Notes from the book Siddartha by Herman Hesse
“Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.”
Siddhartha learned many new things. He listened much and spoke little and, mindful of Kamala’s words, he never behaved subserviently toward the merchant. Instead, he compelled him to treat him as an equal: indeed, as more than an equal. Kamaswami pursued his business with solicitousness, even with passion, but Siddhartha saw it all as a game whose rules he was striving to learn but whose substance did not touch his heart.
When Kamaswami once reproached him, saying he had, after all, learned everything he knew from him, Siddhartha replied, “Please don’t make such jokes at my expense! From you I learned how much a basket of fish costs, and how much interest one can charge for borrowed money. These are your spheres of knowledge. I did not learn how to think from you, most esteemed Kamaswami; it would be better if you tried learning this from me!”
He was quite aware that there was something separating him from the others, and this thing that set him apart was his life as a Samana. He observed people living in a childish or animal way that he simultaneously loved and deplored. He saw their struggles, watched them suffer and turn gray over things that seemed to him utterly unworthy of such a price—things like money, petty pleasures, petty honors. He saw people scold and insult one another, saw them wailing over aches and pains that would just make a Samana smile, suffering on account of deprivations a Samana would not notice.
Once he said to her, “You are like me; you are different from most people. You are Kamala, nothing else, and within you there is a stillness and a refuge into which you can withdraw at any moment and be at home within yourself, just as I can. Few people have this, and yet all people could have it.”
“Not all people are clever,” Kamala said.
“No,” Siddhartha said, “that isn’t the reason. Kamaswami is just as clever as I am, but he has no refuge within himself. And there are people who have one whose minds are like those of little children. Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf as it twists and turns its way through the air, lurches and tumbles to the ground. Others, though—a very few—are like stars set on a fixed course; no wind can reach them, and they carry their law and their path within them. Among all the many learned men and Samanas I have known, there was just one who was like this, a perfect man. Never will I forget him: Gautama, the Sublime One, who preached this doctrine. Thousands of disciples hear his doctrine every day and do as he instructs, but all of them are just falling leaves. Within themselves they have no doctrine and no law.”
The world had captured him: voluptuousness, lust, lethargy, and in the end even greed, the vice he’d always thought the most foolish and had despised and scorned above all others. Property, ownership, and riches had captured him in the end. No longer were they just games to him, trifles; they had become chains and burdens. A curious and slippery path had led Siddhartha to his latest and vilest form of dependency: dice playing. Ever since he had ceased to be a Samana in his heart, Siddhartha had begun to pursue these games with their stakes of money and precious goods—games he had once participated in offhandedly, dismissing them as a child-people custom—with growing frenzy and passion. He was feared as a player. Few dared to challenge him, for his bets were fierce and reckless. He played this game out of his heart’s distress. Losing and squandering the wretched money was an angry pleasure; in no other way could he have shown his contempt for wealth, the idol of the merchants, more clearly and with more pronounced scorn. And so he bet high and mercilessly. Despising himself, mocking himself, he won thousands and threw thousands away, gambled away money, gambled away jewelry, gambled away a country house, won again, lost again. That fear—that terrible and oppressive fear he felt while rolling the dice, while worrying over his own high stakes—he loved it. Again and again he sought to renew it, to increase it, to goad it to a higher level of intensity, for only in the grasp of this fear did he still feel something like happiness, something like intoxication, something like exalted life in the midst of his jaded, dull, insipid existence. And after each major loss he dreamed of new wealth, pursued his trading with increased vigor, and put more pressure on his debtors, for he wanted to go on gambling, he wanted to go on squandering all he could so as to continue to show his contempt for wealth. Siddhartha lost the composure with which he had once greeted losses, he lost his patience when others were tardy with their payments, lost his good-naturedness when beggars came to call, lost all desire to give gifts and loan money to supplicants. The one who laughed as he gambled away ten thousand on a single toss of the dice turned intolerant and petty in his business dealings, and at night he sometimes dreamed of money. Whenever he awoke from this hateful spell, whenever he saw his face grown older and uglier in the mirror on his bedroom wall, whenever he was assailed by shame and nausea, he fled further, seeking to escape in more gambling, seeking to numb himself with sensuality and wine, and then hurled himself back into the grind of hoarding and acquisition. In this senseless cycle he ran himself ragged, ran himself old, ran himself sick.
Siddhartha wandered through the forest, already quite far from the city, knowing only this: He could never go back again. The life he had been living these many years was now over and done with; he had drunk it to the lees, sucked the last drops, filled himself with nausea. Dead was the songbird from his dream. Dead was the bird within his heart. He was deeply enmeshed in Sansara, had absorbed nausea and death from all sides the way a sponge soaks up water till it is full. He was filled with antipathy, filled with misery, filled with death; there was nothing left in the world that could tempt him, console him, give him pleasure.
He longed to be rid of himself, to find peace, to be dead. If only a bolt of lightning would strike him down! If only a tiger would devour him! If only there were a wine, a poison, that would numb him, bring him oblivion and sleep, and no more awakenings! Was there any sort of filth with which he had not yet defiled himself, any sin or folly he had not committed, any barrenness of soul he had not brought upon himself? Was it still possible to live? Was it possible to continue, over and over again, to draw breath, to exhale, to feel hunger, to eat again, to sleep again, to lie again beside a woman? Had not this cycle been exhausted for him, concluded?
With a grimace, he peered into the water, saw his face mirrored there, and spit at it. Feeling profound weariness, he released his arm from around the tree trunk and rotated his body a little so as to let himself fall vertically, sink at last into the depths. With closed eyes, he sank toward death.
Then, from distant reaches of his soul, from bygone realms of his weary life, a sound fluttered. It was a word, a syllable that he now spoke aloud, mindlessly, his voice a babble, the first and final word of every Brahmin prayer, the holy Om that meant the perfect ox perfection. And the moment the sound Om touched Siddhartha’s ear, his slumbering spirit suddenly awoke and recognized the foolishness of his actions.
Siddhartha was deeply shaken. This, then, was how things stood with him. 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! All the torments of the last months, all the disillusionment, all the despair had been unable to achieve this thing that had been accomplished in the single moment when the Om pierced his consciousness: his recognizing himself in his misery and folly.
“Om,”he said aloud. “Om!” And he had knowledge of Brahman, had knowledge of the indestructibility of life, had knowledge of all things divine that he had forgotten.
But all this was only a moment, a flash. Siddhartha sank down at the foot of the coconut palm, laid his head upon the root of the tree, and fell into a deep slumber.
Deep was his sleep and free of dreams; it had been a long time since he had known such sleep. When he awoke some hours later, it seemed to him as if ten years had passed. He heard the water quietly flowing, didn’t know where he was or who had brought him, opened his eyes, was astonished to see trees and sky above him—and then remembered where he was and how he had come here. But it took him quite a while to do this, and the past appeared to him as if concealed behind a veil, infinitely distant, infinitely removed from him, infinitely indifferent. He knew only that his former life—in his first moment of new awareness, this former life appeared to him like a previous incarnation from the distant past, an early embodiment of his present Self—his former life had been left behind, that he had even wanted to throw away his life in his nausea and misery, but that he had regained consciousness beneath a coconut palm with the holy word Om upon his lips; he had then fallen asleep, and now, having awoken, he beheld the world as a new man. Murmuring to himself the word Om, over which he had fallen asleep, he felt as if this entire sleep had been nothing but a long deeply engrossed chanting of Om, an Om-thinking, a plunging into and complete immersion in Om, in the Nameless, the Perfect.
For a long time he contemplated his transformation, listening as the bird sang with joy Had this bird not died within him, had he not felt its death? No, something else had died within him, something that had desired death for a long time. Was it not the very thing that he had once, in his ardent years as a penitent, wanted to kill? Was it not his Self, his nervous, proud little ego that he had done battle with for so many years, that had bested him again and again, that was always back again each time he killed it off, forbidding joy and feeling fear? Was it not this that had finally met its death today, here in the forest beside this lovely river? Was it not because of this death that he was now like a child, so full of trust, so devoid of fear, so full of joy?
And now it dawned on Siddhartha why, as a Brahmin and as a penitent, he had struggled in vain to subdue this ego. A surfeit of knowledge had hindered him, too many holy verses, too many rules for the sacrifices, too much self-castigation, too much activity and striving! He had been full of pride—always the cleverest, always the most eager, always a step ahead of all the others, always the knowledgeable spiritual one, always the priest or wise man. His Self had crept into this priesthood, this pride, this spirituality, and made itself at home there, growing plump, all the while he thought he was killing it off with his fasting and penitence. Now he could see it, and he saw that the secret voice had been right: No teacher would ever have been able to deliver him. This is why he’d had to go out into the world and lose himself in pleasure and power, in women and money, why he’d had to become a tradesman, a gambler, a drinker, an avaricious creature, until the priest and the Samana within him were dead. This is why he’d had to go on enduring these hateful years, enduring the nausea, the emptiness, the senselessness of a desolate, lost existence, enduring to the end, to the point of bitter despair, until even the lecher Siddhartha, the greedy Siddhartha, could die. He had died, and a new Siddhartha had awoken from sleep. He too would grow old; he too would have to die someday. Siddhartha was transitory, every shape was transitory. Today, though, he was young; he was a child, the new Siddhartha, and was full of joy.
“Have you too,” he asked him once, “have you too learned this secret from the river: that time does not exist?”
Vasudeva’s face broke into a radiant smile. “Yes, Siddhartha,” he said. “Is this what you mean: that the river is in all places at once, at its source and where it flows into the sea, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the ocean, in the mountains, everywhere at once, so for the river there is only the present moment and not the shadow of a future?”
“It is,” Siddhartha said. “And once I learned this I considered my life, and it too was a river, and the boy Siddhartha was separated from the man Siddhartha and the graybeard Siddhartha only by shadows, not by real things. Siddhartha’s previous lives were also not the past, and his death and his return to Brahman not the future. Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has being and presence.”
Siddhartha spoke with rapture; this enlightenment had made him profoundly happy. Oh, was not then all suffering time, was not all self-torment and fear time, did not everything difficult, everything hostile in the world vanish, was it not overcome as soon as one had overcome time, as soon as one could think it out of existence? He had spoken in rapture, but Vasudeva smiled at him, beaming, and nodded in affirmation; he nodded silently, ran his hand across Siddhartha’s shoulder, and turned back to his work.
On yet another occasion, when the river had swollen in monsoon season and was raging, Siddhartha said, “Isn’t it true, my friend, that the river has many voices, very many voices? Does it not have the voice of a king, and of a warrior, and of a bull, and of a nocturnal bird, and of a woman giving birth, and of a man heaving a sigh, and a thousand voices more?”
“It is so.” Vasudeva nodded. “All the voices of the creatures are in its voice.”
“And do you know,” Siddhartha went on, “what word it is the river is speaking when you succeed in hearing all its ten thousand voices at once?”
Vasudeva smiled happily; he leaned toward Siddhartha and spoke the holy Om into his ear. And this was just what Siddhartha had heard.
For a long time, for long months, Siddhartha waited for his son to understand him, to accept his love and perhaps even return it. For long months Vasudeva waited, observing this: waited and kept his peace. One day, when the boy Siddhartha had yet again tormented his father with his defiance and moods and had broken both rice bowls, Vasudeva took his friend aside in the evening and spoke with him.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I am speaking to you with a friend’s heart. I can see you are suffering, I can see you are troubled. Your son, my friend, is making you worry, and I also worry on his account. This young bird is accustomed to a different life, a different nest. Unlike you, he did not flee from wealth, from the city, out of nausea and surfeit; he was forced to leave them behind against his will. I have asked the river, my friend; many times I have asked it. But the river only laughs—it laughs at me, both at me and at you, shakes with laughter at our foolishness. Water seeks out water; youth seeks out youth. Your son is not in a place where he can flourish. Ask the river and hear its counsel for yourself!”
Distressed, Siddhartha gazed into Vasudeva’s kind face, in whose many furrows a constant gaiety resided.
“Could I bring myself to part with him?” he asked quietly, ashamed. “Give me more time, my friend! I am fighting for him, you see, trying to win his heart and hoping to capture it with loving-kindness and patience. To him too the river must speak someday; he too has a calling.”
Vasudeva’s smile blossomed more warmly. “Indeed, he too has a calling; he too will enjoy eternal life. But do we know, you and I, to what he has been called: to what path, to what deeds, to what sufferings? His sorrows will not be slight, for his heart is proud and hard; those like him must suffer a great deal, commit many errors, do much wrong, pile much sin upon themselves. Tell me, my friend, are you educating your son? Do you force him? Do you strike him? Do you punish him?”
“No, Vasudeva, I do none of these things.”
“This I knew. You do not force him, do not strike him, do not command him because you know that soft is stronger than hard, water stronger than rock, love stronger than violence. Very good, I praise you. But is it not an error for you to think that you are not forcing him, not punishing him? Do you not bind him with the bands of your love? Do you not shame him daily and make things more difficult for him with your kindness and patience? Are you not forcing him, the arrogant and spoiled boy, to live in a hut with two old banana eaters for whom even rice is a delicacy, whose thoughts cannot be his, whose hearts are old and still and beat differently from his? Do all these things not force him, punish him?”
In dismay, Siddhartha cast his eyes down. Softly he asked, “What do you think I should do?”
Vasudeva said, “Take him to the city, to his mother’s house. There will still be servants there; give him to them. And if there is no one left, take him to a teacher, not because of what he will learn but because he will then be among other boys and girls, in the world where he belongs. Have you never thought of this?”
“You have seen into my heart,” Siddhartha said sadly. “Often I have thought of this. But tell me, how can I release him into this world when his heart is so ungentle to begin with? Will he not become a hedonist, will he not lose himself in pleasure and power, will he not repeat all his father’s errors, will he not become perhaps forever lost in Sansara?”
The ferryman’s smile radiated brightness; he touched Siddhartha’s arm gently and said, “Ask the river, my friend! Listen to its laughter! Or do you really believe that you committed your own follies so as to spare your son from committing them? And will you be able to save your son from Sansara? How, with doctrine, with prayer, with admonitions? My friend, have you entirely forgotten that instructive story about Siddhartha, the Brahmin’s son, that you once related to me here in this very spot? Who saved the Samana Siddhartha from Sansara, from sin, from greed, from folly? Were his father’s piety, his teachers’ admonitions, his own knowledge, and his own searching able to protect him? What father, what teacher, was able to protect him from living life himself, soiling himself with life, accumulating guilt, drinking the bitter drink, finding his own path? Do you think then, my friend, that this path might be spared anyone at all? Perhaps your little son, because you love him and would like to spare him sorrow and pain and disillusionment? But even if you died ten times for him, you would not succeed in relieving him of even the smallest fraction of his destiny.”
Once when the boy’s face reminded him very much of Kamala, Siddhartha suddenly remembered something Kamala had once said to him a long time before, in the days of their youth. “You cannot love,” she had said, and he had agreed that she was right, comparing himself to a star and the child people to falling leaves; nonetheless, he had felt a reproach in what she’d said. It was true that he had never been able to lose himself entirely in another person, give himself to another, forget himself, commit the follies of love for the sake of another; never had he been able to do this—and this, it had seemed to him at the time, was the great difference separating him from the child people. But now, ever since his son had come, he, Siddhartha, had become a child person in his own right, suffering because of another person, loving another person, lost, a fool, because of love. Now he too felt for once in his life, late as it was, this strongest and strangest of passions, was suffering because of it, suffering terribly, and yet he was blissful; he felt somehow renewed, somehow richer.
He could sense quite distinctly that this blind love for his son was a passion, something very human, that it was Sansara, a muddy spring, dark water. Yet at the same time he felt that it was not without value—it was necessary, it came out of his own being. This too was pleasure that had to be atoned for; this too, pain to be experienced; these too, follies to be committed.
He could sense quite distinctly that this blind love for his son was a passion, something very human, that it was Sansara, a muddy spring, dark water. Yet at the same time he felt that it was not without value—it was necessary, it came out of his own being. This too was pleasure that had to be atoned for; this too, pain to be experienced; these too, follies to be committed.
He now saw people differently than he had before, less cleverly, less proudly, but more warmly, with more curiosity and empathy. When he ferried ordinary sorts of people across the river, child people, tradespeople, warriors, womenfolk, they did not appear so strange to him as once they had; he understood them. He shared their life, which was governed not by thoughts and insights but by drives and desires; he felt like one of them. Although he had nearly reached perfection and still felt the pangs of his recent wound, it seemed to him as if these child people were his brothers. Their vanities, desires, and ridiculous habits were losing their ridiculousness for him; they were becoming comprehensible, lovable, even worthy of respect. A mother’s blind love for her child, a self-satisfied father’s blind pride in his one little son, a vain young woman’s blind, furious urge to bedeck herself with jewels and attract men’s admiring glances—all these drives, all these childish matters, all these simple, foolish, but enormously strong, strongly alive, strongly asserted drives and desires were no longer mere child’s play to Siddhartha; he saw people living for their sake, saw them performing endless feats for their sake—making journeys, waging wars, suffering endless sufferings, enduring endless burdens—and he was able to love them for this; he saw life, the living, the indestructible, the Brahman in each of their passions, each of their deeds. Lovable and admirable these people were in their blind fidelity, their blind strength and tenacity. 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. And at times Siddhartha even doubted whether this knowledge, this thinking, should be so highly valued, wondered whether it too was not perhaps the child’s play of thought people, who might be the child people of thought. In all other matters, the worldly were the wise man’s equals, were in fact far superior to him in many ways, just as animals, in their tenacious, unerring performance of what is necessary, can appear superior to people at certain moments.
Siddhartha said, “What could I have to say to you, Venerable One? Perhaps this, that you are seeking all too much? That all your seeking is making you unable to find?”
“How is this?” Govinda asked.
“When a person seeks,” Siddhartha said, “it can easily happen that his eye sees only the thing he is seeking; he is incapable of finding anything, of allowing anything to enter into him, because he is always thinking only of what he is looking for, because he has a goal, because he is possessed by his goal. Seeking means having a goal. Finding means being free, being open, having no goal. You, Venerable One, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for, striving to reach your goal, you overlook many things that lie close before your eyes.”
Wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to pass on always sounds like foolishness.
The opposite of every truth is just as true! For this is so: A truth can always only be uttered and cloaked in words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided that can be thought in thoughts and said with words, everything one-sided, everything half, everything is lacking wholeness, roundness, oneness. When the sublime Gautama spoke of the world in his doctrine, he had to divide it into Sansara and Nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and redemption. This is the only way to go about it; there is no other way for a person who would teach. The world itself, however, the Being all around us and within us, is never one-sided. Never is a person, or a deed, purely Sansara or purely Nirvana, never is a person utterly holy or utterly sinful. It only seems so because we are subject to the illusion that time exists as something real. Time is not real, Govinda. I have experienced this again and again. And if time is not real, then the distance that appears to lie between world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between evil and good, is also an illusion.
“Listen well, my dear friend, listen well! The sinner who I am and who you are is a sinner, but one day he will again be Brahman, he will one day reach Nirvana, will be a Buddha—and now behold: This one day is an illusion, it is only an allegory! The sinner is not on his way to the state of Buddhahood, he is not caught up in a process of developing, although our thought cannot imagine things in any other way. No, in this sinner the future Buddha already exists—now, today—all his future is already there. In him, in yourself, in everyone you must worship the future Buddha, the potential Buddha, the hidden Buddha. The world, friend Govinda, is not imperfect, nor is it in the middle of a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect in every moment; every sin already carries forgiveness within it, all little children already carry their aged forms within them, all infants death, all dying men eternal life. It is not possible for anyone to see how far any other person has come along his path. Buddha waits within the robber and the dice player, and the robber waits in the Brahmin. In the deepest meditation we have the possibility of negating time, of seeing all life, all having-been, being, and becoming, as simultaneous, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman. Therefore everything that is appears good to me. Death appears to me like life, sin like holiness, cleverness like folly; everything must be just as it is, everything requires only my assent, only my willingness, my loving approval, and for me it is good and can never harm me. I experienced by observing my own body and my own soul that I sorely needed sin, sorely needed concupiscence, needed greed, vanity, and the most shameful despair to learn to stop resisting, 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.
“This here,” he said, playing with it, “is a stone, and in a certain amount of time it will perhaps be earth and from earth it will become a plant or an animal or man. Earlier I would have said, ‘This stone is just a stone, it is worthless, it belongs to the world of Maya; but since in the cycle of transformations it might even become human and spirit, I must give it due consideration.’ This is how I might have thought once. 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—and precisely this—that it is a stone, that it appears to me now and today as a stone—precisely this is the reason I love it and see value and meaning in each of its veins and hollows, in the yellow, in the gray, in the hardness, in the sound it gives off when I knock on it, in the dryness or moistness of its surface. There are stones that feel like oil or soap, others that feel like leaves, others like sand, and each one is special and prays Om in its own way, each is Brahman, but at the same time and to just as great an extent, each one is a stone, is oily or soapy, and precisely this pleases me and seems to me wondrous and deserving of worship.
“This too,” Siddhartha said, “concerns me little. Let the things be semblances or not; then I too am only semblance, and so they will always be like me. This is what makes them so dear to me, makes me so admire them: They are like me. This is why I can love them. And here now is a bit of doctrine that will make you laugh: Love, O Govinda, appears to me more important than all other matters. 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.”
“This I understand,” Govinda said. “But it is precisely this that he, the Sublime One, recognized as illusion. He commands benevolence, gentleness, pity, tolerance, but not love; he forbade us to bind our heart with love for earthly things.”
“I know,” Siddhartha said; his smile was radiant, golden. “I know, Govinda. And behold: Here we are in the middle of the thicket of opinions, in a battle over words. For I cannot deny that my words about love stand in opposition, in apparent opposition to Gautama’s words. This is precisely why I distrust words so much, for I know this opposition is an illusion. 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? Even with regard to him, your great teacher, things are dearer to me than words, his actions and life more important than his speeches, the gestures of his hand more important than his opinions. It is not in his speaking or in his thinking that I see his greatness, only in his actions, his life.”