Socrates once said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." In Herman Hesse's novel, Siddhartha, the journey for self-discovery takes many forms and necessitates change for the protagonist throughout life. The protagonist Siddhartha first must journey from his life of a Brahmin in order to understand his search for spiritual enlightenment. The second part of Siddhartha's examination of life causes him to reject his spiritual quest in order to better understand the world and his role in it. His final search for self leads him to the brink of suicide and ultimate understanding of the nature of his heart and the need for continuing self-reflection. The character of Siddhartha develops the theme of search for self and the need for constant renewal in every life to achieve the true "life worth living."
The protagonist Siddhartha must first journey from his life as a Brahmin in order to understand his search for spiritual enlightenment. Wanting to become a Samana against his father’s wishes he says, ““With your permission, Father, I have come to tell you that I wish to leave your house tomorrow and join the ascetics. I wish to become a Samana. I trust my father with not object"” (10). In response his father says, ““It is not seemly for Brahmins to utter forceful and angry words, but here is displeasure in my heart. I should not like to hear you make this request a second time”” (10). Siddhartha waits in that very spot for a day until his father agrees to let him leave with the ascetics. After years of living as a Samana he goes with his dear friend Govinda to the Buddha hoping he will have the enlightenment they seek. Govinda is fascinated by the Buddha, however, Siddhartha is not. Before leaving his friend behind he speaks with the Buddha:
Quietly, Gotama had listened to him, unmoved. Now he spoke, the perfected one, with his kind,with his polite and clear voice: "You've heard the teachings, oh son of a Brahman, and good for you that you've thought about it thus deeply. You've found a gap in it, an error. You should think about this further. But be warned, oh seeker of knowledge, of the thicket of opinions and of arguing about words.There is nothing to opinions, they may be beautiful or ugly, smart or foolish, and everyone can support them or discard them. But the teachings, you've heard from me, are no opinion, and their goal is not to explain the world to those who seek knowledge. They have a different goal; their goal is salvation from suffering. This is what Gotama teaches, nothing else”” (33)
Next, Siddhartha finds he must reject his spiritual quest in order to better understand the world and his role in it. Siddhartha learns of sex and food from the courtesan Kamala. When Siddhartha first arrives in this new, unfamiliar town, he is stupefied by the beauty of Kamala. When he first meets her she says:
"Never before this has happened to me, my friend that a Samana from the forest came to me and wanted to learn from me! Never before this has happened to me, that a Samana came to me with long hair and an old, torn loin-cloth! Many young men come to me, and there are also sons of Brahmans among them, but they come in beautiful clothes, they come in fine shoes, they have perfume in their hair and money in their pouches. This is, oh Samana, how the young men are like who come to me." Quote Siddhartha: "Already I am starting to learn from you. Even yesterday, I was already learning. I have already taken off my beard, have combed the hair, and have oil in my hair. There is little which is still missing in me, oh excellent one: fine clothes, fine shoes, money in my pouch. You shall know, Siddhartha has set harder goals for himself than such trifles, and he has reached them. How shouldn't I reach that goal, which I have set for myself yesterday: to be your friend and to learn the joys of love from you! You'll see that I'll learn quickly, Kamala, I have already learned harder things than what you're supposed to teach me. And now let's get to it: You aren't satisfied with Siddhartha as he is, with oil in his hair, but without clothes, without shoes, without money?"(53-54)
In order to please Kamala, Siddhartha learns of money and business from the wealthy businessman Kamaswami. Kamaswami was so pleased at the fact that Siddhartha could read and write that he says “”It is excellent how you're able to write," The merchant praised him.”Many a thing we will still have to discuss with one another. For today, I'm asking you to be my guest and to live in this house.””(65) Then Siddhartha learns of gambling and ine from his rather unhealthy business associates. He went into a spiral in which:
He was a feared gambler, few dared to take him on, so high and audacious were his stakes. He played the game due to a pain of his heart, losing and wasting his wretched money in the game brought him an angry joy, in no other way he could demonstrate his disdain for wealth, the merchants' false god, more clearly and more mockingly. Thus he gambled with high stakes and mercilessly, hating himself, mocking himself, won thousands, threw away thousands, lost money, lost jewelry, lost a house in the country, won again, lost again. That fear, that terrible and petrifying fear, which he felt while he was rolling the dice, while he was worried about losing high stakes, that fear he loved and sought to always renew it, always increase it, always get it to a slightly higher level, for in this feeling alone he still felt something like happiness, something like an intoxication, something like an elevated form of life in the midst of his saturated, lukewarm, dull life (79).
His final search for self leads him to the brink of suicide and ultimate understanding of the nature of his heart and the need for continuing self-reflection. Once Siddhartha realizes a part of him has died he leaves this life he wanders to a river he crossed previously on his journey. “”With a distorted face, he stared into the water, saw the reflection of his face and spit at it. In deep tiredness, he took his arm away from the trunk of the tree and turned a bit, in order to let himself fall straight down, in order to finally drown. With his eyes closed, he slipped towards death.””(89) As he falls towards the river:
…remote areas of his soul, out of past times of his now weary life, a sound stirred up. It was a word, a syllable, which he, without thinking, with a slurred voice, spoke to himself, the old word which is the beginning and the end of all prayers of the Brahmans, the holy "Om", which roughly means "that what is perfect" or "the completion". And in the moment when the sound of "Om" touched Siddhartha's ear, his dormant spirit suddenly woke up and realized the foolishness of his actions. Siddhartha was deeply shocked. So this was how things were with him, so doomed was he, so much he had lost his way and was forsaken by all knowledge, that he had been able to seek death, that this wish, this wish of a child, had been able to grow in him: to find rest by annihilating his body! What all agony of these recent times, all sobering realizations, all desperation had not brought about, this was brought on by this moment, when the Om entered his consciousness: he became aware of himself in his misery and in his error. (89)
The character of Siddhartha develops the theme of search for self and the need for constant renewal in every life to achieve the true "life worth living." The protagonist Siddhartha first must journey from his life of a Brahmin in order to understand his search for spiritual enlightenment. The second part of Siddhartha's examination of life causes him to reject his spiritual quest in order to better understand the world and his role in it. His final search for self leads him to the brink of suicide and ultimate understanding of the nature of his heart and the need for continuing self-reflection. With these collective pieces of his life he suffers greatly. He merely thinks he endures when he fasts and deprives himself and whips himself when he is a Samana. That wasn’t even close to the pain he suffered later. He dies on the inside through gambling and alcoholism. He loses the love of his life, Kamala and the emotional attachment to his son. That is true pain that is true heartbreak. He almost commits suicide in a drunken rage of regret. Even though the suffering seems unnecessary, he had to live among the people, like the people, with the people. This wasn’t an optional pathway for him he needed to suffer to reach enlightenment. With this enlightenment he became a vessel and shared his wisdom as the ferryman when he replaced Vasuveda. Finally, when Govinda came to the river he gives all he has to offer and Govinda experiences something both wonderful and terrifying:
He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha. He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with fading eyes—he saw the face of a new-born child, red and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying—he saw the face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into the body of another person—he saw, in the same second, this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head being chopped off by the executioner with one blow of his sword—he saw the bodies of men and women, naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love—he saw corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void— he saw the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants, of bulls, of birds—he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni—he saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transistorizes, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face—and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated themselves, floated along and merged with each other, and they were all constantly covered by something thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing, like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha's smiling face, which he, Govinda, in this very same moment touched with his lips. And, Govinda saw it like this, this smile of the mask, this smile of oneness above the flowing forms, this smile of simultaneousness above the thousand births and deaths, this smile of Siddhartha was precisely the same, was precisely of the same kind as the quiet, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps benevolent, perhaps mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha, as he had seen it himself with great respect a hundred times. Like this, Govinda knew, the perfected ones are smiling.
None of this would have been possible if Siddhartha didn’t continue to fail and get back up and try new paths and experience new things. This was Siddhartha’s path to enlightenment, an endless path of renewal.
The protagonist Siddhartha must first journey from his life as a Brahmin in order to understand his search for spiritual enlightenment. Wanting to become a Samana against his father’s wishes he says, ““With your permission, Father, I have come to tell you that I wish to leave your house tomorrow and join the ascetics. I wish to become a Samana. I trust my father with not object"” (10). In response his father says, ““It is not seemly for Brahmins to utter forceful and angry words, but here is displeasure in my heart. I should not like to hear you make this request a second time”” (10). Siddhartha waits in that very spot for a day until his father agrees to let him leave with the ascetics. After years of living as a Samana he goes with his dear friend Govinda to the Buddha hoping he will have the enlightenment they seek. Govinda is fascinated by the Buddha, however, Siddhartha is not. Before leaving his friend behind he speaks with the Buddha:
Quietly, Gotama had listened to him, unmoved. Now he spoke, the perfected one, with his kind,with his polite and clear voice: "You've heard the teachings, oh son of a Brahman, and good for you that you've thought about it thus deeply. You've found a gap in it, an error. You should think about this further. But be warned, oh seeker of knowledge, of the thicket of opinions and of arguing about words.There is nothing to opinions, they may be beautiful or ugly, smart or foolish, and everyone can support them or discard them. But the teachings, you've heard from me, are no opinion, and their goal is not to explain the world to those who seek knowledge. They have a different goal; their goal is salvation from suffering. This is what Gotama teaches, nothing else”” (33)
Next, Siddhartha finds he must reject his spiritual quest in order to better understand the world and his role in it. Siddhartha learns of sex and food from the courtesan Kamala. When Siddhartha first arrives in this new, unfamiliar town, he is stupefied by the beauty of Kamala. When he first meets her she says:
"Never before this has happened to me, my friend that a Samana from the forest came to me and wanted to learn from me! Never before this has happened to me, that a Samana came to me with long hair and an old, torn loin-cloth! Many young men come to me, and there are also sons of Brahmans among them, but they come in beautiful clothes, they come in fine shoes, they have perfume in their hair and money in their pouches. This is, oh Samana, how the young men are like who come to me." Quote Siddhartha: "Already I am starting to learn from you. Even yesterday, I was already learning. I have already taken off my beard, have combed the hair, and have oil in my hair. There is little which is still missing in me, oh excellent one: fine clothes, fine shoes, money in my pouch. You shall know, Siddhartha has set harder goals for himself than such trifles, and he has reached them. How shouldn't I reach that goal, which I have set for myself yesterday: to be your friend and to learn the joys of love from you! You'll see that I'll learn quickly, Kamala, I have already learned harder things than what you're supposed to teach me. And now let's get to it: You aren't satisfied with Siddhartha as he is, with oil in his hair, but without clothes, without shoes, without money?"(53-54)
In order to please Kamala, Siddhartha learns of money and business from the wealthy businessman Kamaswami. Kamaswami was so pleased at the fact that Siddhartha could read and write that he says “”It is excellent how you're able to write," The merchant praised him.”Many a thing we will still have to discuss with one another. For today, I'm asking you to be my guest and to live in this house.””(65) Then Siddhartha learns of gambling and ine from his rather unhealthy business associates. He went into a spiral in which:
He was a feared gambler, few dared to take him on, so high and audacious were his stakes. He played the game due to a pain of his heart, losing and wasting his wretched money in the game brought him an angry joy, in no other way he could demonstrate his disdain for wealth, the merchants' false god, more clearly and more mockingly. Thus he gambled with high stakes and mercilessly, hating himself, mocking himself, won thousands, threw away thousands, lost money, lost jewelry, lost a house in the country, won again, lost again. That fear, that terrible and petrifying fear, which he felt while he was rolling the dice, while he was worried about losing high stakes, that fear he loved and sought to always renew it, always increase it, always get it to a slightly higher level, for in this feeling alone he still felt something like happiness, something like an intoxication, something like an elevated form of life in the midst of his saturated, lukewarm, dull life (79).
His final search for self leads him to the brink of suicide and ultimate understanding of the nature of his heart and the need for continuing self-reflection. Once Siddhartha realizes a part of him has died he leaves this life he wanders to a river he crossed previously on his journey. “”With a distorted face, he stared into the water, saw the reflection of his face and spit at it. In deep tiredness, he took his arm away from the trunk of the tree and turned a bit, in order to let himself fall straight down, in order to finally drown. With his eyes closed, he slipped towards death.””(89) As he falls towards the river:
…remote areas of his soul, out of past times of his now weary life, a sound stirred up. It was a word, a syllable, which he, without thinking, with a slurred voice, spoke to himself, the old word which is the beginning and the end of all prayers of the Brahmans, the holy "Om", which roughly means "that what is perfect" or "the completion". And in the moment when the sound of "Om" touched Siddhartha's ear, his dormant spirit suddenly woke up and realized the foolishness of his actions. Siddhartha was deeply shocked. So this was how things were with him, so doomed was he, so much he had lost his way and was forsaken by all knowledge, that he had been able to seek death, that this wish, this wish of a child, had been able to grow in him: to find rest by annihilating his body! What all agony of these recent times, all sobering realizations, all desperation had not brought about, this was brought on by this moment, when the Om entered his consciousness: he became aware of himself in his misery and in his error. (89)
The character of Siddhartha develops the theme of search for self and the need for constant renewal in every life to achieve the true "life worth living." The protagonist Siddhartha first must journey from his life of a Brahmin in order to understand his search for spiritual enlightenment. The second part of Siddhartha's examination of life causes him to reject his spiritual quest in order to better understand the world and his role in it. His final search for self leads him to the brink of suicide and ultimate understanding of the nature of his heart and the need for continuing self-reflection. With these collective pieces of his life he suffers greatly. He merely thinks he endures when he fasts and deprives himself and whips himself when he is a Samana. That wasn’t even close to the pain he suffered later. He dies on the inside through gambling and alcoholism. He loses the love of his life, Kamala and the emotional attachment to his son. That is true pain that is true heartbreak. He almost commits suicide in a drunken rage of regret. Even though the suffering seems unnecessary, he had to live among the people, like the people, with the people. This wasn’t an optional pathway for him he needed to suffer to reach enlightenment. With this enlightenment he became a vessel and shared his wisdom as the ferryman when he replaced Vasuveda. Finally, when Govinda came to the river he gives all he has to offer and Govinda experiences something both wonderful and terrifying:
He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha. He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with fading eyes—he saw the face of a new-born child, red and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying—he saw the face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into the body of another person—he saw, in the same second, this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head being chopped off by the executioner with one blow of his sword—he saw the bodies of men and women, naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love—he saw corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void— he saw the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants, of bulls, of birds—he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni—he saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transistorizes, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face—and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated themselves, floated along and merged with each other, and they were all constantly covered by something thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing, like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha's smiling face, which he, Govinda, in this very same moment touched with his lips. And, Govinda saw it like this, this smile of the mask, this smile of oneness above the flowing forms, this smile of simultaneousness above the thousand births and deaths, this smile of Siddhartha was precisely the same, was precisely of the same kind as the quiet, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps benevolent, perhaps mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha, as he had seen it himself with great respect a hundred times. Like this, Govinda knew, the perfected ones are smiling.
None of this would have been possible if Siddhartha didn’t continue to fail and get back up and try new paths and experience new things. This was Siddhartha’s path to enlightenment, an endless path of renewal.