Siddharta
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by Herman Hesse
I had just boarded the D train, and plummeted down on one of the remaining seats. I pulled out Siddhartha and opened it to where I had left off on page 45.
"He saw trees, stars, animals, clouds, rainbows, rocks, weeds, flowers, brook and river, the sparkle of dew on bushes in the morning, distant high mountains blue and pale; birds sang, bees hummed, the wind blew gently across the rice fields. All this, colored and in a thousand different forms, had always been there. The sun and moon had always shone; the rivers had always flowed and the bees had hummed, but in previous times all this had been nothing to Siddhartha but a fleeting and illusive veil before his eyes, regarded with distrust, comdemned to be disregarded and ostracized from the thoughts, because it was not reality, because reality lay on the other side of the visible. But now his eyes lingered on this side…"
Before I finished a paragraph, the guy sitting next to me said, "I love that book."
"I'm loving it too."
"Where have you gotten to?"
"He has just bid the Buddha farewell, and told him that he can not learn from teachings. That enlightenment can't be communicated through words and teachings, and that the Buddha also didn't learn that way."
"Have you read any of Hesse's other work?"
"No, I always thought it would be too heavy, given the name, Herman Hesse…! But it's not."
"No, it's not heavy but it's deep."
Well said.
And so the conversation continued, one of those train conversations, but there was a kind of alignment there, because of the book we shared.
Siddhartha is an experience. Whenever I opened it, I would forget where I was. It is the story of a journey. Of having to lose yourself before you can find yourself. Of someone who is not a follower of any person or idea, but of his own soul. Of a seeker of meaning, who grows the wisdom to know that "when someone is seeking, it happens quite easily … that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking". Of a learner who learns to learn from nature and to listen for perfection in the river.
Lessons from the river are somehow a recurring theme these days…
Do read it...
- Reviewed by Mille Bojer
News from Pioneers of Change - SEPTEMBER 2007
Warriors Without Weapons 2009
