Этот роман является введением в буддистскую и индуистскую философию для людей далеких от них, написанный языком, понятным для обычных людей. Молодой брахман Сиддхартха ведет поиск мудрости, истязая себя аскезой, учился голодать, научился благоговейному почитанию и теперь должен воспринимать его, как препятствие на пути к высочайшему смыслу. Своей цели Сиддхартха достигает только после того, как открывается навстречу духовной и телесной сторонам жизни, преодолевает в себе отчаяние. Он учился у Камалы любви, учился торговать. Он преодолевает я, опирается на самость – психологическую опору любой религии. Роман-становление, основанный на древней легенде о Гаутаме-Будде.
Брахманы знали все – от сотворения мира, но что проку в знаниях, если не знаешь самого важного? Упанишады говорят: душа твоя – весь мир. Дивная мудрость заключена в словах. Хотел постичь свое я, освободиться от него, загадка, что есть он один, единственный. Ни об одной вещи он не знает меньше, чем о себе, о Сиддхартхе.
В старости, он приходит к мысли, что он скатился вниз, невежественный, с пустотою внутри. «Ты катишься вниз», - сказал он себе и увидел реку, катящую воды вниз. Его путь был извилист, прошел через столько пороков и порогов, только для того, чтобы стать ребенком. Он сражался со своим «Я», он был исполнен высокомерия, всегда одухотворенный, священнослужитель или мудрец, в этой одухотворенности скрывалось его «я», поэтому он должен был уйти в мир, покуда не умрет в нем священнослужитель и самана. Недолговечен Сиддхартха, недолговечны воплощения. Кто способен постичь реку, тот поймет философию. Река бежит вниз, но при этом стоит на месте, все время меняется, но все время одна и та же. Река ему друг, река с ним говорит. Река для людей была помехой, и нужен был перевозчик, чтобы преодолеть эту преграду. Но нашлись несколько человек, для кого, река не была преградой. Каждая волна, каждая капля стремятся к разным целям – водопаду, озеру, морю, и каждая достигала цели. Из воды выбивается туман, поднимается к небу, низвергается дождем на землю, становится источником и снова течет к своим целям.
Прекрасная книга с глубоким смыслом.

By the latter part of the 19th Century, the colonial spread of European powers across the world was in full swing. The British ruled India and Australia and had gone to war with China to force opium on the population. Africa, South America, and the Philippines had been portioned out for Western rule and control of resources.

But tyranny does not travel only in one direction, from conqueror to subject. When Medieval European knights returned from the crusades, they brought with them mathematical principles, Greek and Roman texts, and thus was the European Renaissance kindled by the Light of Islam. Africans were brought to America as slaves, but even being scattered and mistreated did not prevent them from changing the culture, gifting us with blues, jazz, and African-descended words like 'funk', 'mojo', 'boogie', and 'cool'.

It was the same with the colonial powers of the fin de siècle , who brought back stories, myths, fashions, art, and philosophies from all over the world. Many Europeans grew obsessed with these foreign religions, finding in them both universal truths of human existence and completely new modes of thought. Organizations like the Theosophical Society were formed to explore these religions--it was all the rage.

But there was a problem: they got almost all of it wrong.

A Frenchman could spend his entire life learning the intricacies of Greek and Hebrew in order to study Catholicism--its origins, philosophies, schisms, heresies, and history--and still find that, in the end, there is much he does not know, and that he'd made many errors along the way. This, despite the fact that his culture is already steeped in it, he can go and speak to one of hundreds of experts any time he has a question, and has access to a complete library of texts on the subject written in his own language, and by people of a similar culture.

Now, imagine our 19th Century Gascon trying to do the same thing with Buddhism, where not only the original texts on the subject but the histories and analyses are in not merely a foreign language, but a completely different language branch, where the experts are from a different culture and speak a different language, and where the complexity and depth of history are just as vast.

It's no wonder that the Theosophists and similar groups ended up with garbled, mistranslated, simplified versions that combined opposing schools of thought haphazardly. As an old philosophy professor of mine once said: "You can learn a great deal about German Protestantism from reading Siddhartha, but almost nothing about Buddhism".

What ultimately emerged from the Theosophist movement was not a branch of Western Buddhism, but the 'New Age Movement': a grab bag of the same old Western ideas dressed up as mystical Oriental wisdom. Indeed, the central idea of the inane self-help book 'The Secret' and of Siddhartha are the same: the 'Law of Attraction', which is not a Buddhist principle.

Like most of Hesse's work, it belongs in the 'Spiritual Self-Help' section, where vague handwaving and knowing looks are held in higher esteem than thought or insight. It's the same nonspecific mysticism he shows us in n  The Journey To The Eastn and n  The Glass Bead Gamen, where the benefits of wisdom are indistinguishable from the symptoms of profound dementia.

If you want to understand Buddhism, start somewhere else, because you'd just have to unlearn all of Hesse's incorrect arguments and definitions. Happily, we have come a long way since Hesse's time, with experts and commentaries in many different languages available to the avid student. But, if you'd like to see someone try to explain the principles of Lutheranism using only misused Hindu terms, this may be the book for you.

Rereading Siddhartha After Many Years

I read Herman Hesse's short novel "Siddhartha" in high school, as many people of my generation did and as many young people still do. I remember being deeply moved by the book and going on to read more of Hesse over several years. Then, I put Hesse aside for a long time. Even though I grew seriously interested in Buddhism some years ago, I was not moved to revisit "Siddhartha" or Hesse.

After rereading "Narcissus and Goldmund", I returned at last to "Siddhartha". It is difficult to recapture feelings from many years ago, but I was moved again by Hesse's book but probably saw it differently than I did when I was young. Although the book appeals primarily to young readers, something is to be gained by reading it late in life. The book has deservedly become famous and will at any age reward reading.

Hesse's novel tells the story of the title character from his youth through old age. Siddhartha is the child of a well-to-do Brahmin and is a gifted student with a good friend, Govinda. As an adolescent, Siddhartha experiences spiritual discontent and to the chagrin of his father joins an ascetic sect, the Samanas, which wander the forest practicing self-mortification. After some years, Siddhartha again realizes he is dissatisfied. He and Govinda, who has joined him, go to hear the teachings of the Buddha. Govinda becomes a follower but Siddhartha, after a conversation with the Buddha, wanders on his way looking for experiences rather than teachings. After crossing a river through a mysterious ferryman, Siddhartha comes to a town, meets and becomes enamored of a beautiful courtesan, Kamala, and ultimately becomes rich, successful, and Kamala's lover. Siddhartha again comes to feel the emptiness of this life and wanders off where he meets the old ferryman and, with guidance from the ferryman and from the river, spends the rest of his life ferrying people over the river and attains peace and contentment at last.

Young people probably read "Siddhartha" because of the protagonist's search for meaning in life which begins in youth. Reading at later in life, one might think more about Siddhartha's old age. It might be tempting to suppose that Siddhartha rejected the materialism and sensuality he adopted in the middle years of his life, but that is not the case. It seems to me that the elderly Siddhartha accepted his activities and experiences during these years and saw them as continuous with his life as part of a timeless whole. So too, some might refer to Siddhartha's search as involving in recent jargon "finding oneself" but Siddhartha seeks to lose the sense of a separate self and to try to see reality whole.

Instead of the rejection of American society of the counter-culture of my youth, Siddhartha finds an acceptance of himself, of others, and of the culture in which he lives. He says at one point that the difference between the wise and other people is that the former avoid taking the part for the whole, and even that insight can be overdone. Although Siddhartha comes to believe in the inadequacy of words and concepts to express full reality, he tries to explain his insights several times in the latter part of the book. When he meets again his old friend Govinda who has become a faithful disciple of the Buddha, Siddhartha struggles to explain what he has learned.

"[I]t seems to me that everything that exists is good -- death as well as life , sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding; then all is well with me and nothing can harm me. I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it."

There is a sense of understanding of one's life and of a love and acceptance of reality as a whole and -- more concretely -- of the society in which one lives -- that becomes an important part of Siddhartha's wisdom. Parts of this understanding may not be apparent to young readers who love Hesse's novel or, indeed, to other readers stung with a sense of social criticism, as was the case in late 1960s America and as remains the case today. Something is to be learned from a spiritual vision that might have escaped youthful readers.

I learned a great deal from reading and thinking about "Siddhartha" again and in thinking about reading the book when I was young.

Robin Friedman

Γραμμένο σε στυλ παραμυθιού, αλλά με πολύ βαθιά νοήματα. Η ιστορία του Σιντάρτα, ενός φωτισμένου ανθρώπου που έψαχνε διαρκώς το νόημα της ζωής, στην ασκητική ζωή, στην κοσμική, ζώντας ως ερημίτης.... λέγοντας αντίο πολλές φορές και κάνοντας το βήμα μπροστά, πάντα αναζητώντας κάτι παραπάνω.. Προφανώς οι αντιστοιχίες με τη σύγχρονη ζωή πολλές.

Μεγάλες αλήθειες μέσα από λόγια απλά, γιατί ουσιαστικά εκεί κρύβονται τα μεγάλα νοήματα: λέγοντας αντίο σε όσα δεν μας ταιριάζουν πλέον και υποδεχόμενοι τον καινούριο μας εαυτό, πολλές φορές κατά τη διάρκεια της ζωής μας... (ναι, είναι εγωιστικό, αλλά αυτό είναι άλλο μεγάλο θέμα συζήτησης...)

n   Σαν αερικό θα ζήσω ωωωω σαν αερικό n

"Τι είναι η αυτοσυγκέντρωση; Τι είναι η εγκατάλειψη του σώματος; ΤΙ είναι η νηστεία; Τι σημαίνει να ρυθμίζεις την αναπνοή σου; Είναι φυγή από το Εγώ, είναι μια σύντομη απόδραση από τον πόνο της ύπαρξης, μια σύντομη απόδραση από τον πόνο της ύπαρξης, μια σύντομη νάρκωση για να μη νιώθεις τον πόνο και τον παραλογισμό της ζωής. Την ίδια φυγή, την ίδια σύντομη νάρκωση βρίσκει ο ζευγάς στο πανδοχείο πίνοντας μερικές κούπες κρασί.... Δεν νιώθει πια τον εαυτό του, δεν νιώθει τον πόνο της ζωής, ναρκώνεται για λίγο..."

"Όταν ψάχνει κανείς, συχνά τα μάτια του δεν βλέπουν παρά μονάχα το πράγμα που ψάχνει, δεν μπορεί να βρει τίποτα και δεν είναι δεκτικός, γιατί σκέφτεται μονάχα εκείνο που ψάχνει, γιατί έχει ένα στόχο, κι ο στόχος τον έχει κυριέψει. Αναζητώ σημαίνει έχω ένα στόχο. Βρίσκω, όμως, σημαίνει: είμαι ελεύθερος, είμαι ανοιχτός, δεν έχω κανένα στόχο".

"Η σοφία δεν μπορεί να μεταδοθεί. Η σοφία που προσπαθεί να μεταδώσει ο σοφός, μοιάζει πάντα με τρέλα. Τη γνώση μπορεί να τη μεταδώσει κανείς, τη σοφία όχι. Μπορεί κανείς να τη βρει, να τη ζήσει, να στηριχθεί σε αυτήν, να κάνει θαύματα με τη βοήθειά της, αλλά δεν μπορεί να τη διατυπώσει με λόγια και να τη διδάξει".

The introduction in my edition is written by Paolo Coelho author of The Alchemist and having read that many years ago, I can see where he took his inspiration from.

What did I take from this book?

I need to stop and remember to be mindful. Focused, conscious, aware.

I need to stop and remember be present. Concentrated, attentive, watchful.

I need to stop
and remember to not just to Look; definition (glance, peer, peep) but to See; definition (discern, distinguish, recognise).

I need to remember to not just Hear; (perceive, catch, get) but to Listen; (attend, heed, hearken)

I need to remember what I've learnt about Unity;
 Unity of all existence, which is seen as the essential foundation of all true spiritual traditions, from Hindu and Buddhist teachings of India and China to the monotheism of western religions.

I need to remember Love is the only thing that matters in the world.

Quotes
But he learned more from the river than Vasudeva could teach him. He learned from it continually. Above all he learned from it how to listen, to listen with a still heart, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgement, without opinions.

Brahman is the unchanging, infinite, immanent and transcendent reality which is the Divine ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being and everything beyond in this universe.

Sometimes books find you at exactly the right time and this was one of those for me. Did I discover anything new? We'll see. :)

It feels very strange, even un-necessary to rate this one but the nature of GR asks that I do....
5*

While the simple writing is nothing extraordinary and the philosophical underpinnings tend towards reductionism, I'm still inclined to say 5 stars for all the warm and fuzzy feelings.

Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the realisation, the knowledge, what wisdom actually was, what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness.

Uber popular & widely read in high schools & colleges all over the US, there is a goldmine of true, deep (om... indescribable?) philosophy in Siddhartha—a constant string of meditation & a neverending search through a thick forest of abstraction. The world is Westernized by the wise writer, and his easy prose is easy to follow, although the concepts take a while to sink in (I mean, how can a person really be devoid of love? How can possessions, even the indispensable ones, be so discardable? How can life be so NEATLY, ARTFULLY circular?). But of these Everyman-overtaking-his-destiny novels, this one belongs right above “The Alchemist” (you know that Coelho was completely aware of the conventions which make up these type of stories), but not superior to “The Life and Times of Michael K.” by Coetzee, and definitely not as fun, rambunctious, random, nor bafflingly-surreal as the French classic “Candide.” Students should be encouraged to read Voltaire—in this case, although not in all of them, French lit undermines the German type?

P.S. Two guests of mine have already left me a copy of this--such a tradition for literary geeks to be a part of.

Been wanting to read this book for a long, long time.

And yes, I did it, read it on the first day of 2022!

Well, there are many parts which are quotable and can be considered great advice and thought provoking.

Well, that's fine. I got what I needed from this classic read.

However, I m just not a big fan of either the characters, the plot or the writing style.

Well, a good start of the year nevertheless.

"Siddhartha? Am I, Govinda, still such a dumbshit that even in my advanced age I do not recognize thee yet again and must I continually play the fool for the didactic purposes of this story, even though my hair is grey and my travels many?"

"Perhaps it is so, my oldest friend. But I do not judge Mr. Hesse too harshly. He is yet one of the many voices in the stream of life. He is trying to distill the voices of humanity into a great Om of pidgen, monotonal kitsch language and dialogue, and does so repetitively, so that the great masses might hear his message."

"Ah, my old friend Siddhartha, it makes sense to me now. Although it does seem to me that a great number of Buddhist terms are placed in our mouths by Mr. Hesse without sufficient explanation of them for the uninitiated, but I suppose context is everything."

"Tis so. But again, do not judge him too much. This was but a baby step in teaching those in the West about the ways of the East. And, quite frankly, Mr. Hesse rather rocks for allowing me to repeatedly taste of the nectar of the finest courtesan, she whose mouth is like a fig."

I recently reread Hesse’s Steppenwolf, a book I had not read since my teens, and liked the memory trip it afforded me. Hesse was important to me as a young man, and I learned much from the romantic German seeker who journeyed to the East and wrote of a spiritual tradition that I deemed to be less judgmental and binary (good/bad) than my Dutch Reformed Calvinist upbringing. Siddhartha was very important to me in bringing to life through story a way of synthesizing western and eastern spiritual ideas. Hesse was German, traveled to the east to study the Buddhist spiritual tradition, and he creates a character, Siddhartha, on a life journey to enlightenment, to help us see how such a synthesis can take place.

“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”

We were all on that road to self-discovery, as I saw it then. So many young people in the late sixties—disenchanted by sexism, racism, the onset of environmental disaster, more war—were looking for alternatives to western capitalist society that had led us to the “Eve of Destruction,” and Hesse showed scruffy, anti-Establishment idealists like me how to begin to create a different life, one that was more communal, more accepting, more committed to love and serving others. With Siddhartha, we tried to learn to laugh with the river.

Of course, as Siddhartha himself made clear in this book, things would change, we would betray those ideals, we would we would stray from the path of enlightenment, but he also saw that the staying and straying is all the same path, and vestiges of that idealism would remain as we circle back over time to those early commitments.

Hesse gives us, in this late middle aged reader’s reading of the book, a story of enlightenment, of a man’s life of leaving home against his father’s wishes and traveling to the East to meet the Buddha. For a time Siddhartha would go down a different path for a time of materialism, of licentiousness, gambling, lust, which led to despair, but then he rights the ship, he returns to the better way on his spiritual path. He is supported by a good friend, Govinda, a Buddhist; he meets a woman, Kamala, who teaches him the path of love:

“So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it.

With Kamala he also has a son, also Siddhartha, who leaves him as he left his father.

Siddhartha actually meets Gautama, the Buddha. He is also guided in part by conversations with a boatman, Vasudeva, who teaches him to laugh, and be accepting:

“I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.”

It’s a simple story, a kind of allegory of spiritual searching. It’s maybe even pretty didactic, as it is more of a spiritual teaching text, but as a novel, it does reveal the complexities of Siddhartha’s character, and the depths of his relationships. Not everyone chooses the path Siddhartha chooses. His friend Gautama chooses Buddhism; Kamala chooses the way of physical pleasure, Siddhartha’s son chooses a more licentious life, and they are all good for them, Hesse makes clear. He does not judge them. He accepts others and learns to be at peace and laugh.

“It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.”

I finally liked it very much, again. At first in rereading it I thought it was simplistic, too didactic, (someone said literary types thought of Hesse as Thomas Mann-lite, a kind of easy, pop spiritualist), but then I rediscovered the kind of purity he brings to his story. If we think of The Brothers Karamazov as a kind of spiritual journey depicting an array of choices, as it surely is, in a way, Dostoevsky’s novel is far greater, far more complex, but Siddhartha has an earnestness to it. Is it a young person’s book? I think so, but I liked it more than I had anticipated. It made me think of my own life and path.

“When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”

Cat Stevens, “On the Road to Find Out”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPv0-...

Eh.

شاید کتاب سیدارتها نوشته هرمان هسه نویسنده مشهور آلمانی را بتوان ستایش نویسنده ازمفاهیمی مانند رفتن ، جستجو کردن و به آرامش و حقیقت دست یافتن دانست ، سفری معنوی که در خلال آن می توان به خودشناسی ، شناخت معرفت و حقیقت رسید .
سیدارتها قهرمان داستان او بدین گونه پای در سفر و سلوک معنوی خود می گذارد ، او خانه پدری را ترک کرده تا شمن شود ، سالیانی به ریاضت کشی و تقویت روح و ذهن خود پرداخته اما به ناگهان پی می برد که با ریاضت کشی تنها نمی توان به حقیقت دست یافت . سفر معنوی و عرفانی او ناگهان به سفری مادی مبدل می شود ، سیدارتها در این مرحله از سفر خود از زیبایی ها و خوشی های زندگی تا حد افراط برخوردار می شود ولی همچنان از مقصد خود بسیار دور مانده است . او سفر خود را باردیگر شروع می کند تا به رودی می رسد ، با گوش دادن به آوای رود سیدارتها به حقیقت می رسد و راه رستگاری را پیدا می کند .
با پایان یافتن کتاب ، خواننده ای مانند من شاید مفاهیم کتاب را غیر کاربردی و کمی شعاری بداند ، شاید فلسفه مورد نظر جناب هسه اندکی اعتبار خود را از دست داده باشد ، شاید هم رسیدن به رود آبی و گوش سپردن به صدای جادویی آن راهی برای رسیدن به خودشناسی و رستگاری باشد .
در پایان می توان گفت تاکید جناب هسه شاید بر پیوسته بودن و جاری بودن همه امور جهان باشد ،او زندگی را مجموعه ای از خوشی ها و شادی ها ،غم ها و رنج ها ،بیماری ها و ترس ها مانند یک بدن پیوسته و همانند یک رود رونده می بیند و شاید از نگاه هرمان هسه تنها با فرورفتن در این رود است که می توان به کمال رسید .