The Turn Inward

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SOURCE: “The Turn Inward,” in Faith from the Abyss: Hermann Hesse's Way from Romanticism to Modernity, New York University Press, 1965, pp. 68–78.

[In the following essay, Rose comments on the artistic logic that prompted Hesse to use the influences of his own life experience in writing Siddhartha.]

Demian as well as Klingsor's Last Summer already had visualized an ironical acceptance of the world as a possible solution for the problem of human existence. Yet because of their contemporary connotations both stories were open to misunderstanding. It was not conformity that Hesse was advocating, but a reshaping of the world from within. The Turn Inward (Der Weg nach Innen) was the common title chosen by him, in 1931, when he brought Siddhartha and Klingsor's Last Summer together under the same cover. The “turn inward” was meant to be described in both Demian and Klingsor.

For the reader of Siddhartha (1922) no further misunderstanding was possible. The Indian locale at once removed Hesse from contemporary European realities and forced him to come to grips with the existential problem. The story also made Hesse's message universal by no longer addressing itself to occidentals only.

Siddhartha is based on the life of Buddha. (Siddhartha was Buddha's original name and means the man who is on the right road.) But the interpretation of Buddha's life is by no means traditional, and the India of Siddhartha is far removed from the reality Hesse experienced in 1911. The poet has concentrated on the “subterranean, timeless world of spiritual values” (III, 857).

The son of a Brahmin, Siddhartha, at first seems content to follow the pious Hindu's path to salvation through chastity, which is here stressed in a way comparable to Protestant Pietism. However, he becomes aware that the precepts of his parents and tutors do not fit his spiritual needs, and he decides to leave home to seek his own salvation. With his friend Govinda he joins the Samanas, an ascetic sect of beggars. Both learn to restrain their impulses and to concentrate on the spirit which is innate in man and is united with the spirit of the universe. Such concentration is achieved by the practice of Yoga.

After a time, however, Yoga no longer yields true satisfaction. It is merely a step toward fulfillment; it does not represent the whole way. Siddhartha feels that trust in detailed moral prescription leads only to despair. Man can never hope for salvation by external works; he must give up his self-righteousness. It is useless to starve and maim oneself in order to find the secret behind the fragments of life. The youth therefore sets out to live a real life in the spirit—a life in Atman.

Now, Siddhartha studies the teachings of Gotama Buddha and strives “to die away from himself, to be an ego no longer, … to be open to the miracle in a selfless spirit” (III, 626). He learns that Buddha teaches his disciples to control their senses without extinguishing them, promising salvation in the Nirvana. Govinda becomes a Buddhistic monk, but Siddhartha cannot accept the whole doctrine. To him real experience is more revealing than all the formal doctrines of religion, including the concept of Nirvana.

Siddhartha enters the world of Samsara, the disturbing cycle of earthly happenings. As the lover of the courtesan Kamala he becomes a rich merchant, a gambler, and a drinker. But this type of life proves to be empty, since it is lived in the fearful world of man's fiendish cruelty and lust of evil. A disillusioned Siddhartha leaves his wealth behind and sets out to drown himself in the river. At this point Klein's solution looms as a possibility. But Siddhartha happens to meet the ferryman Vasudeva and is taught by him to “sleep on the wave,” i.e., to have confidence in life and to be in harmony with nature.

This “sleep on the wave” overcomes time, which already for Klingsor was a deception. “Was not all suffering time, was not all self-vexation and fear time, did not everything hostile and heavy in the world disappear and was overcome, as soon as one had conquered time, as soon as one became able to extinguish time?” (III, 698). Life through this act of time-negation opens up and gains a fourth dimension.

Siddhartha has a momentary vision of Brahma, the absolute divinity behind all worldly deceptions. He pronounces the sacred syllable “Om” and anticipates the life of mystic intuition, the via illuminativa. But he has not yet followed the way of purification, the via purgativa, to the end. He has merely taken the first step by giving up his luxurious existence and living a simple life of solitude.

Kamala brings him a son she has borne him, and turns aside to die. Siddhartha now has to take care of his son. The son, however, does not understand his father and eventually runs back to the city. Siddhartha is heartbroken, but Vasudeva reminds him that his own father had the same experience when Siddhartha left home.

Now the pilgrim is ready to enter the via illuminativa. He resigns from Samsara completely and, after Vasudeva's death, himself becomes the ferryman. He lives beside the river and consoles all travelers. Govinda, who comes to visit him, believes Siddhartha to be a saint. He is taught by Siddhartha the unity of life, the unity of night and day, of I and thou, of poverty and affluence, of flesh and spirit. Siddhartha tells him that only by living a life of both the spirit and the senses will he gain peace.

The new ferryman's wisdom has been gained from the river. The river has become his teacher and the voice of life, which is continuously changing. Siddhartha is not one of those mystics who shut out the world by withdrawing into their selves. His mysticism is immersion into life. He aims, like Friedrich Schleiermacher, “in the midst of final life to become one with the infinite and to be eternal in a moment” (Speeches on Religion, 1799). This immersion into life enables Siddhartha to shed great parts of his individuality and to find inner freedom.

The first stage of his way to freedom had been innocence. The second stage was the observation of a system of moral prescriptions in the certain hope of reaching salvation. The third stage was characterized by the discovery of ineradicable evil and the consequent abandonment of all hope. The fourth stage is reached by the acceptance of evil and the resumption of ordained tasks. Only now, when justification is left to the Godhead, does the real path to salvation, the via unitiva, lie open. Siddhartha can aspire to vedantic identity mysticism. To be sure, complete identity with the all-embracing divinity is open to him as little as to other men. But he can live within the higher divinity.

It must be seen clearly that this is a continuation of Hesse's early theopanism and not simply “pantheism.” God is here the cosmos and expresses himself by it; the cosmos has no separate existence without him or within him. The central idea of this theopanism is unity. In the vision transferred to him by Siddhartha, Govinda no longer sees the face of his friend Siddhartha, but a continuous stream of faces “which all came and disappeared and yet all seemed to be there at the same time, which all continually changed and renewed themselves and which were yet all Siddhartha” (III, 731). They represent all ages and sexes; they change into the faces of animals and gods. Yet there hovers above this welter of passing forms the smile of unity, “this smile of simultaneousness over thousands of births and deaths,” which is also the “thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha” (III, 732). Before this smile Govinda is “overwhelmed by a feeling of great love, of the most humble veneration” (III, 733).

There is here a certain stressing of passivity, and the story can almost be interpreted as an illustration of Hinayana Buddhism or of the Upanishads' way to salvation. It seems to resume Klein's and Klingsor's solution on a higher level. But there is more to it than passivity. Siddhartha has not become a monk, but a ferryman; he has shown active concern for the other travelers and for Govinda, as well as for his son.

Despite the Eastern coloration, the message of Siddhartha is Christian, even Protestant Christian, not Asiatic. Mystic union in the last instance means a loving embrace of the world. One could justifiably quote Christ's pronouncement that “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matth. 23:32). Hesse aims at a synthesis of Eastern and Christian thought. Western intellectual arrogance and impatience is tempered by Eastern contemplation and humility. Eastern mysticism is expressed in a Western concern for the world's creatures. Of course, this concern is not to be equated with the Platonic eros where the love of the beautiful form leads back to the original idea as the true basis of reality. On the contrary, the way here leads from the union with the transcendental to beauty as an expression and metaphor of God.

Potentially all things participate in God, and the more man succeeds in changing these potentialities into actualities, the more he realizes himself and participates in divine love. Love for one's neighbor and love for the world are ways to self-realization. Siddhartha's experience of mystic union does not lead to spiritual aloofness, for man can never wholly divest himself of the earth, he is “never wholly saint, nor is he ever wholly sinner” (III, 725). Siddhartha's way leads to humble, Christian charity. In all his awareness of the infinite realm of God and the universe, he remains a simple ferryman and farmer.

Still we must not forget that the book is a work of art, and not a philosophical treatise. Its ideas are implicit; they are never expressed outright. The charm of Siddhartha lies in its unforgettable images. The god-seeker's childhood among the Brahmins, his ceaseless ascetic roamings with the Samanas, his mad worldly exploits with Kamala, and finally his meeting with Vasudeva and his life as his disciple, are all parts of a closely interwoven tapestry. They are far from being flowery transcriptions of abstract formulas. A symbolic expression like “sleeping on the wave” is of unusual poetic depth. It is comparable to Goethe's description of poetry as “water shaped into a ball.” The final meaning of Siddhartha, just as the ultimate meaning of life, defies philosophic definition and can be hinted at only by the poetic symbol. It remains forever closed to the literal mind unable to read between the lines.

In keeping with the introspective theme of the story, the technique of narration here is different from the one employed in Klingsor's Last Summer. The natural background of the two books is similar, but the perspective has changed. In Klingsor's Last Summer, the garden of the Casa Camuzzi became an overriding symphony of sound and color. Here it has taken on calm, restrained, and almost classic features. The exotic jungle of Klingsor has become the grove of contemplation, the Indian forest of sallows and fig trees and shadowy mangoes. Everywhere the stress is on the essentials of the description, and these essentials are intensified by repetition and intensifying variation:

He however, Siddhartha, did not fashion joy for himself, he did not live for his pleasure. Walking on the rosy paths of the fig garden, sitting in the bluish shadow of the grove of contemplation, washing his limbs in daily ablutions, doing his sacrifices in the deep shadows of the mango forest, loved by all for the perfect grace of his gestures, and a joy for everybody, he yet bore no joy in his heart

(III, 618).

The profuse orchestration of Klingsor is reduced to the measured rhythm of short, direct sentences, precisely balanced: “He came to the river, he asked the Old One to ferry him across, and when they left the boat on the other side, he said to the Old One: ‘Much good you do to us monks and pilgrims. Many of us you have ferried across. Aren't you, ferryman, a seeker for the right path?’” (III, 722). With Hesse, all the images keep their full weight and can therefore be expressed in stark, even archaic, simplicity. His parallels are intensifications, not verbosities. Labored involutions are absent, but dependent clauses are not avoided: “The years passed by, and nobody counted them. Then monks came on a pilgrimage, disciples of Gotama, the Buddha, who asked to be ferried across the river, and who informed the ferryman that they were hurriedly walking back to their great teacher, for the news had spread that the sublime one was sick unto death and would soon die his last human death, in order to enter into salvation” (III, 700).

In these circumstantial clauses with their interruptions and their afterthoughts, the restlessness of the Buddhistic monks is aptly expressed, while Siddhartha himself gains peace by listening in silence to the river and remaining at his post. His calmness is described in simpler sentences, the repetition of which are slowly growing extensions of thought:

Siddhartha was listening. He now was nothing but a listener, wholly engrossed in listening, wholly emptied, wholly breathing in, he was feeling that he now had mastered listening to the end. He had often heard all this, these many voices in the river; today they sounded like new. He already could no longer differentiate between the many voices, between the happy ones and the weeping ones, between the childish and the manlike voices, they were all belonging together, the plaints of longing and the laughter of the sage, the shout of the irate and the moans of the dying man; they all were one, everything was interwoven and tied together, was intertwined a thousandfold. And everything together, all the voices, all the goals, all longing, all suffering, all good and evil, all this together was the world

(III, 720).

As in Klingsor, the rhythm in Siddhartha is often triadic. “He felt a great desire to laugh, to laugh at himself, to laugh at this strange, foolish world” (III, 689). “Siddhartha felt what a great happiness it was to confess to such a listener, to sink into his heart one's own life, one's own strivings, one's own sufferings” (III, 696). Again there are sentences arranged in contrapuntal parallels: “Wonderful insight came to me through the teachings of the great Buddha, I felt the knowledge of the unity of the world circulate within me like my own blood. But I also had to leave again Buddha and the great knowledge” (III, 689).

Staccato passages of intensifying enumeration are scattered through the entire book. “The sun browned his light shoulders on the river bank, at bathing, at the holy ablutions, at the holy sacrifices. Shadow flowed into his black eyes in the mango grove, during his games, while his mother sang during the sacred sacrifices, during the teachings of his learned father, during the conversations of the wise men” (III, 617). At times this style assumes the character of a ritual chant. Its musical quality is unmistakable, but the music is more subdued than in Klingsor. Such a style does not represent the studied mannerism of artificial simplicity. It is rich enough in varitions to capture our undivided attention, and yet it is pure, as only the style of a master can be pure.

The highly spiritual view of the world presented in Siddhartha exercised its appeal on West and East alike. Hesse's book found recognition in Japan as well as in India itself. The Japanese translations put Hesse in the first place among all German authors whose works appeared in the East in translation, and lectures on the book were given at the Zen-Buddhistic university of Komadzawa in Tokyo. In India the book was translated into nine major dialects, and an Indian scholar praised Siddhartha as a proud tribute to the sons of India by one of the great contemporary spirits. He was amazed to find a European who had actually understood the spirit of the country.

For Western readers, Siddhartha climaxed centuries of effort to penetrate Eastern thought and religion and to understand that God had revealed himself to mankind in different ways. At the end of the nineteenth century it had become a common conviction of enlightened Easterners and Westerners alike that the Orient and the Occident could very well learn from each other. The seventeenth-century Jesuits had opened up the world of China to the European mind. About 1780 the great Sanskrit scholars had laid before it the world of India. The naval demonstration of Commodore Perry before Tokyo in 1854 had initiated an era of lively economic and cultural interchange between the West and the Far East, and had engendered an Eastern fashion among Western painters and decorators, poets and philosophers. Profound thinkers like Aldous Huxley and Romain Rolland found themselves obliged to justify the occidental, Christian attitude to the East and to accommodate the Western mind to profound Eastern insights. The West was reminded that it must give up its intellectual pride and admit the Eastern spirit of reverence.

For Hesse himself, the world of the East had been a living reality from his childhood. His trip to India, Malaya, and Sumatra had not even been necessary. At an early age he had realized the independence of the Orient and had begun to doubt the wisdom of the Christian missionary efforts. In the story Robert Aghion (1913; II, 355–394) he described the experiences of the first English missionary to India. Aghion had soon become convinced that it was presumptuous to take away their God from these strangers and in the end had succumbed to the lure of India. Like the author, Robert Aghion no longer felt certain of his mission and the superiority of his European ways.

At this point the poet's mind was refreshed by a study of oriental classics in excellent translations which, from 1890, had been brought out by far-sighted German publishers. These studies often included scholarly annotations and introductions. Previously, the oriental image of the German Romanticists had been based primarily on William Jones' translation of Kâlidâsa's Sakuntala. Lao-tse had still been unknown to them. Even Schopenhauer had to be satisfied with Anquetil Duperron's translation of Oupnekh' at (1801), at that time the only Eastern work of consequence available. He did not know that the “divine” Oupnekh' at was a Persian, and therefore second-hand, extract from the original Vedas.

It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that Paul Deussen's translation of the Upanishads (1897) and Karl Eugen Neumann's rendering of the Buddhistic Canon made the documents of Indian religion available in the original. Neumann's Dharmmapada came out in 1893; his Last Days of Gotamo Buddho (Mahaparinibbana-Sutta) in 1911. Die chinesische Flöte, Hans Bethge's free adaptation of Chinese poetry from English and French sources, appeared in 1907. Richard Wilhelm's Tao-tê ching was printed in 1911. It was part of his monumental translation of the Chinese classics, of which I Ching (1924) was to influence Hesse's thoughts profoundly. All of these translations enabled the nonlinguist to penetrate oriental thought to a degree unknown among older specialists.

The evidence of the Orient became so overwhelming that lesser spirits could give themselves Buddhistic and Confucian airs. This became fashionable in the nineteen-twenties, when World War I had so visibly demonstrated the breakdown of European culture. Now Max Dauthendey's, Karl Gjellerup's, and Waldemar Bonsels's stories from India and Malaya found an appreciative public, and Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophic movement was spawned by Indian thought. Count Hermann Keyserling's Travel Diary of a Philosopher (1919), with its more critical appreciation of Buddhistic thought, became a publisher's success. This was the climate of public opinion in which Hesse's own Siddhartha found a deeply gratifying echo.

Siddhartha was begun in 1919 and finished in 1922. The process of its gestation was interrupted by a period of one and a half years, while Hesse studied comparative religion and meditated closely on his subject. The first part of the novel was dedicated to Romain Rolland, the second to Wilhelm Gundert, Hesse's “Cousin from Japan.” In the last years of the poet's life, Gundert's translation of the basic document of Zen Buddhism appeared, with an introduction by Hesse.

Still, the end of Siddhartha was clearly not Buddhistic, and its affirmative attitude toward life appeared to Western critics to be more Christian than Indian. This statement of course does not hold true when one has read the Brahmanistic Bhagavad-Gita (The Song of the Lord), where life pursued in a spirit of piety is envisioned as man's duty. Also, one must not forget that, according to Radhakrishnan, the world is no mere illusion for the pious Hindu.

It might also be argued that the ending of Siddhartha is more Taoistic than Indian, and it would be appropriate to quote Lao-tse's saying that the gentlest overcomes the strongest. In the following years Hesse more and more turned to Chinese philosophers, and in The Bead Game they replaced the Indians. At the same time he no longer found any contradiction between the Taoistic view of the world and the essense of Christianity. He realized that Lao-tse would have fully understood the Sermon on the Mount and could have uttered the promise that “the meek shall inherit the earth.”

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