The first time I read Siddhartha, I had just finished uni, left my job at the power company (on a hiatus) and bought a ticket around the world starting at Los Angeles. Why I had picked up Siddhartha in the first place I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps at that time I was into German literature, with its complex discussion on Dionysian pleasures and Apollonian asceticism. But even at a young age, I was glad to have read it then.
But my memory had faded since then, and though I remember the essence of the book as you would, I had forgotten the details and even some of the important details. And reading the book as a 37 year old, as opposed to a 23 year old university graduate, it is reading a completely different book. You are after all, not the same person. I shudder to think of the books that I had loved in my early twenties that I may deem cringeworthy now (Shantaram and Palahniuk books come to mind), but these books were essential stepping stones to my reading journey, and it is a conversation for another article.
The Siddhartha I read as a younger man was a line in the path yet taken: a possibility of learning through poverty, the promise of life of a hard-earned peace. I think I missed the point completely. The Siddhartha that I had read a few days ago is a path already taken, but perhaps not the path that I had assumed to take. It is the path taken by Siddhartha himself in a way, in a worldly life as opposed to a life in search for peace. It is only for the last couple of years that it is a life of balance that I was seeking. But the Siddhartha that I had just read is still full of promises of the one that I had read fourteen years ago.
The confusion over the name. Was Siddhartha Buddha?
No, even though Buddha Gautama is also part of the novel, a vital component to our own Siddhartha, who also share the same name. Their journeys resemble each other’s and at some point their paths will cross briefly. It is a pivotal moment in the book.
Siddhartha (the protagonist), pampered by the family’s wealth, felt an insatiable emptiness which his present life was unable to complete him. When a community of Samanas stopped by near his household, he and his friend Govinda decided to adopt the ascetic life, having no home and living through nature. When they met Gautama, Govinda jumped ship to become a disciple whilst Siddhartha went to carve his own way.
En route to enlightenment, Siddhartha fell victim to distractions. Having met in a courtesan in Sansara, he fell in love with her and decided to stay and live the life of a merchant, a successful one at that. After many years, the void recaptured him and he left Sansara penniless once again to continue his journey albeit as an older man. In his new journey, he came across the river and the boatman he met years ago whilst he was still a wanderer. Ultimately, he decided to become the apprentice of the boatman, still in search of enlightenment.
The quest for nothingness, where nothing is everything
What is the self? When we have stripped away our physical needs, wants and connections, we are left with the essential — the essence. Theoretically. But the process of stripping away is in itself, like pulling an atom from a block of steel. It is not an easy process, and something that most people would fail before they get started. But what if we strip away everything and we are left with nothing anyway? There is nothing there, not a gemstone, not any hidden treasure or message, but this is what Siddhartha attempted to strip bare the soul.
“Dead to himself, not to be a self anymore, to find tranquility with an emptied heart, to be open to miracles in unselfish thoughts, that was his goal. Once all of myself was overcome and had died, once every desire and every urge was silent in the heart, then the ultimate part of me had to awake, the innermost of my being, which no longer myself, the great secret.”
But meditation and exposing himself to the trials of nature will only bring him back to square one, and the ways of Samana was inadequate. When he found Buddha, Govinda had no doubt on the teachings and decided right then and there to become a Buddhist for life. However, Siddhartha has a higher realisation: that wisdom can only come from oneself, not from any other teaching and thus, Siddhartha needs to create his own reality in order to form his own wisdom.
In a way, this is a very German idea, for man to create his own reality. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s concept was to reject the current belief system imposed on the individual, and for the individual to shape his own, becoming the Superman. Siddhartha, in a way, is the consequence of this idea but in a more moderate sense.
Instead of clashing with other realities, one’s own belief system is a pathway to the same enlightenment. Govinda’s decision to follow Gautama might also take him to enlightenment, though at the end of the book, he had not. But does that mean that enlightenment can be in different shapes and forms from one individual to the next? In Siddhartha, the creation of one’s own system is only the end to the means, where in Zarathustra, the creation is the end. But perhaps this is only different shades of the lexicon.
The Dionysian and Apollonian forces, and the river
This running theme in German literature of the friction between the Dionysian (pleasure seeking) and Apollonian (harmony seeking) is prevalent in most of the works of great German authors. Hesse was no different. The two forces are always at odds, but at times complementary. The push and pull between the two forces is often the life force which propel an individual’s journey, as in the case of Siddhartha.
The Apollonian side of Siddhartha strives to find harmony, balance and knowledge. The Dionysian allows the emotion to take the hand at the wheel, falling to passion and worldly pleasures such as money and gambling. Yet, these two forces were insufficient for Siddhartha to obtain enlightenment. Something is still amiss.
The path therefore is something else entirely. It is a path where neither paths really matter; that experience is just mere experience, and what is good and what is bad is compiled into the unity of existence. What matters is that you have lived through it and having experienced both of these forces. Without Siddhartha having fallen into the Dionysian cycle, he would be incomplete, as he had to transcend the worldly experiences in order to take a step towards enlightenment.
This goes back thus, to the idea of the river — central to Siddhartha. It is ever changing, ever present, but ever constant. The river is the source, the start, the middle and end and it flows at any given point in time. Thus, there is little difference between the past and the future, only the point to which we are observing the river, where we are in the river, a.k.a. the present. The river, in this way, is also a symbol of unity — of time and of experience.
“But out of all secrets of the river, he today only saw one, this one touched his soul. He saw: this water ran and ran, and was nevertheless always there, was always at all times the same and yet new in every moment! Great he be he who would grasp this, understand this! He understood and grasped it not, only felt some idea of it stirring, a distant memory, divine voices.”
By the end, Siddhartha had fully realised this. After sacrificing his life and dignity to his estranged son, he realises that this too, matters little for it is only part of the experience within the unity. When Govinda met Siddhartha for the last time, it was Govinda who asked Siddhartha what he had learned from enlightenment, but it is something that Govinda must discover for himself in his own way.
We are all our own separate rivers
The symbol of the river can be opaque, but it is instructive. In a way, we can connect these thoughts to stoic philosophy, that in a long enough timeline that we are all the same. Siddhartha’s humble hunk of stone at the end of the novel can transform into soil, into man, into stone again, thus it was important to pay respect to the stone. In the same way, Marcus Aureliussaw no difference between a caesar and slave in a long enough timeline, which is ironic as he himself was an emperor.
Yet, there is another resemblance with another classic from across the Atlantic: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughterhouse Five runs through a similar theme where time is irrelevant, as Billy Pilgrim jumps backwards and forwards in time before he ultimately discovers that everything had already been written, that time thus, matters not. It is only for us to accept the experience, the good and bad, the banal and everything in between.
We are each our own rivers. And though we are hardly ever constant, the past and future rushing past, we must be like Siddhartha who can enjoy the sounds of the river beneath the trees, as Sisyphus finds happiness in retrieving his boulder when he walks down the hill.
