Siddhartha and Govinda inform the leader of the Samanas of their decision to leave. The leader is clearly displeased, but Siddhartha silences him with an almost magical, hypnotizing gaze. Siddhartha is initially pleased with Gotama, and he and Govinda are instructed in the Eightfold Path, the four main points, and other aspects of Buddhism. However, while Govinda is convinced to join Gotama and his followers, Siddhartha still has doubts.
Siddhartha realizes Buddhism will not give him the answers he needs. Sadly, he leaves Govinda behind and begins a search for the meaning of life, the achievement of which he feels will not be dependent on religious instruction. Siddhartha decides to embark on a life free from meditation and the spiritual quests he has been pursuing, and to instead learn from the pleasures of the body and the material world. In his new wanderings, Siddhartha meets a friendly ferryman, fully content with his simple life.
Here, a beautiful courtesan named Kamala entrances him. He knows she would be the best one to teach him about the world of love, but Kamala will not have him unless he proves he can fit into the material world. She convinces him to take up the path of the merchant. With her help, Siddhartha soon finds employment with a merchant named Kamaswami and begins to learn the trade. While Siddhartha learns the wisdom of the business world and begins to master the skills Kamaswami teaches him, Kamala becomes his lover and teaches him what she knows about love.
Soon, he is a rich man and enjoys the benefits of an affluent life. He gambles, drinks, and dances, and anything that can be bought in the material world is his for the taking. Siddhartha is detached from this life, however, and he can never see it as more than a game. The more he obtains in the material world, the less it satisfies him, and he is soon caught in a cycle of unhappiness that he tries to escape by engaging in even more gambling, drinking, and sex.
He understands that the material world is slowly killing him without providing him with the enlightenment for which he has been searching.
One night, he resolves to leave it all behind and departs without notifying either Kamala or Kamaswami. Sick at heart, Siddhartha wanders until he finds a river.
It does not seem coincidental that the book is separated into two parts, part I with 4 chapters and part II with 8 chapters: there are Four Noble Truths to Buddhism and the Buddha's path to salvation is called the Eightfold path. This focus on suffering and the attainment of peace as the abolition of suffering is very important to the novel. This is central to Siddhartha's discussion with the Buddha, which forms the start of the climax of part I of the book.
There are two thematic concerns at the heart of Siddhartha and the Buddha's discussion, both of which we have discussed previously. The first relies on the relationship between seeking truth and seeking peace. To express the same point another way, the question is one of metaphysics or ethics, a question of reality, truth, and knowledge or how one should live one's life.
Siddhartha tells the Buddha that his view of the universe as cause and effect, his metaphysics, is unimpeachable, but it seems to break down at a crucial point, the point at which we are able to escape from this causal chain, the point of salvation. The Buddha responds that the goal of his teaching is "not to explain the world to those who are thirsty for knowledge.
Its goal is quite different; its goal is salvation from suffering. This means that the Buddha is privileging ethics over metaphysics. Finding peace from suffering is what matters, not discovering the true nature of ourselves or of the universe. This comports with the Buddhist doctrine of AnAtman, or no-soul, which denies the Hindu duality between the absolute reality of Brahman and the false reality of Maya. Given that the pain from which Siddhartha has tried to escape is specifically the pain of metaphysical ignorance, it is odd that he does not respond to the Buddha here.
We will return to this question later, as it seems to be one of the unresolved issues in the novel. Siddhartha then expresses doubt that the Buddha's teaching can ever bring someone to Nirvana.
This secret, the experience of Nirvana, can only be reached by oneself. This, of course, seems true. Buddhism only tells you how to approach the goal because the nature of the goal is such that it can only be known first-personally achieved; it is a state of consciousness.
For example, the fact that I cannot make you intoxicated by telling you what being intoxicated feels like does not mean that I cannot tell you how to become intoxicated yourself.
Given this, Siddhartha's comments seem off the mark. Siddhartha's commentary is really a metaphysical rather than an ethical point.
Siddhartha believes that the Self as Atman will guide us through some sort of inner voice. This is why he denies the value of teachers; they distract one from this inner guide. The Buddha does not believe in the Atman, at least not in the same way, and so seems to believe that people can be taught to approach Nirvana.
It is Siddhartha's metaphysics, then, his view of what the Self really is, that makes him dissatisfied with Buddhism. This is what Siddhartha is getting at when he responds that "I must judge for myself. I must choose and reject" While the Buddha's path may work for some, it does not work for himself. He must follow his inner voice. If this is true, though, why does Siddhartha respond to the Buddha that there is nothing wrong with other people following his teachings.
Is it that their inner voice tells them different things than Siddhartha's? How could this be if the Atman is really Brahman, the unity of all things. If their voices are the same, either they are right in following Buddha's path or Siddhartha is right in rejecting it. This problem raises tensions which are more fully developed in the next chapter. In this final chapter of part I, Siddhartha reviews all of his experiences up to that point and comes to conclusions that will shape his future.
First, he concludes that he is done with teachers. This was clear from the previous chapter. He then asks what he intended to learn from the teachers and answers that he sought to know the nature of Self.
The way he expresses this is very interesting. He says, "truly nothing in the world has occupied my thoughts as much as the Self, this riddle, that I live, that I am one and am separated and different from everyone else, that I am Siddhartha" This provides an enlightening interpretation of Siddhartha's quest, because it is the first time he considers the Self as a solitary unity apart from the substratum of Atman to which the ego is attached.
He has sought that which unites him with all things instead of that which marks him as distinct, as Siddhartha. Siddhartha admits this in the next paragraph, saying that "the reason why I do not know anything about myself I was seeking Brahman, Atman, But by doing so, I lost myself on the way" Yes, the view that the Self is Atman does commit one to identifying with a reality more expansive and objective than one's singular personality: that is precisely the point.
That this seems as a shock to Siddhartha is surprising as his quest for the Self as Atman was made clear in the first chapter. After this "awakening," Siddhartha commits himself to learning from himself and not search single-mindedly for Atman.
This concern with authenticity, being true to one's particularity, derives from a decidedly Western context, and it is in this direction that Siddhartha moves in this chapter. Moreover, it is not clear why Siddhartha makes this move. He has lost himself on the way, but it is not clear why this is bad. It was not an unexpected side-effect of his quest. It was the very heart of it. This is a far cry from Siddhartha's present contention that he has failed because he has lost himself.
Siddhartha's logic here seems obscure. The effect of Siddhartha's contemplation is his denial of Hindu duality; he know longer believes that the world in which we commonly live is an illusion, Maya. As he says, "Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them" Why he decides this, though, is not clear. All in all, it seems like a convenient way to conclude Siddhartha's life as a thinker, the first part of his tripartite quest.
There seems to be no obvious connection between listening to one's inner voice and appreciating the diversity of the world. In any case, Siddhartha agrees with the Buddha, and this transfiguration is meant to mirror the Buddha's awakening from under the Bodhi tree. But while the Buddha awakened to Nirvana, Siddhartha has not yet done this.
Siddhartha is far from it. He is traveling another path, one brought out powerfully by the chapter's close. Somewhat surprisingly, the last two paragraphs of this chapter are a startling precursor to European Existentialism.
Indeed, the sentence "At that moment, when the world around him melted away, when he stood alone like a star in the heavens, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of icy despair, but he was more firmly himself than ever," could have come from Kierkegaard or Sartre or Camus.
This sense of harrowing solitude is against the deepest spiritual convictions of Indian thinkers and further underscores the extent to which Hesse is importing Western ideas into an Eastern context. The Question and Answer section for Siddhartha is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. Active Themes. The Path to Spiritual Enlightenment. Related Quotes with Explanations.
Through the dry and rainy seasons, Siddhartha suffers the pain of burning and freezing, and sores from walking, but he withstands everything, until the pains fade. He learns to control his breath, to slow it right down until he is hardly breathing. He learns the art of unselfing meditation, loosing his soul from memories and senses. He feels like he embodies the creatures around him, the heron and even the dead jackal, through the whole life cycle.
He transforms, from creature to plant to weather to self again. No matter how totally he seems to leave himself, he always returns, and feels himself in an inescapable cycle. Siddhartha is overtaken by physical phenomena. The heat and the cold impose themselves on his body, but through thought he banishes all of his human responses and overcomes them. But instead of becoming one with nature, as we later learn is possible, Siddhartha seems to be trying to extinguish himself, to eliminate the impact of nature on him.
Each time he comes back to his own body, it seems like a failure, not like a positive reconnection with his spirit. Siddhartha asks Govinda , who has been living this painful samana life along with him, whether he thinks they have made progress.
Govinda thinks Siddhartha is learning quickly and will become a great samana, even a saint, but Siddhartha himself is not so sure. He thinks he could have learned just as much among criminals in the red light district or an ox driver! Govinda thinks this is a joke. How could the same selflessness be learned there? Siddhartha is cynical. In both the life of the samanas and the philosophy of contemplation and speaking the om that they learned from the Brahmins, Siddhartha and Govinda have grown up with the notion that enlightenment is a high ideal and that there is a distinct direction upwards that leads to this level of greatness.
He feels as though he is seeing the world, puzzling and magical, for the first time. He realizes he is in the middle of the world and that he is not enlightened, but that he can awaken while learning more about himself. Siddhartha is suddenly infused with a powerful certainty in his own powers of self-realization. He feels he has truly become a man. Instead, Siddhartha feels sure that his path to enlightenment will come from within himself. Thus resolved, his new task will be to discover how to find this enlightenment.
His first impulse is to return home to his father, but then he realizes that his home is part of the past. He suddenly knows he is completely alone, and a shudder runs through him.
Here, in the midst of what exists within him and around him, Siddhartha must discover who and what he is. He calls this discovery a rebirth, one of several rebirths he will undergo during his quest. This rebirth signifies the death of what he was and his ignorance of what he will become. He knows he cannot return to his father because he will not gain any more wisdom from the past. In a way, this moment exists independently of the rest of time: briefly, Siddhartha has no remembered past and no discernible future.
This moment in the present marks more than a transition, however, because it offers Siddhartha a glimpse of the sum of all individual instants in time. Although Siddhartha barely realizes it, this supreme awareness brings him close to the unity he seeks. The next part of his quest must take him away from the spiritual world and into the material world. Although Siddhartha had considered the freedoms and limitations of the spiritual and material worlds in earlier chapters, he contemplates them more fully here.
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