Books |
Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse
By
Published: Jul 04, 2022
Category:
Fiction
I became aware of Hermann Hesse around the time Steppenwolf recorded “Born to Be Wild.” All the kids were reading him — he’s who you read when you graduated from Holden Caulfield. “Liking him is a good sign at age fifteen, a bad one by age twenty,” The New Yorker noted recently. “Hesse is a literary gateway drug.”
I read none of Hesse’s books then. A few years, when I was about to write a novel that involves Buddhism, I read the 152 pages paperback of “Siddhartha.” It was a revelation: a page turner, a spiritual detective story. [To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the paperback from Amazon at a ridiculously low price, click here. To buy the Kindle edition at a ridiculously low price, click here.]
What’s the attraction of Hesse? His ability to tap his own story, which, it turns out, is the story of disaffected kids everywhere and at all times. His parents were Christian purists who sent him to schools that molded students for conformity and obedience. In 1892, when he was 14, he ran away for a day. His mother prayed that he was dead. “I was very relieved when I finally got the feeling that he was in God’s merciful hands,” she wrote in her diary. No surprise that his parents had him committed to a mental asylum. He begged them to free him: “I loathe everything here from the bottom of my heart. It is like it has been designed especially to show a young man how wretched life and all its aspects are.” When he won his freedom, he worked for a mechanic, apprenticed at a bookshop, wrote a novel about an unhappy young man… and suddenly he was a successful writer.
“Siddhartha” was published in 1922, on the heels of a war that ripped the veil of civility from Europe. It’s a quest, set in India in the fifth century B.C. Siddhartha is the son of a Brahman priest, and, naturally, he rejects everything he’s been taught and sets out to find a truth he can accept.
As you know, Siddhartha is the given name of the man who became the Buddha. That is not this story — Siddhartha will meet the Buddha, be impressed by his message, but he will reject him and move on, believing that no teacher can deliver self-knowledge. For this alone, the book is a service. “Nobody finds salvation through teachings,” Hesse writes. Or, as someone has noted, “The Buddha did not worship the Buddha.”
This seeker tries everything: extreme poverty and deprivation, commerce, soul-shaking lovemaking. He drains each effort completely. A good thing: “Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone.”
The end? It’s so obvious. You’ve heard it a million times. But hearing it and knowing it — those are two different things. “Siddhartha” is a useful reminder.
