On Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha Novel

“I have not only occasionally made a confession of belief in essays, but once, a little more than ten years ago attempted to set forth my belief in a book. This book is called Siddharta.” – Hermann Hesse

 

I’ve long wanted to read this book. The reason that got me so long to start to pick up the book is the fact that I’m skeptical about the notion of how Western people portray and understand Buddhism. I ought to think that Western authors always romanticize Orientalism as an alternative for their dogmatic Catholicism doctrine. Apparently, I’m wrong.

This novel deals with the spiritual journey of self-discovery of a man named Siddhartha during the time of the Gautama Buddha. Indeed, the novel is actually the author’s process of self-realization that is inextricably tied to the composition of the novel itself. After he finished Part One of the book and left it unfinished for years without any advancement. Hesse would like to fully experience himself in order to develop the richness of the character Siddhartha and the depth of the novel. If not for Hesse’s unrelenting determination for self-discovery, this novel would have been abandoned.

Nevertheless, this book is profounding and intriguing to read. One can read it in a total immersing mind that we can sympathize with the story characters. Other than that, the book poses numerous philosophical questions for the reader to read in manifolds; epistemologically, metaphysically and mystically. This novel is an unrelenting search for truth is essential for achieving a harmonious relationship with the world through the characters in the book.

Epistemology

But Siddhartha replied in a voice that contained both mockery and sadness, in a soft, somewhat sad, somewhat mocking tone:

“Soon, Govinda, your friend will abandon this path of the Shramanas in which he has accompanied you for so long. I suffer thirst, O Govinda, and on this long path of a Shramana, my thirst has not grown any less. I have always thirsted for understanding; I have always been full of questions. Year after year, I asked questions of the brahmins: year after year, I asked questions of the holy Vedas. Perhaps, Govinda, it would have been just as good, just as clever, just as meaningful to address my questions to a tickbird or a chimpanzee. I have taken a long time–and I have not yet finished–to learn the following, Govinda: It is impossible to learn anything! In my opinion, that thing we call ‘learning’ does not exist. The only thing that exists, my friend, is knowing that is everywhere, which is atman, which is in me and in you and in every being. And I am beginning to believe that this knowing no greater enemy than wanting to know, than learning.”

 

From the dialogue, we can discern that Govinda and Siddhartha both have a fundamental desire to understand their lives through spirituality, seek to do this by reaching Nirvana. Siddhartha and Govinda differ in what they’re willing to do in search for this truth. In the case of Siddhartha, he is more like a skeptical empiricist where he thinks enlightenment cannot be reached only by following one path or teaching where one has to experience intrinsically. As for Govinda, he is more inclined to idealism where he thinks the senses are nothing but a pure delusion to the path of enlightenment and yet he is more conservative towards other alternative paths. At the end of Part one of the book, Siddhartha left his beloved friend Govinda and started to explore his very path to enlightenment:

It was the ego whose meaning and essence I wanted to learn. It was the ego that I wanted to get rid of, to overcome. But I was unable to overcome it, I could only trick it, could only elude it, could only hide from it. In truth, nothing in the world has occupied my thoughts so much as my ego, this enigma that I am alive, that I am unique and separate and distinct from others, that I am Siddhartha! And there is nothing in the world I know less about me than Siddhartha!…. The Yogaveda will teach me no longer, nor the Atharvaveda, nor the ascetics, nor any other teaching. I will learn from myself, be my own student. I will learn about myself, about the mystery of Siddhartha.

Metaphysic

“These myriads of colorful things had always been there; the sun and moon had always shone, rivers had always rushed and bees hummed. But in former days all this had been nothing more for Siddhartha than a transitory and beguiling veil before his eyes, viewed with distrust, meant to be punctured by thought and destroyed, since it was not the essence, since the essence lay beyond the visible. But now his unfettered vision dwelt here–he saw and acknowledged the visible, sought his home in this world. He no longer pursued the essence or looked toward the beyond. The world was beautiful when one just looked at it without looking for anything, just simply, as a child. The moon and stars were beautiful, brook and bank, forest and rock, goat and beetle, flower and butterfly–all were beautiful.”

This sentence reminding me of the Allegory of the Cave by Plato’s theory of forms. Plato’s dualism philosophy indoctrinates a world of ideas beyond our human senses. A world that only exists a pure, permanent and ultimate reality that resemblance with Hinduism Brahman. But ever since Siddhartha acknowledged himself that his ego, the existence of himself in this world that he only realized the world of ideas was also part of this world, and nothing worthwhile was achieved through destroying the unreal ego of the senses at the expense of bloating up the unreal ego of ideas and erudition. For Siddhartha, the senses and ideas–were fine things, behind both of them the ultimate meaning lay hidden, both were worth heeding, it was worth playing with both of them, neither despising nor overrating them. He thinks the atman, the inmost essence could be overheard in both of them. This realism of Siddhartha started to put his feet on the ground to look for truth rather than keep searching in the realm of thought.

Throughout the centuries, theologians, philosophers claim that the ultimate reality exists in the consciousness, not the materialism; not the impermanent forms that in constant flux and chaos. In the modern era, people thought science would give an accurate answer to people. But yet, the debate is still ongoing forever without any solutions. But I found it interesting how pervasive is the idea of mystical unity with the One from Science, Religion, and Nature. Physicists claim that our body is made of subatomic particles that share common substances with the Universe. Biologists, Naturalists romanticized about the unity of earth and the human body. Philosophers praise how the unity of the soul with the One after leaving the impermanent, decaying body of ours.

Mysticism

“Siddhartha listened. He was now all listener, completely one with listening, completely empty, completely receptive. He felt now that he had completed his learning of how to listen. He had often heard all these things before, these many voices in the river, but today he heard it in a new way. Now he no longer distinguished the many voices, the happy from the grieving, the childlike from the manly. They were all part of each other–longing laments, the laughter of the wise, cries of anger, and the moans of the dying–all were one, all were interwoven and linked, intertwined in a thousand ways. And everything together, all the voices, all the goals, all the striving, all the suffering, all the pleasure–everything together was the river of what is, the music of life.”

At the end of the story, Siddhartha achieved Nirwana just by the river when he listens to the river flows and completely immersed his ego in it. The river itself never actually tells Siddhartha what its revelations mean. Instead, the river reveals the complexity of existence through sound and image, and Siddhartha meditates on these revelations in order to gain an understanding of them. Govinda, on the other hand, persists in looking to teachers for his wisdom, at the end he seeks advice from Siddhartha on the way of achieving Nirwana:

“When someone seeks”, said Siddhartha, “it can easily happen that his eyes only see the thing he is seeking and that he is incapable of finding anything, incapable of taking anything in, because he is always only thinking about what he is seeking, because he has an object, a goal, because he is possessed by this goal. Seeking means having a goal, but finding means being free, open, having no goal. Perhaps you, venerable one, are indeed a seeker, for in striving after your goal, there is much you fail to see that is right before your eyes.”

Because of this reliance on an external explanation, Govinda continuously fails to find Nirvana. On the contrary, Siddhartha ultimately understands that because the essence of enlightenment already exists within us and is present in the world at every moment, rigid and prescriptive paths simply lead us further from ourselves and from the wisdom we seek. For Siddhartha, wisdom is not expressible. Wisdom, when one tries to express it, always sounds foolish. Knowledge can be expressed, but not wisdom. One can discover knowledge, can live it, can be borne along by it, can do miracles with it, but one cannot express it and teach it. Just as Siddhartha says: “The opposite of truth is also just as true! It is like this: A truth can be expressed and cloaked in words only if it is one-sided. Everything that can be thought in thoughts and expressed in words is one-sided, only a half. All such thoughts lack wholeness, fullness, unity…But words I cannot love. That is why teachings are nothing for me. They have no hardness, no softness, no colors, no edges, no odor, no taste. They have nothing but words. Perhaps this is what prevents you from finding contentment–perhaps it is all the words. For Liberation and virtue and samsara and nirvana are mere words, Govinda. There is no thing that is nirvana. There is only word nirvana.”

Conclusion

“A true seeker, one who truly wished to find, could not accept any doctrine. But he who had found realization could look with favor on any teaching, any path, any goal.”

All the struggles, predicaments, liberations, sufferings that philosophers philosophizing for a thousand years; it’s never concerned about the extrinsic value but the intrinsic. Yet people who wish to attain the truth, happiness, enlightenment ought to look for external guidance as an explicit and objective goal. Perhaps it is time to look inwardly to find whether or not what we want in life is deep down inside ourselves. In the novel, Siddhartha points out that by focusing only on the goal of Nirvana, Govinda failed to notice the tiny clues along the way that would have pointed him in the right direction, Siddhartha’s reward for studying it is an intuitive understanding of its divine essence. In this very short 155 pages novel, Hermann Hesse manages to express the beautiful journey of self-discovery story about young Brahmin, Siddhartha to achieve nirvana. Reviewing some of my notions here is not adequately convey the richness of the novel, for those who are desperately in need of spiritual guidance, I personally think this is a good book to start with, or perhaps, The Prophet by Khalil Gibran is also another choice for spiritualism study.

Thank you for reading…