river as one in reaching enlightenment.

[Rylan]

Ok boomer