Time and the Structure of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha
[In the following essay, Shaw assesses Hesse's attempt in Siddhartha to transcend the limitations of time and to experience temporal unity.]
In 1911 Hermann Hesse set out upon a voyage to India, “to see,” he tells us, “the sacred tree and snake [of Buddha] and to go back into that source of life where everything had begun and which signifies the Oneness [Einheit] of all phenomena.”1 The vagueness of these words, written some ten years after his return to Europe, testifies to Hesse's uncertainty concerning the exact nature of his quest. The unity or oneness he sought may have been nothing more than a resolution of the conflicts developing within his own personality; it may refer to a cultural and political harmony he had not been able to find in Europe during the years before the Great War; or it may simply reflect the longing of someone steeped in the German Romantic tradition for a feeling of identity between the self and the world about one. Whatever the purpose of his search, however, it is clear that India, and more specifically the philosophy of Buddhism, which were familiar to Hesse from boyhood through his grandfather's scholarly and missionary activities,2 were supposed to contain the goal for which he was seeking.
The mission was a failure,3 not merely because Hesse found nothing to match his ideal, but because the motivation for it had already prejudiced his chances of finding what he sought. The voyage, Hesse confesses, had been an escape, an attempt to exchange one continent for another and to replace immediate circumstances with a more remote, but no less limited way of life. He had compromised the hope of universal oneness, therefore, by assuming it might be attained through sacrificing one portion of experience and through abjuring the responsibilities which had bound him to a present time and place.
The voyage to India convinced Hesse that oneness, whatever it was and wherever it existed, would produce a harmonious condition in which every contrast and all opposing forces had finally been resolved. Furthermore, it had become clear that the unity he desired did not reside in any particular philosophy or place, but that it belonged to “a subterranean and timeless world of values and the spirit” of which the visible marks of a civilization were only an external manifestation.4 Unity, in short, resided only in the timeless. With this realization the problem of finding unity became, for Hesse, the problem of transcending the limitations imposed by the domain of time. He had to learn to accept the present, but with the knowledge that it was only the embodiment of an essence which time itself had no power to destroy.
Siddhartha, eine indische Dichtung (1922), is in part a testimony to this awareness, in part a vision of the manner in which Hesse thought his problem might be solved. India, and the way of Buddhism, are joined to his own experience in the story of a man who achieves unity and the timeless through the realization that search, and the attainment of search, are simultaneous realities of existence. In the discussion which follows I shall try to show how Hesse was able to communicate this vision through an intricate and remarkable welding of meaning and form. Siddhartha stands almost alone in modern German fiction as an example of a work in which the structure is the idea, the latter growing organically out of the former and not fully revealed until the last element of composition has been fitted into its proper place.
Siddhartha, young “son of the Brahmans,”5 is propelled by the same search, and has the same foreknowledge of the goal, as Hesse himself. In the opening chapter of the novelle he is pictured meditating upon the magic syllable OM, “the word of words” which stands for Perfection or the Perfected:
OM ist Bogen, der Pfeil ist Seele,
Das Brahman ist des Pfeiles Ziel.
Das soll man unentwegt treffen.
(621)
OM, the alpha and omega of every Vedic text, is a symbol for that “holy power,” as Heinrich Zimmer describes it, which “turns into and animates everything within the microcosm as well as in the outer world,”6 a power without form or substance itself and yet the source of everything that was, is, or shall be. Brahman, the impersonal and universal godhead, is one aspect of this power, and Atman, the individual soul or Self, is an expression for the infinite aspects which are identical to it. To merge within this micro-macrocosmic essence, then, and by this merging find the unity which is without time and yet made manifest only in the multiplicities of time, is the goal Siddhartha envisages as the perfect fulfillment of his way upon earth.
The vocabulary of Indian philosophy suggests first of all the several dimensions concentrated in the single action of this novelle. Although Siddhartha's story recapitulates the search of a contemporary westerner, it also recalls the hyperconscious striving of an immemorial Eastern tradition as well. “The search for a basic unity underlying the manifold of the universe,” according to Zimmer, had been “the chief motivation” of Indian philosophies since the time of the earliest Vedic hymns.7Siddhartha is a legend, therefore, a story which is the amalgam of several possible actions, each of which has its origin in a discrete moment of historical time and yet is simultaneously identified with a multitude of other actions taking place on other levels of experience.
Legend as the framework of the novelle offers the first clue to the manner in which Hesse imagined the attainment of a timeless reality. A second is given in Siddhartha's unusual foreknowledge of the goal. Like Hesse's own yearning to “go back into the source of life,” Siddhartha's undertaking bears the characteristic of a return to, or from another point of view, of a discovery, by the self, of something that is already there. In his own words, he seeks “at-homeness in Atman,” a goal which is at the same time the place from which he has already departed. Unlike the classic novel of development, the story of Siddhartha's way to perfection is not the logical and inevitable unfolding of one event out of the other towards an end which could not have been foreseen from the beginning; it is rather an ever-expanding awareness of a reality already known, a progression which is at the same time a regression to a condition forever in being. We must be prepared, therefore, for a type of structure in which the various moments of the protagonist's life are presented as parts of a whole that is already existent even though it has not yet been realized in his actual experience. The events of the story occur in the fleeting instant, to be sure, but an instant in which the goal as well as the search, the process of what is developing as well as the end of development, are both implied.
With these facts in mind we may turn now to the implications of Hesse's title, with its suggestive reminder that the historical Buddha, Gotama Sakyamuni,8 acclaimed during his own lifetime as One who had found the way to Perfection, himself bore the given name of Siddhartha. It is striking that the life of Hesse's protagonist runs almost parallel to the little that is known of the Buddha's obscure history. The latter involves three basic events: the leave-taking from his father's house, the frustrating years wasted in vacillation between the pursuit of worldly desires and a life of extreme asceticism, and finally, the determination of the Middle Path as the only road to Enlightenment. Siddhartha also follows this course, if not in strict chronological sequence, still in the same pattern of significant experiences. The sole difference here—which, as I shall try to show, amounts to only a superficial distinction—consists in the fact that the Buddha left a body of sermons and teachings which are not advanced by Hesse's hero.9
The parallel just noted, which forms the structural backbone of this work, comes from Hesse's desire to superimpose upon his story of the seeker a portrait of the sage who had already found his way. Being and Becoming are both represented in the story, therefore, the former in the existence of a man who has found unity, the latter in the presence of a man who has identified himself with perfection although he is still approaching it. In this sense, time, the troubled present in which one seeks the way, is transcended in the novelle by the timeless fact of the goal already achieved. Siddhartha, indeed, is both seeker and sage, the One in whom perfection hovers as a silent attendant within the actions of the One who is still unperfected. His actual encounter with the Buddha in the course of the story anticipates this absolute crossing of the timeless with time, for here the aspect of life which is Becoming meets the aspect of a life already in Being, the One who is already perfect encounters himself in the process of attaining perfection. The fact that these two aspects do not coalesce at this point, and that Siddhartha refrains from declaring himself a disciple of Gotama although acknowledging the latter as a living Buddha, is essential to Hesse's message, for it signifies the distance which experience always intrudes between the seeker and his goal. Time, the sum of moments which the Buddha has already transcended in himself, must first be lived out in Siddhartha's own life.
The course of Siddhartha's discovery of the Self, his realization, so to speak, of the Buddha who is already within him, is therefore a process of acquiring the wisdom of the historical Sakyamuni while he himself is finding the way to enlightenment. The external design of the novelle—its division into two major parts, of which the first contains four, the second eight separate sections—corresponds in extremely subtle fashion to the Buddha's celebrated doctrine of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path to salvation from human suffering. This is not to say that Siddhartha is intended as a biography of the Buddha, or as a literal presentation of his doctrine, but that it has drawn upon the essential language of Buddhism in order to support Hesse's identification of the One-in-Being with the One-Becoming by tracing the seeker's acquisition of those virtues which are the special wisdom of an enlightened sage.
The first part of the novelle, written near the end of the First World War,10 brings Siddhartha the knowledge of Buddha's Four Noble Truths. The experiences recounted here reflect certain events in Hesse's life up to his return from India and convey the realization, already noted, that the problem of finding unity was a problem of transcending time and that, paradoxically, the way into this timeless realm led through the multiple fields of the Here and Now. In the second part of the novelle, then, Siddhartha undertakes this journey through experience and arrives at the goal he is seeking.
Buddha's First Noble Truth is revealed to Siddhartha while he is still a son of the Brahmans dwelling in his father's house. The world of the father is a world of things as they have become, determined by the past and geared to the perpetual repetition of an unchanging way of life. Ritual and formula govern this world, and life in it revolves around the rendering of sacrifices and offerings at “the accustomed time,” the performance of established duties from which not even the “most blameless” of men, Siddhartha's own father, is free. He must “cleanse himself every day, strive for purification every day, every day anew” (621).11
The world of the father, then, is fixed in the moment and regulated according to the set times of an inherited manner of existence. What will come is the same as what has been; the present exists only as the appointed moment for acting within a cycle of time that is forever revolving around the same course. This, Hesse indicates, is the world into which all men are born—orthodox, traditional, determined by the past—a world in which they suffer not only from the imposition of a way of life that is not of their own making, but also because time, the necessity of living according to a ritualized moment, stands between them and the reality they seek. Between Brahman and Atman, the universal godhead and the Self that is supposed to be identical to it, lies the ethic of the gods and their demands, mere formulas for life which are no less “ephemeral and subject to time” than man himself. Thus Siddhartha, as a son of the Brahmans, suffers from the impossibility of translating the consciousness of truth, his foreknowledge of the goal, into the actual experience of living free from the repeated phases of established time.
When he leaves this world of the father, Siddhartha sets out with his friend Govinda to find a place in which “the cycle of time might be eluded, the end of causes [found], and an eternity without suffering would begin” (627). Like the historical Buddha, he joins the jackal men called Samanas,12 fanatic ascetics for whom enlightenment was to be found only through denial of the flesh and all worldly desires. Among the Samanas Siddhartha tries “to kill memory and his senses,” to deny the sum of things as they had been, withdraw from the present, and close himself off from the possibility of further experience. He tries, in short, to escape from time. The arts of the Samanas are conscious attempts of the intellect, exercising itself through the will, to free the self from all temporal effects. Through fasting, Siddhartha tries to make himself physiologically independent of the moment; through thinking, to control what the moment might bring him and to determine his own attitude towards it; and through waiting, to suspend the moment between a part he has rejected and a future condition which he hopes to will into existence. The purpose of Siddhartha's life among the Samanas may be summed up in the rhyming words leer and nicht mehr: to be no longer subject to the experience of time, but to be “empty of thirst, empty of desire, empty of dream, empty of joy and sorrow,” to become a void which only Atman-Brahman, the timeless unity of his search, would be sufficient to fill.
The way of asceticism succeeds only in revealing to Siddhartha the second of Buddha's Noble Truths—that the cause of suffering is the craving for something which can never be satisfied: “Although Siddhartha fled from himself a thousand times, lingered in nothingness, in an animal, in a stone, the return was inevitable, the hour unavoidable when he came back to find himself once more, in moonlight or in sunshine, in shadow or in rain, when he became himself again, Siddhartha once more, and again felt the torture of an imposed cycle of time” (627–628). No matter what his way of escape, then, Siddhartha always returns to the self restricted by time. Thus he realizes not merely that asceticism can bring him no salvation, but also that it is impossible to solve the problem of time by trying to crush it with an act of will. His attempts to escape from suffering only lead to further suffering; the denial of the moment serves only to accelerate the temporal cycle. Siddhartha has learned that the timeless may not be found apart from the medium of that self which time is still in the process of making. Being does not reveal itself through the negation of Becoming.
In “Gotama,” the next chapter of the novelle, Siddhartha discovers the third of Buddha's Noble Truths through an encounter with the historical sage himself. The presence of the Enlightened One proves that there is a way of release from suffering. Gotama has made “the highest wisdom his own; he has remembered his previous lives, he had reached Nirvana and returned no longer into the cycle of time, he immersed himself no longer in the murky stream of illusionary forms” (632).13 In Buddha, then, the searching Siddhartha sees a living demonstration of the fact that it is not necessary to depart from time in order to know the timeless. Yet at the same time the presence of the Buddha, who has learned to preserve the memory of what was and yet not be bound to it, who has found his place in the present and yet is still at home in Atman, is a reminder that the roots of the timeless are embedded in the experiences acted out within the world of time.
Siddhartha's recognition of Gotama is unhesitating and unequivocal: “I have not doubted for a moment that you are Buddha, that you have reached the goal, the highest, which so many thousand Brahmans and sons of the Brahmans are looking for” (642). Nevertheless, he does not become a disciple of Buddha, as his friend Govinda does, for reasons which are both pertinent and revealing. The Samanas had taught him to look upon experience only with his intellect; under this influence, he cannot overlook a logical error in the Buddha's teaching. Gotama, he claims, had clearly demonstrated “the unity of the world, and the interconnection of all that happens,” but he had himself broken that unity by advising one to overcome the world and seek salvation outside of it. In contradiction to his own presence, therefore, Gotama seems to Siddhartha to preach that timelessness lies in abjuration of the world and of present time.
Buddha himself answers this argument in warning Siddhartha against a too zealous and trusting attention to words: “Be on your guard, o eager seeker for knowledge, before the thicket of opinions and the strife over words” (642). Buddha may speak this way, indeed, because he knows that wisdom is not limited to his own doctrine and because that doctrine has been promulgated solely for the sake of those, like Govinda, who depend upon another's word in order to receive a hint as to their own way into enlightenment. Eventually, when he has reached the wisdom the Buddha now possesses, Siddhartha will admit the justness of Gotama's admonition. “Salvation and virtue, even Sansara and Nirvana,”14 he will tell Govinda, “are only words. There is no Nirvana as such; there is only the word” (728).
Siddhartha refuses to become a disciple of Buddha for another reason which is more fundamental, perhaps, since it leads to a revelation of the fourth Buddhistic truth. “One thing,” he says to Gotama, “is not contained in your clear and most respected doctrine; it does not contain the secret of what the Buddha has experienced himself” (643). Buddha, in other words, cannot direct Siddhartha towards his goal because the way lies through Siddhartha's knowledge of himself. This is at one and the same time a confession that a man may not learn salvation from any teacher, even if that teacher be Buddha himself, and a recognition that the path to unity and the timeless lies through one's own experience of temporality, in that very process of Becoming which seems to contradict the absolute state of Being.
In “Erwachen” Hesse stresses the word hier as the sign of Siddhartha's acceptance of the fact that his way of discovery leads through the determining world of the Here and Now. After perceiving this truth, Siddhartha suddenly finds that “the world is beautiful, the world is many-colored, the world is strange and full of mystery”: “Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green. The sky was in flux, as was the river, the forest was silent, as were the mountains, everything was beautiful, everything mysterious and magical, and in the middle of it all was Siddhartha, the Awakening One, on the way to himself. … Meaning and essence were not hidden somewhere behind things; it was in them, in everything” (647). Thus in the midst of what exists with himself as the center of the various phenomena in time, Siddhartha sets out to discover what he is. He calls this turning point in his life a rebirth, the first of several in the course of the action, a rebirth which signifies death to what he was and ignorance of what he is to be. He knows he cannot “go home any longer, no longer to his father, no longer back”; but he knows also that he does not know “where he belongs, whose life he will share, what language he will speak” (649). For Siddhartha it is a moment without a remembered past and without a discernible future, a present which is more than a time of transition, however, since it offers the potential reality of a timelessness that contains the sum, and yet is more than the sum, of all individual instants in time. Although Siddhartha barely realizes it, he is very close in this supreme awareness of a suspended present to the Oneness he seeks. At the end of a period in his life which had brought him the knowledge of Buddha's Four Noble Truths, he is ready now to enter upon the Eightfold Path, the way of multiple experience in time, which will bring him those virtues of enlightenment by means of which his Self will become at one with Brahman.
The first night after leaving Gotama, Siddhartha finds himself in the hut of a ferryman on the banks of a great river. It is an appropriate departure point for one who is about to embark on a discovery of the Self, not only because the river symbolizes the nature of the reality towards which Siddhartha is moving, but also because it marks out the course he must travel in order to arrive at the goal. Siddhartha will cross and recross the river many times during his error-laden search, and return in the end to the very place from which he started, with the realization that the several paths of his experience were all implicit in the beginning.
The river is the first of two master tropes into which Hesse concentrates the action and meaning of this latter portion of the novelle. The second is the image of sound which Siddhartha first perceives as the innermost “voice” belonging to every object, by means of which it proclaims its own nature. As he contemplates the river, listening to it sing the song of itself through the forms and attributes peculiar to it, it seems to Siddhartha that the river is telling him how to undertake his own voyage of discovery. He must go the way of experience, getting to know himself in the course of creating himself, becoming acquainted with his own characteristics before he can find the nature of the being hiding within. In following his own “voice,” Siddhartha believes he has found the way which will lead him home again to Atman. “He would long for nothing except what the voice commanded him to long for, linger nowhere except where the voice advised him” (652).
Siddhartha's voice leads him first onto a path that is directly opposite to the way of a Samana. Instead of denying the senses, he decides now to exploit them; instead of escaping from the present, he elects to explore it to the full. With this decision he enters into that world of time which the Indian pantheon assigns to the god Kama, lord of desires,15 who has left his mark upon the names of those who are closest to Siddhartha during this phase of his life. In “Kamala” he becomes the disciple of a famous courtesan and learns from her the arts of love and sensual pleasure; in “Bei den Kindermenschen” he is apprenticed to Kamaswami, a great merchant, and finds the secrets of success in business and commerce.
From both these worldlings Siddhartha learns much that is useful in the world of time: how to reside happily in the moment and induce it to yield its fruits; how to utilize the present so that it will produce a desired consequence in the future. Yet at the same time, and almost without his knowing it, Siddhartha's life in the world of Kama brings him the first of those virtues which are appropriate to a seeker on his way to enlightenment. From Kamala he learns “right attitude,” the correct way to approach an experience through complete surrender of the self even while the purpose of the experience is kept steadily in mind; and from Kamaswami he learns “right aspiration,” that there is no real profit in working for an immediate gain, as the merchant himself does, in constant fear of losing the little he already has, but that there is always a worthwhile return in any voluntary investment of the temporal moment.
The world of Kama does not, however, lead Siddhartha onto the way that is right for him alone. In learning from Kamala and Kamaswami, in following the direction they had taken before him, Siddhartha finds that he has lost his own path: “going through the things of this world,” he once tells Kamala, “like a stone through the water, without doing anything and without bestirring himself” (663). He has begun, in short, to separate the Self from its experience, acting in such a way that he cannot become part of the immediate experience nor it a part of him. Gradually, then, as the years pass, Siddhartha notices that “the divine voice in his own heart became a memory”; “the sacred source which had once been so near and had once rustled so deep inside him was distant now and barely discernible” (673). Thus Siddhartha learns, through his disappointment, the Buddhistic virtue of “right speech,” the lesson that one cannot hear the voice within if the ear is too closely attuned to the dialogue of others. He becomes like the bird which Kamala keeps in a golden cage: beautiful to look upon, but unable to sing, some day to be cast out upon the street to die.16
In “Sansara” Siddhartha experiences the last bitter consequences of a life adjusted to the sensuous moment. He finds that he has been playing a game “whose rules he endeavored to learn exactly, but whose meaning had never touched his heart” (666). And after becoming a perfect player of the game, as he had once been a model son of the Brahmans and paramount among the Samanas—the desire to excel never leaves this seeker for perfection—Siddhartha discovers that he has become a slave to the very thing he had mastered, a gambler, as Hesse pictures him, waiting anxiously upon every turn of the dice, hoping for a possible break within the cycle of predictable events. Even his play with Kamala fits now into this unending round of being, Sansara, “the game without end, a game for children, glorious to play once, twice, or even ten times perhaps, but [not] for always” (680).
In the end, Siddhartha's devotion to Kama brings him only the poignant experiences common to anyone who must live out his life in time. He encounters boredom, and with it the fatal necessity of repeating pleasures over and over in the futile attempt to keep boredom from returning. And finally, as the years accumulate upon him, Siddhartha sees that the cycle of the senses is revolving slowly but inevitably around the fixed point of death. One night, after a conversation in which Kamala begs him to tell again of his meeting with Gotama, Siddhartha “reads a frightened script underneath her eyes and near the corners of her mouth, a script of fine lines and soft furrows, a script which reminded him of autumn and of death” (677). Suddenly he becomes afraid, for the mention of Buddha, recalling him to his effort to free himself from the limitations of becoming, warns him that time is drawing to a close without his having found a way to transcend it. That very night, departing from Kamala's arms, he leaves the world of the exploited moment forever.
Siddhartha's renewed search for the goal soon leads him to the same river from which he had once started. Again it reflects his present state, appearing now as a boundary beyond which he cannot go, a literal reminder of the fact that he had exhausted the possibilities of search and still not found the essence for which he had been seeking. As a Samana he had emptied himself of all experience to create a void for the reception of Atman-Brahman; afterwards, among the childlike ones [Kindermenschen], he had tried to accumulate experience in the hope that the sum of it would yield an ultimate reality. Thus frustrated at the extreme poles of time-denied and time-exploited, it seems to Siddhartha that there is nothing left for him to do and no place left in which to search.
Yet as he gazes upon the river, recalling the enthusiasm with which he had crossed it years before, Siddhartha remembers that the ferryman had predicted his return to this very spot: “Everything comes again, and you too, Siddhartha, will also come again” (653). The fulfillment of the prophecy comforts him, for he realizes that his life in the world of Kama was an inevitable, but temporary phase of his discovery of the Self. The river represents not only the completion of one cycle of his existence, it marks the beginning of a new life with the past already behind him. Once more, then, as in the moment after his encounter with Gotama, Siddhartha is suspended between that which was and that which shall be, curiously close to the timeless because he exists in a present undetermined by specific time.
In this moment between life and death, Siddhartha falls into a deep sleep. And when, after several hours, he awakens, “the past seemed to him as if it were covered by a veil, infinitely far away, a matter of infinite indifference. He knew only that he had left his former life (which, at the first moment of consciousness, seemed far away like an embodiment, or an earlier existence, of his present Self), and that now. … awake, he was looking out into the world as a new man” (684). This renewal through sleep, like Hesse's own descent into the underworld of the Jungian unconscious during the First World War,17 is not quite the same as the rebirth noted earlier in “Erwachen.” There Siddhartha had tried consciously and deliberately to break with the past, to deny what had been for the sake of what might come, exchanging one world of time for the other. The present rebirth, on the other hand, takes direct issue with the past and puts it in a proper relationship to present existence. As something once lived, the past is a matter of “indifference” and no longer has the power, as it had in the world of the father, to determine the future; but as a part of life, as a factor entering into the creation of what Siddhartha had become, the past, revealing itself through memory, exists still as a bridge between life experienced and life still being lived, a previous embodiment, in Siddhartha's words, of the present self.
The initial result of this dip into the past is to recall Siddhartha to his goal and to remind him of his continuing search. The sleep itself appears as a “long immersion in the depths of OM, in the Nameless, the Perfected” (684); and he awakens to find Govinda, the friend who had begun his search with him and is still seeking, at his side. With this recollection of what had been, this residue of the essential past establishing his permanent condition, Siddhartha is able to make a clear evaluation of the “round-about ways” of his life so far. He sees that it had been a mistake to try to control the direction of life, for this could be done only by submission to the repetitive cycles of time. “Your life is going backwards!” he tells himself, and considers that a long lifetime of experience and wandering have brought him nowhere at all. Yet once more the river, which mirrors his present condition in its constant flow downstream, also sends back the knowledge of himself by which his subsequent actions may be guided. In “Am Flusse” Siddhartha learns the Buddhistic lesson of “right conduct,” that one must take the way which comes naturally, heeding only the voice of oneself, without trying to arrange the course of discovery in advance. “No matter where my way will go,” he promises, “let it go where it may, I will take it” (600).
The promise involves Siddhartha in a paradox, for he decides to stay by the river and learn from it, to find his Self, in short, by ceasing to create it through experience in time. With this decision the full significance of Hesse's choice of the river image becomes clear. In India, where water plays such a large role in domestic and religious life, and the cry of Ko paraga? (Who is going to the other shore?) is a familiar and often-heard phrase, the river has become a symbol common to all philosophies of timeless perfection. In the Vedic hymns the knowledge of enlightenment is called the “Transcendental Wisdom of the Far Bank,” in Jainism the wise men are known as “Makers of the Crossing,” and in Buddhism itself, the doctrine is identified as the “Knowledge that goes to the Other Shore.” The river is life and the teachings of the sage are that “boat of virtues” in which the seeker undertakes his voyage to the state of enlightenment symbolized by the other shore.18
When Siddhartha decides to remain by the river and become a helper to the ferryman Vasudeva, then, he acts like the Indian novitiate surrendering himself, his own will and his own preconceptions, into the hands of a wise man in order to learn from his example how one may discover the way to perfection. Vasudeva (the name is that of a legendary Hindu king who was the father of Krishna, the Savior, and means “one who dwells in all beings”) may be compared to the Bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism, “a sublimely indifferent, compassionate being who remains at the threshhold of Nirvana for the comfort and salvation of the world.”19 Because he has stopped at the brink of time and eternity, poised between this world and the state of enlightenment, yet with a knowledge of enlightenment, Vasudeva appears in the novelle as another aspect of Buddha, a sort of intermediary, let us say, between the aspect of Seeker personified in Siddhartha, and the aspect of Perfected personified in Gotama.20 Vasudeva's function is to teach Siddhartha Buddha's “right means of livelihood,” the occupation which, under the guidance of a maker of the crossing, will bring him knowledge of the virtues necessary for the final stages in his passage to the other shore.
The ferryman, counseling Siddhartha to hearken to the voice of the river, brings together the two main images of this second of the novelle: “The river has taught me how to listen, and you too will learn listening from it; the river knows everything and one can learn everything from it” (697). It is the doctrine that knowledge resides in the present time and place, and that from one's position in the Here and Now, in the depths of the fleeting instant, one can discover all there is to know. Wisdom lies not in denying the present, nor in trying to exploit it, but in accepting it as the repository for truths that are not apparent in the visible context of a single moment.
In his deep sleep on the banks of the river Siddhartha had discovered an unsuspected dimension to his life in the memory of a past which was still part of the present moment. In “Der Fährmann,” listening to the voice of the river, he sees further that his earlier distinction between past and present was only an apparent one. “The water ran and ran, forever and ever it ran, and yet was always there, was always and at all times the same and yet new in every moment” (694). Because it is “simultaneously here and there,” no matter what its form, no matter what its position, “everywhere at the same time,” the essence of the river remains always existent. And so it is with Siddhartha's own life, for he himself has always been the same in spite of the changing aspects of his temporal experience. Time, then, does not really exist: “Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has essence and is present” (698). Likewise, the experience of time—the fear of ephemerality, the weight of boredom, the terror of a determining past—are only the shadows of a mind thinking in temporal terms.
Without this fear of time, Siddhartha is soon able to destroy the illusion of multiplicity. As there are no breaks in his continual process of Becoming, of realizing the Being which lies eternally within him, so there are no barriers between the various phenomena of the world or between himself and these phenomena. The river, Siddhartha hears, speaks “with a thousand voices,” all of them identical, the multitudinous voices of Atman echoing the single cosmic voice of Brahman. And the sound is OM, “the name that had always been and would always be, the voice of life itself, the voice of Being, of the eternal Becoming” (699).
Thus the difference between Siddhartha and Gotama, which had seemed so vast to the seeker at his meeting with the sage, becomes non-existent. The knowledge Siddhartha has been acquiring is the same as that already possessed by Gotama, and in becoming enlightened, he has already begun to resemble the Enlightened One himself: “For a long time now [Siddhartha] had known that he was no longer separated from Gotama although he had not been able to accept his teaching. A true seeker, he knew, one who really wanted to find, could accept no teaching, but the man who had already found could approve every teaching, every way, every goal; nothing separated him any longer from the thousands of others who lived in the eternal and breathed the Divine” (701). So close is Siddhartha to this realization of his goal that Kamala, who chances upon him in her own search for Buddha, suffers no disappointment in having to die with only a glimpse of Siddhartha's face: “It was good, just as good, as if she had seen [the Buddha] himself” (704). Her death advises him of his nearness to the goal, if only because it confirms his knowledge that the final stroke of time, the cessation of temporal existence itself, cannot destroy the timeless unity present in all things. Looking upon her countenance in death, Siddhartha was “filled with the feeling of presentness and simultaneity, the feeling of eternity; in this hour, deeper than ever before, he perceived the indestructibility of each life, the eternity of every moment” (704).
If the novelle does not end with this awareness, it is because Siddhartha has not yet applied his wisdom to a situation beyond himself in which he is deeply involved. Up to now his problem has centered on the relationship to time as it has been experienced in his own life; he has not yet taken issue with what may be called the extensive future, that is, with that which will come after him and for which he is the specific cause; nor has he taken issue with the extensive past, that is, with that which has preceded him of which he is the immediate product. He has, in brief, not related his own Self with the uniqueness of the Self in others; he still needs to gain the knowledge of unity as it centers in experiences outside his own, in the lives of those who are linked to him through the accidents of time, and yet who must seek their own way into the timeless independently of him.
This final insight comes to Siddhartha through the son whom Kamala has borne him and whom she leaves in his keeping at her death. The boy arouses an emotion of which Kamala had accused him of being incapable: “Then, because his son was there, Siddhartha also became a childlike one, suffering because of a human being, lost in love, become a fool because of love” (710). His love is imperfect, however, because it is an attempt to imbue the boy, who has scarcely begun his experience in the world of time, with the knowledge the father has already acquired from his penetration into the timeless. Hoping to spare a loved one the suffering he has known, Siddhartha tries to make up for the son's lack of experience by giving him something of his own past, so that the boy may begin his life at the limits of his father's knowledge.
Siddhartha does not realize, as the boy does, that this is tantamount to making his son into his own image. And blinded by love, he does not heed Vasudeva's reminder that no one can determine the boy's calling, “to which way, to what deeds and to what sorrows” (707), since all must follow their own voice to enlightenment. Thus it happens that in becoming a father himself, trying to predict his son's life as his father had once tried to predict his, Siddhartha also becomes a representative of that world which is never acceptable to those who find it imposed upon them at their birth. The revolving cycle of time has described a full circle, therefore, and the truths of Buddha begin to reveal themselves again in the life of the son. Like his father before him, the young Siddhartha runs away to search for his own way into salvation.
With this Siddhartha learns the Buddhistic lesson of “right endeavor,” that it is not possible to impose one's knowledge of the timeless upon one who is still subject to the limits of time. But he also learns that what he has experienced as a father is, in the all-encompassing circle of the timeless, the same as that which he had experienced years before as the son. Setting out one day to look for his son once more, Siddhartha pauses for awhile beside the river and there, as a reflection of himself, he sees the image of his own father, subjected to the same trial that he is now undergoing. This vision of the Self, posed in a situation of the past which had once been future, the image of a father-son dissolving again into the image of a son-father, proves to Siddhartha that the present moment truly contains all time, for it concentrates experience which, in the cycles of merely temporal existence, it would take several lifetimes to go through. With this realization, the limits to his previous grasp of unity are broken, for in addition to the knowledge which is already his own, that he himself is always the same in spite of a multitude of changes in his own life, he now has the knowledge that he is the same as all others although each has an identity of his own.
In “OM” the two master tropes of the novelle meet and mingle once more in a magnificant symbol for Siddhartha's final meditation upon unity and the timeless. The voice of the river, collecting the multitudinous sounds of Atman, the voice within each individual thing, becomes the imperishable and divine tone of all existence.
As in the case of the river, the full significance of Hesse's image can only be understood with reference to Indian philosophy. The sound OM, which accompanies every Vedic text, is perceptible either in the depths of Atman, the individual Self or soul, or in the world of Brahman, the universal godhead—in the microcosm as well as the macrocosm, therefore, joining the individual with the great totality of which he is a part, demonstrating that “the phenomenal visible sphere (that of change, the Heraclitean flux), wherein the manifestations of time appear and perish” is identical to “the transcendent, timeless sphere, which is beyond yet at one with it (that of imperishable being).”21
Both timelessness within time and unity through multiplicity are represented by the traditional manner in which OM is uttered. In Sanskrit the first vowel of the charm is pronounced A-U; thus instead of two sounds, there are actually three. The charm is made by opening and closing the lips in movement from the back, open sound A, through the half-open, half-closed sound U, to the front closure of M.22 One repeats this without stopping. It is, therefore, a continuous utterance, a circle without end, or a constant process of becoming in time in which the entirety, never wholly contained in any one part, is forever and timelessly existent. This invisible unity is symbolized by a fourth factor, or “silence,” obvious when the mouth is poised between final M and initial A, a silence which is considered part of the magic formula's total sound and is analogous to “the silence always present in the creations, manifestations and dissolutions of the universe.” Out of the visible three, then, is revealed an invisible four which is the essence of the whole, the being and unity underlying the becoming and multiplicity of the various parts. “What has become, what is becoming, and what will become—verily, all of this is the sound OM. And what is beyond these three states of the world of time—that too, verily, is the sound OM.”23
Siddhartha's meditation in “OM,” the “right meditation” of Buddha's Eightfold Path, proceeds according to this mystic awareness. As he looks into the river, he sees a succession of images: of his father, himself, and his son, all of them discrete persons, and yet himself as all three; present in this moment are al the apparent stages of temporal succession. Similarly, the river sings to him three songs: a song of sorrow, a song of longing, and a song of joy, each of them different, each of them distinct historically in terms of its appearance in Siddhartha's own life, but all of which are present in him and are included in that great “music of life” implicit in every song and yet greater than any one of them.24
“Govinda,” the final chapter of the novelle, is a paean of “right rapture,” the Enlightened One rejoicing in his enlightenment and yet mocking the glory of his knowledge by his admission that it is impossible to communicate it fully. In Siddhartha's conversation with his friend one can hear Buddha's warning that wisdom does not reside in the doctrine, that beyond the word lies the mystery, the silence out of which the sounds have come and into which they inevitably return.25 Although trying to define the Being which is in and around him, Siddhartha knows that words are one-sided, robbing truth of its impartiality, emphasizing the rightness of one point of view at the expense of an opposite which is no less true. It is because this is so that Siddhartha cautions Govinda against believing in time, for “if time isn't real, then the span which seems to exist between the world and eternity, between sorrow and blessedness, between good and bad, is also a deception” (725).
As he reviews his life for Govinda, Siddhartha reflects that einst, the powerful adverb by which men try to distinguish between past and future, marks no real division in the fundamental oneness of their lives. It is a mistake to think of oneself as on the way to enlightenment, in the sense of progressing by stages in which one leaves off one thing as one acquires another, for enlightenment exists within one at every moment of present time. “In every sinner there is, now and today, the future Buddha; his future is all already there, in him, in you, in everyone there is the becoming, potential, hidden Buddha” (726). Similarly, unity, whether within or outside oneself, is not to be attained by trying to put it together as one would a puzzle out of many pieces, for it is present and entire in every object. Thus Brahman, the holy power identical with the Self, the timeless unity of all creation, is simply the reality discovered by lifting the deceptive veil of time as it is experienced in one's own life. Unity resides in the readiness, at each individual moment of time, to see the timelessness beneath, “to see all that has been, life being and life becoming, as simultaneously existent” (726).
In the last paragraphs of the novelle Govinda, the everlasting disciple and uncomprehending seeker, has a vision of this truth as he looks into the face of his friend:
He no longer saw Siddhartha's face, he saw instead other faces, many faces, a long series, a streaming river of faces, hundreds and thousands, all of which came and went and yet seemed to be there all at the same time, all of them changing continually and renewing themselves, and yet which were all Siddhartha. … And thus Govinda saw that this smiling mask, this smiling of unity within the streaming forms, this smiling of simultaneity within the thousand births and deaths, this smiling of Siddhartha was exactly the same, was exactly identical to the quiet, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps goodnatured, perhaps mocking, wise, thousandfold smile of Gotama, the Buddha.
(732)
Thus the goal Siddhartha has realized for himself, the destruction of multiple time, is imaged for Govinda in the face of a living Buddha. And with this we too, who have attended the search like Govinda without a full knowledge of its implications, arrive at the wisdom which Hesse has made manifest through the unique form of eternal Being discovering itself in the process of Becoming. There is after all no difference between seeker and sage, no difference between Siddhartha and Gotama, no disunity possible for the Enlightened One who has found his way to the wisdom of the other shore.
Notes
-
Hermann Hesse, Gesammelte Dichtungen, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 1952, III, 806. Hereafter quotatins from this edition will be given in parentheses within the text. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are from Vol. III.
-
Dr. Hermann Gundert-Dubois, Hesse's maternal grandfather, was “one of the first pioneers of Pietism's mission in India” and became an accomplished linguist and scholar of Indian lore. See Hugo Ball, Hermann Hesse, sein Leben und Werk, Zürich, 1947, p. 5 ff., 168 ff.
-
“… Und mitten in Kandi unter den Buddhapriestern hatte ich nach dem wahren Indien, nach Indiens Geist, nach einer lebendigen Berührung mit ihm das ungestillte Heimweh wie vorher in Europa” (III, 856). Besuch aus Indien, 1922.
-
“Ich wusste, dass es, in Europa wie in Asien, eine unterirdische, zeitlose Welt der Werte und des Geistes gab … und dass es gut und richtig war, in dieser zeitlosen Welt zu leben, an der Europa und Asien, Veden und Bibel, Buddha und Goethe gleichen Teil hatten” (III, 857).
-
Brahman, first of the four castes, whose members were originally priests with the primary duty of studying and teaching the Vedas, the sacred hymns of “Divine Knowledge.” Not to be confused with Brahma(n), the supreme soul of the universe.
-
Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India, ed. Joseph Campbell, Bollingen Series XXVI, Pantheon Books, New York, 1951, p. 79.
-
Ibid., p. 338.
-
Siddhartha, “Desire accomplished,” is the given name; Gotama or Gautama, the name by which Buddha is generally known and also the name of a great teacher and founder of the Nyaya system of philosophy; Sakyamuni means “Silent sage of the Sakyas,” the clan to which Gotama belonged.
-
This rather obvious parallelism is overlooked by Johanna Maria Louisa Kunze, Lebensgestaltung und Weltanschauung in Hermann Hesses Siddhartha (Diss., Amsterdam, n.d.). In general Miss Kunze misses the point of the novelle in trying to decide whether Hesse was subscribing to Buddhistic views. That Siddhartha was not intended as a biography of the Buddha, nor yet a reproduction of his doctrine, is not disputed. It even seems likely, as a critic has recently suggested, that the tone of the novelle owes more to Chinese than to Indian philosophy (see Edmund Gnefkow, Hermann Hesse Biographie, Freiburg i. Br., 1952, p. 58 ff., for an informative discussion of this point).
-
The first part, up to the point where Siddhartha is found at the river by his friend Govinda, was written in the winter of 1919; the remainder was finished after a year and a half. Ball's Hesse, p. 169.
-
A separate essay might be written on the splendid manner in which Hesse has managed to convey the rigidity of that world in his prose. Variations in style throughout the novelle correspond to the basic discoveries Siddhartha makes in each chapter, yet one never loses the feeling that the same person is involved in these various experiences and that they all belong to the same process.
-
Samana, “the equalizing breath,” apparently Buddha's own name for the extreme ascetics and the life he had lived among them (see Kenneth J. Saunders, Gotama Buddha, New York, 1920, p. 23).
-
It is interesting to note that the rumors Siddhartha hears of Buddha are the same as those spread about Christ. Ball has pointed out the similarity between Hesse's portrait of Siddhartha with his portrait of St. Francis—a conscious attempt, perhaps, to suggest the timeless essence or harmony between the dissimilar figures of varying times and civilizations.
-
Opposite and key terms in Buddhistic teaching. Sansara is the “round of being,” transmigration in the cycles of time; Nirvana, “blown out,” is the state of enlightenment when the flame of temporal existence has been extinguished. Siddhartha's insistence that these are mere words is quite in keeping with the spirit of Buddhism. “So long as nirvana is looked upon as something different from samsara [sic], the most elementary error about existence still has to be overcome” (Zimmer's Philosophies, p. 481).
-
Kama is discussed by Zimmer in a chapter called “The Philosophies of Pleasure,” p. 140 ff. The name does not occur in Hesse apart from its use in the proper names as I have noted.
-
Hesse uses images very sparingly in Siddhartha; their beauty and appropriateness is therefore the more striking (cf. the image of the wheel of asceticism, III, 673). Much more typical of the novelle are the continuing appearances, either in person or in memory, of people who keep reminding Siddhartha of his search and his goal, e.g., Govinda, Gotama, and Vasudeva.
-
For the events leading up to Hesse's psychiatric treatment, in 1918, by the Jungian disciple J. B. Lang, see Ball's Hesse, p. 156 ff.
-
See the fascinating discussion in Zimmer, p. 474 ff. It should be remarked that the emphasis in Buddhism is on the crossing, not on reaching the other shore, for “Illumination means that the delusory distinction between the two shores of a worldly and a transcendental existence no longer holds. There is no stream of rebirths flowing between two separated shores: no samsara and no nirvana” (p. 479).
-
Zimmer, p. 535. There are two Buddhistic traditions, the Hinayana, “little ferryboat,” in which “the accomplishment of Buddhahood is regarded as a goal attained only by very few”; and the Mahayana, “great ferryboat,” which teaches that the secret meaning and goal of the doctrine is the universal Buddhahood of all beings” (Zimmer, pp. 484–85).
-
Another example of the three in one whose sum adds up to an invisible four (see below, discussion on OM, pp. 27–28).
-
Zimmer, p. 372.
-
Each of the letters corresponds to a part of the Self: A is Vaisvanara, “common to all men,” the waking state; U is Taijasa, “the shining one” whose field is the dream; and M is Prajna, “the knower,” deep sleep (Zimmer, p. 377).
-
Zimmer, p. 372.
-
Ball (p. 175) has commented that the “music of India” in Siddhartha is a “hieratic triad which makes the individual sentence resound like a constellation,” but he seems unaware of the implications pointed out here.
-
It is important to understand that in Buddhism final knowledge involves, not only the destruction of all dualism (including the primary spheres of Sansara and Nirvana), but complete incommunicability of the absolute state of enlightenment itself.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.