ENCOUNTERING THE DIVINE IN LITERATURE

Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha

Following the voice of the Divine within

Ruth Smith
ILLUMINATION-Curated

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Hermann Hesse’s desk: Hesse Museum at Gaienhofen, Wikimedia

The German-Swiss writer, Hermann Hesse, published his novel, Siddhartha, in 1922. Like several of his other novels, it is the story of an individual’s search for truth and spirituality. Siddhartha is a young Indian boy, brought up in a devout Hindu household, who sets out to make the religion of his parents his own. As a boy, he succeeds in mastering the outer requirements of his religion, soaking up the knowledge of his Brahmin teachers, assiduously sacrificing to the gods and praying to them.

M.V. Dhurandhar [signed ]Unknown Publisher, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Yet he is restless, sensing that there is more. His teachers pass on the truth that the deepest part of a human being, the Atman, is one with the Brahman (the Divine) and that, in sleep, the human dwells in the Divine. But Siddhartha sees no evidence that the Brahmins themselves experience what they teach, in their everyday lives.

Where were the initiated who, attaining Atman in sleep, could retain it in consciousness, in life, everywhere, in speech and in action?¹

Siddhartha continues his search as a teenager, ‘preoccupied … as a youth with asceticism, with thinking and meditation.’ Then, as a young man, he feels drawn to leave his home and become a Samana — a wandering ascetic who lives outside the norms and comforts of ordinary life: ‘I lived in the woods, suffered heat and cold. I learned to fast, I learned to conquer my body’ (p.75). After a time, Siddhartha leaves the Samanas with his friend Govinda and, wandering onwards, comes to the place where a holy man lives and teaches— attracting a great number of followers. His name is Gotama and he has begun to be known as the Awakened One (the Buddha).

Although Gotama is an ‘unassuming man in a yellow cowl’ (p.22), dressed just like all the other monks, Siddhartha at once recognizes him as the Buddha. He is walking quietly on his way but

his face and his step, his peaceful downward glance, his peaceful downward-hanging hand, and every finger of his hand spoke peace, spoke of completeness, sought nothing, imitated nothing, reflected a continual quiet, an unfading light, an invulnerable peace (p.23).

The two friends listen to the Buddha’s teaching and Govinda wholeheartedly throws in his lot with him, fully expecting that Siddhartha will do the same. But, although Siddhartha sees that in ‘every joint of every finger of (Gotama’s) hand there was knowledge; they spoke, breathed, radiated truth’ (p.23), he decides to continue on his quest, alone. Before he leaves Jetavana, where the Buddha lives, Siddhartha has a private conversation with Gotama. He praises Gotama’s wonderful teaching but raises an objection; the Buddha is teaching something new and unproven that has not been part of the perfect unity of Hindu truth. The Buddha listens politely and commends Siddhartha for the careful thought he has given to the teaching. However, he warns the young seeker against ‘the thicket of opinions and the conflict of words’ (p.27). He says that the goal of his teaching is not ‘to explain the world to those who are thirsty for knowledge… its goal is salvation from suffering… nothing else’ (p.27).

Chandrasen Yadav (Chacky yen), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Siddhartha explains why, although he has no doubt that Gotama has reached ‘the highest goal,’ he will not stay and become a disciple, like his friend Govinda. He suggests that the Buddha did not himself learn anything through the teachings of others but became enlightened through his own thought, meditation and knowledge. He, Siddhartha, wishes to find his own way: ‘to leave all doctrines and all teachers and to reach my goal alone, or die’ (p.28).

At every turn in his quest, in every choice he has made, Siddhartha feels that he has been guided by a voice he has heard within, which he sometimes describes as being like the singing of a ‘bird in my breast’:

He had heard this voice when he had left his home and chosen the life of the Samanas, and again when he had left the Samanas and gone to the Perfect One, and also when he had left him for the unknown (p.65).

Following this voice, Siddhartha leaves the Buddha and finds himself drawn to a more worldly life than he has tasted so far. He meets a woman called Kamala who teaches him the arts of love and becomes his companion. Rather than begging for alms as a monk, he goes into the service of a merchant, Kamaswami, and soon earns his master’s trust. As Siddhartha learns the skills of business Kamaswami gives him greater responsibility, which in time leads to his becoming a wealthy man in his own right. Used to living simply, Siddhartha is at first indifferent to the luxury and wealth of his new life but gradually he comes to enjoy and depend on his new comforts. Occasionally, ‘he heard within him a soft, gentle voice which reminded him quietly’ (p. 56) of his spiritual quest, of the fact that he was playing a strange game but his real self was elsewhere.

Image by Raisa Binte from Pixabay

As the years go by, a weariness settles over Siddhartha, ‘the soul sickness of the rich crept over him’. His comfortable new life loses its ‘colour and sheen’ and disillusionment and nausea begin to take over, without his realizing it. What he does notice is that ‘the bright and clear inward voice that had once awakened in him and had always guided him in his finest hours had become silent’ (p.61).

One day, Kamala asks him to tell her about the Buddha. She listens intently and expresses a desire to, one day, become a follower herself. Looking at her, Siddhartha is shocked to notice that she is beginning to lose her beauty — to show the signs of old age. He spends the night drinking and carousing and cannot sleep — nauseated with himself and the ‘entirely senseless life’ (p.64) he has come to lead. At last he falls asleep and dreams about the rare songbird that Kamala keeps as a pet. In the dream he notices that the bird has stopped singing and, discovering its inert body on the floor of the cage, he has a strong sense that he has thrown everything good in his life away. That night, Siddhartha leaves behind his lover, his house and pleasure garden, his job and all his possessions.

Wandering in the forest, Siddhartha comes to a river. He has reached the end of his resources and feels totally alienated from his true Atman self. ‘The songbird was dead; its death, which he had dreamt about, was the bird in his own heart’ (p.68). Hating even the image of himself in the water, he longs to drop down into the river, to let himself go and be submerged. At this point, something significant occurs.

From a remote part of his soul, from the past of his tired life, he heard a sound. It was one word, one syllable, which without thinking he spoke distinctly, the ancient beginning and ending of all Brahmin prayers, the holy Om, which had the meaning of ‘the Perfect One’ or ‘Perfection.’ At that moment, when the sound of Om reached Siddhartha’s ears, his slumbering soul suddenly awakened and he recognized the folly of his action (p. 69).

In the past, whenever Siddhartha has received divine guidance, it has been heard or felt within but it has come to him unbidden, from somewhere beyond himself. At this life or death moment, he again hears a sound but it is Siddhartha himself who has made the sound, who speaks the life-giving word, ‘without thinking’ (p.69). Rather than waiting for a message, he discovers for the first time that hidden beneath his thoughts is his true self, the Atman, and that if he speaks from his true self, his ‘slumbering soul’ can hear and awaken. He speaks the word again, inwardly, and ‘he was conscious of Brahman, of the indestructibleness of life; he remembered all that he had forgotten, all that was divine’ (p.70).

Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

Siddhartha falls asleep for a long time and awakes refreshed, like a new man. ‘Softly he said the word Om to himself, over which he had fallen asleep, and it seemed to him as if his whole sleep had been a long deep pronouncing of Om, thinking of Om, an immersion and penetration into Om, into the nameless, into the Divine’ (p.71).

Siddhartha is now famished for he has not eaten for two days. In his youth he had mastered the art of fasting but the years of soft living have taken him back to being ‘an ordinary person’ (p.74). He feels like a naked young child again - possessing nothing, knowing nothing - and he laughs at the sense that he is going backwards like the river in front of him, ‘singing merrily’. He sees that the years of worldly pleasure, getting and squandering money, had their purpose and the path he has travelled ‘has been good and the bird in my breast has not died’ (p.75). What the Buddha had hinted was hampering him has been addressed. ‘I had to spend many years like that in order to lose my intelligence, to lose the power to think, to forget about the unity of things.’ Not only did Siddhartha have to reach the point of despair in order to experience grace, he ‘had to become a fool again in order to find Atman in myself’ (p.76).

Siddhartha takes joy in the fact that ‘the bird, the clear spring and voice within him was still alive’ (p.77). He realizes that what he has always known intellectually — that the riches of the world do not bring fulfilment — he has now experienced for himself, so that the knowledge is living and real. He realizes something else too:

Something … in him had died, something that he had long desired should perish. Was it not what he had once wished to destroy during his ardent years of asceticism? Was it not his Self, his small, fearful and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years? (p.77)

Looking back, he sees that in his earlier years he had tried to fight his small Self with ‘too much knowledge … too many holy verses, too many sacrificial rites, too much mortification of the flesh, too much doing and striving.’ It had been counterproductive.

His Self had crawled into his priesthood, into his arrogance, into his intellectuality. It sat there tightly and grew, while he thought he was destroying it by fasting and penitence. Now he understood it and realized that the inward voice had been right. No teacher could have brought him salvation (p 78).

Siddhartha feels strongly drawn to the river and persuades the ferryman, Vasudeva, to take him on as an apprentice so that he can stay close to it: ‘It seemed as if the river had something special to tell him, something which he did not know, something which still awaited him’ (p.78). As the ferryman reminds him, he has already ‘learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths’ (p.82). During the years that follow, living with Vasudeva and working on the river, he learns many more secrets. He discovers that in the river, he is hearing ‘the voice of life, the voice of Being, of perpetual Becoming’ (p.85) and that life, like the river, is a flow, ‘always the same … and yet every moment new’ (p.79). Like the ferryman before him, Siddhartha learns from the river how to listen: ‘to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinions’ (p.83).

Image by Praveen Raj from Pixabay

He learns that time is ultimately an illusion, that reality is always to be found in the present moment:

The river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future (p.83).

One day, Siddhartha’s lover, Kamala, now an old woman, comes to the river. With her is a boy, the son that she bore by Siddhartha after he left her. She is bitten by a snake and dies in the ferryman’s hut, leaving Siddhartha with the task of raising his son. The boy is difficult. He does not want to live the simple life of a ferryman’s son nor to seek the wisdom of the river, and Siddhartha learns many things from the years that follow: the pain of truly loving another when that love is not returned, the necessity of letting the other go, to follow their own path.

Siddhartha’s suffering over his son leads him to listen ever more deeply to the river. There he hears the voices of suffering, but also of joy, of good and of evil, of pleasure and of pain. He discovers the freedom of relinquishing duality, the propensity to set one thing against another: ‘when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om — perfection’ (p. 105).

When he meets his friend, Govinda, after a long time apart, Siddhartha tries to communicate something of what he has learned, though he knows it is not ultimately possible to pass wisdom on to another. Like Julian of Norwich, he has discovered the hidden truth that ‘ everything that exists is good — death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly.’ He has come to see that the path to freedom and well-being is to assent, to bring ‘loving understanding’ to what life presents and then, like Julian, he can say that ‘all is well with me and nothing can harm me’ (p. 111).²

From boyhood Siddhartha has been a seeker after truth and reality. Following his inner voice, he has walked the conventional religious path but has not found what he was seeking there, despite his strenuous efforts to be holy. The inner voice has led him to unexpected places, to friendship with the world and its delights. He has learned to love and experienced the pain that love can bring. At last he has discovered that the Divine cannot be tied down in doctrines nor accessed by following the desires of the superficial self. It is in listening deeply to the river — dynamic, flowing, all-encompassing — that Siddhartha’s pain is dispersed.

From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny. There shone in his face the serenity of knowledge, of one who is no longer confronted with conflict of desires, who has found salvation, who is in harmony with the stream of events, with the stream of life, full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself to the stream, belonging to the unity of all things (p.105).

Photo by Spring Fed Images on Unsplash

Notes

  1. Herman Hesse (2008, first published 1922), Siddhartha, Penguin Books, p.6. All subsequent quotations from this edition.
  2. Julian of Norwich was a 14th-century anchoress — a religious recluse - who lived in a cell attached to a church in Norwich, England. Seriously ill (possibly during a near-death experience?), she received divine revelations, during the course of which she questioned God about sin and why he allowed it to exist. The answer given her is recorded in Chaper 27 of the book she later wrote about her revelations. God says that ‘sin is behovable [i.e. necessary or inevitable] but all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ Penguin Books published a translation of the book into modern English in 1966: Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love (trans. Clifton Wolters).

Thank you for reading!

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Ruth Smith
ILLUMINATION-Curated

Author of ‘Gold of Pleasure: A Novel of Christina of Markyate’. PhD . Spiritual growth, psychology, the Enneagram. Exploring where fiction and spirituality meet