Toward a Perspective for the Indian Element in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha
[In the following essay, Brown discusses various theories about the Indian elements in Siddhartha.]
First contact with Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha indicates quite clearly that things Indian abound in the novel. Titles, names, settings, and cultural background are all Indian. For an author who grew up in a household having close ties to India and who was the enthusiastic inheritor of the eighteenth and nineteenth century German interest in India, such a preoccupation with the subcontinent and its culture in a novel is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that an author who was deeply concerned with religious questions but unable to accept wholly any orthodox form of Christianity would be open to non-Christian, e.g., Indian religions, in his quest for a belief. Hesse's trip of 1911 to Malaya, Sumatra, and Ceylon was likewise a manifestation of this interest. However, just as one cannot take the subtitle Eine indische Dichtung literally, one cannot take the whole of the Indian element at face value. Hesse's relationship to things Indian is complex, his response to Indian culture is selective, and his use of it is varied.
A survey of those critics who have dealt with the Indian element in Siddhartha reveals several tendencies and reflects the complexity of the matter. Some writers have tended to deal with Indian material as being of secondary importance and concentrate on other matters. Theodore Ziolkowski in his excellent book The Novels of Hermann Hesse (Princeton, 1965) seems fully justified in such statements as “it would be naive to read the book as an embodiment or exegesis of Indian philosophy” (150) and “Hesse defines his symbols adequately within the framework of his fiction” (155). Mark Boulby in his equally excellent book Hermann Hesse, His Mind and Art (Ithaca, 1967) speaks of Siddhartha as “the pinnacle of Hesse's orientalism” (124) but views it primarily as “an exemplary vita [in which the] apparent realism … is in the last resort a superficial thing” (134). Although Ziolkowski and Boulby explain much of the meaning of individual Indian elements (e.g., the names of characters and divinities, sacred writings, religious concepts, Gautama's life, and Buddhism), both tend to view the exotic not in terms of itself so much but as subordinate to narrative structure (Ziolkowski) or symbolic structure (Boulby).
Robert C. Conard in his article “Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, Eine indische Dichtung, as a Western Archetype”1 implicitly subordinates the Indian aspects of the work as he joins in the pursuit of its “Western possibilities” (359). Chief among these, declares Conard, is an unconscious pattern, the Isolato-archetype, which “does most to make [Siddhartha] Western literature par excellence” (359). After he discovers the ten conditions ascribed to this archetype in Hesse's work, Conard is satisfied that “Siddhartha proclaims a primordial image, emerging from the deepest strata of unconsciousness, which reveals the bodily structure of the work as Western despite the Indic garment it wears” (367).
A second group of writers has taken things Indian as their points of departure, indicated where these reappear in Siddhartha, and posited unqualified influence. Johanna Maria Louisa Kunze, Hans Beerman, and Eugene Timpe have found traces of the Bhagavad-Gita in Hesse's novel and have concluded that its relationship to this Indian work is one of great similarity, indebtedness or dependence.2 Leroy Shaw and the coauthors Brigitte Schludermann and Rosemarie Finlay find parallelism between the life of Gautama and that of Siddhartha and conclude that this parallelism is the basis of the book.3 These studies are thought provoking and informative, but the shortcoming they all appear to share would seem to be the failure to see that Hesse's technique with regard to Indian ideas is not so much to borrow from this material with which he is familiar and deeply involved, reproducing or even interpreting it, but rather to create an entity which despite all its Indian content is new and different, something which in the final analysis is purely Hessean.
For example, despite all his Indian appearance (name, clothes, family and social status, several occupations, etc.) Siddhartha is essentially Hessean. His early dissatisfaction, his searchings, his playing different roles, the inner voice which guides him, and finally his insights are peculiar to Siddhartha, the individual Hesse has created. Both the exemplary biography which is the story of Siddhartha and the statement the novel makes are Hessean. As one reads what Hesse writes about his “persönliche Religion” in the essay “Mein Glaube” (Gesammelte Schriften, VII, 372) of 1931, the conclusion one seems advised to draw is that the concepts and the Weltanschauung in the Bhagavad-Gita are not those of Siddhartha.4 By the same token one would suspect that any similarity between the lives of the two Siddharthas is merely a means and not an end.
The third tendency among critics is to acknowledge fully the Indian element as authentic in itself but to see the final product as non-Indian. Bhabagrahi Misra in his article “An Analysis of Indic Tradition in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha”5 recognizes and discusses many of the obvious Indian elements in the novel and sees Hesse as combining these from diverse sources into “an organic cultural whole of India” (121). Nonetheless he is sensitive to the technique defined above, namely that the Indian element is not essentially part of the author's belief. Misra sees the novel as Hesse's attempt to discover the meaning of life from an existential not Indian point of view (122).6 In his book Die Begegnung des Christentums mit den asiatischen Religionen im Werk Hermann Hesses (Bonn, 1956) Gerhart Mayer sees in Siddhartha “die Auseinandersetzung zwischen östlicher Weltverneinung und christlich ehrfurchtsvoller Liebe zur Schöpfung” and the striving for a synthesis (51). Siddhartha is “formal … die Beschreibung des östlich-mystischen Heilwegs, der zur Unio führt [however] diese Unio erfahrt nun eine spezifische christliche Färbung: sie bedeutet die liebende Hingabe an die Welt!” (50f).7 Mayer focuses his attention on Hesse's “Gottsucher” and his method, Hesse's God and His relationship to nature and man. Mayer finds what he considers genuine Indian and Christian (specifically similar to Eckhart and Schleiermacher) elements but the sum is “die wesentlichsten Elemente von Hesses Glauben” (42).
Bharati Blaise, in her very informative and thorough dissertation “The Use of Indian Mythology in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha” (unpub., University of Iowa, 1969), presents a wealth of detailed information regarding Hesse's use of things Indian and arrives basically at the same conclusion—namely that the final product is non-Indian. While Blaise shows certain elements such as the Hindu vocabulary, the setting, and some parallels between Siddhartha and the Narada legend to be authentic, she also shows convincingly that Hesse uses Indian mythology symbolically, i.e., not for its own sake but for other, Hessean ends: “to express a modern and Western sense of crisis” (2); as “an attempt to re-establish a dual perspective, a way, that is, of reintroducing mystery and overcoming a mechanical understanding of the cosmic law” (26); “to be not so much a doctrinaire solution to the fragmentations of the twentieth century … [but rather] an artistic tool to reinforce resolutions that are strongly Romantic and suggestively Christian” (102). Following the story line, Blaise takes up values, self, personality, perception, discontent, the goals to be sought, awakening, Seele, spiritual development, experiencing the truth and finally love and shows how Hesse adapts Indian mythology to his own personal concerns.8
For these three critics, Misra, Mayer, and Blaise, the importance of the Indian elements in Siddhartha is not their authenticity but their significance as the cultural context for the story (Misra) or as components in Hesse's religious system (Mayer) or as symbolic material by means of which Hesse expresses his views (Blaise).
In the face of these findings one might be inclined to draw the conclusion that the significance of India and its culture is superficial and decorative or at most part of a synthesis. This may be true for the message in the novel and the personality or the spiritual development of the hero but close examination shows that certain Indian elements have in various ways directly shaped the work. Three things—the idea of a Buddha and the life of Gautama, the four aims or goals designated in Hinduism, and the concept of maya—should serve well to illustrate the kind of impact things Indian have made on Siddhartha.
To what extent Hesse has retold or reinterpreted the life of the Buddha seems to be a difficult question. Most certainly there are “elements borrowed from the life (or legend) of Gautama” and it is clear that some of these elements are important to the plot or that these “parallels to Buddha's life are contributing factors to the legendary quality of the novel” (Ziolkowski, 153 ff.). If, however, one begins with the concept of what a Buddha is, the question resolves itself: “According to Buddhist theory, a ‘Buddha’ appears from time to time in the world and preaches the true doctrine. After a certain lapse of time this teaching is corrupted and lost, and is not restored until a new Buddha appears.”9 For Buddhism the last Buddha was Gautama and his teachings are still readily accessible and uncorrupted; for Hesse, who was not a Buddhist, there was a new doctrine and in terms of an Indian context the fitting way to present it was through a new Buddha, his character Siddhartha.10
Thus the elements in Siddhartha's life which are akin to those in Gautama's are there to lend the character the aura of a Buddha, and the elements which are foreign are there to convey the newness and distinctiveness of the novel's wisdom.11 Hesse uses yet another technique to convey this difference between the old and the new Buddhas; he changes the sequence of biographical episodes so that Siddhartha's life is significantly different from Gautama's. A clear example of this technique is Hesse's presenting Gautama's career in its final stage, that of teacher, by the end of the first quarter of the novel [Gesammelte Schriften, III, 635–645] (i.e., Chapter 3 of Part I) when Siddhartha is young and his development is in an early stage. This positioning makes several points quite clearly: Siddhartha still has a way to go to enlightenment; because he rejects Gautama's teaching, Siddhartha's subsequent development will be independent of the Buddha; Siddhartha's enlightenment will be distinct from that of the Buddha. The structure itself shows that the remainder of the story is Siddhartha's alone and that this wisdom differs from Gautama's. The concept of a Buddha provides Hesse with the appropriate conveyor of his wisdom and Gautama provides the pre-eminent example. It remained for the author to create his own Buddha and to borrow for him some credentials from the tradition. The result is a new, Hessean Buddha.
The temptation is strong to look to eastern teachings for a means of analyzing Siddhartha. I readily agree with the opinion that “any attempt to analyze the novel according to Buddha's … teaching about the Four Truths and Eight-fold Noble Path does violence to the natural [triadic] structure of the book.”12 If in fact Hesse's Siddhartha is a new Buddha, he will be the bearer of a new wisdom and to understand it we need not look to old ones. There is nonetheless a basic Hindu teaching compatible with the triadic structure of the book which critics have not considered but which seems to be a determining factor for Hesse: the four possible goals of human life—Kama, Artha, Dharma, and Moksha.13Kama is pleasure, especially physical love; Artha is material possessions and the power and influence over the lives of others they produce. These two goals compose the Path of Desire. A second and higher path, that of Renunciation, consists of the other goals, Dharma and Moksha. The first is equivalent to duty as prescribed by religious or moral laws; the second is salvation or spiritual release. Moksha is the highest and only satisfying goal of these four. It is redemption, that is, release from Karma, the cycle of reincarnations. The state one achieves with Moksha is Nirvana in Buddhist terms. It is beyond all verbal description.
Already the personification of these goals by the main characters in Hesse's novel should be apparent: Govinda seeks the goal of Dharma, Kamala Kama, Kamaswami Artha, and Siddhartha ultimately the highest, Moksha. Hesse is able to preserve his triadic structure simply by dividing the goals Dharma and Moksha and placing the former before, the latter after Kama and Artha. Seen in the light of this configuration, Siddhartha and his life is made more distinctive, more outstanding. He pursues each of these goals in this order whereas the other characters for the most part of their lives seek only one each. There is for Siddhartha a somewhat unorthodox Moksha in keeping with his being the new Buddha, bearer of the new wisdom. His achievement is indeed in a sense a liberation from the life cycle as he overcomes time and space in his vision but his achievement is also marked by a loving acceptance of life in its entirety. Hesse has described for us his own “Moksha.”
These four aims of life in the Hindu system provide Hesse with concepts for four allegorical characters. When combined with the development of the hero in all four of these areas of life the possibility of a structure emerges. Hesse is easily able to arrange the four elements into the triadic structure which conforms to his view.
At several points in Siddhartha Hesse depicts a sequence of events which takes place in the span of two or sometimes three days and the intervening nights.14 Two of these sequences differ in that they begin not during the day but at night or in the evening and each contains a dream. The first begins with the words: “In der Nacht, da er in der strohernen Hütte eines Fährmannes am Flusse schlief …” (652)15 and relates his dream of the Govinda-woman figure, the next day's events (conversations with the ferryman and later with the woman, arrival at the city and first glimpses of Kamala), his first night in the city, his meeting with Kamala the second day and with Kamaswami the third day. The other sequence begins with “Er war die Abendstunden bei Kamala gewesen …” (676), continues with mention of how he spent the night in entertainments and drinking before his dream at dawn, tells of his lying under the Mango tree in his garden all the next day and night, his departure from the city and the events of the next day as he wanders through the forest to the river. This sequence ends when the old ferryman says, “Laß uns zur Ruhe gehen, Siddhartha” (697). The part of the novel which lies between these sequences tells of the second twenty-year epoch of Siddhartha's life which he spends in the city pursuing worldly rather than spiritual goals.16
In Hindu thought, particularly in the Vedantic system
Māyā denotes the unsubstantial, phenomenal character of the observed and manipulated world17
and has the following significance:
“illusion and appearance,” … a term … applied to the illusion or the multiplicity of the empirical universe, produced by ignorance (avidya), when in reality there is only One, the brahman-atman18
and further:
The phenomenal world does not exist; it is only maya, arising from avidya, that makes us erroneously think it to be real; maya is overcome when he who ignorantly believed himself to be an individual realizes that in actuality he is only one with atman; then only is salvation (moksha, lit. ‘liberation’) finally won.19
To translate maya as ‘illusion’ is potentially misleading. Maya does have “a kind of qualified reality” which is like that of dreams in that they
are real in the sense that we have them, but they are not real in the sense that the things they depict necessarily exist in their own rights. Strictly speaking a dream is a psychological construction, something created by the mind out of a particular state. When the Hindus say that the world is maya, this too is what they mean.20
The particular aspect of maya with which Siddhartha primarily deals is sansara (or samsara), “the worlds of birth … the round of being” or “the realm of birth and death.”21 This is the world of reincarnation, the transmigration of an individual jiva or soul. Samsara could be characterized as the living, human content of maya.
The second twenty-year epoch of Siddhartha's life, his years in the phenomenal, empirical world of the city during which he pursues worldly goals, is samsara and maya, that is, illusion and as such has only a ‘qualified reality.’ As Siddhartha lives it and the reader reads it, it is real but in the total context of the novel it is not real, it is only a dream.
Hesse is careful to begin with the illusion of maya and then to make its reality possible for his hero. Maya is mentioned in the novel only once, namely in the last chapter of Part I, “Erwachen.” The awakening in question is that of Siddhartha's senses and his sense experiences of the second epoch are an antithesis to his spiritual experiences of the first epoch. In order to continue with his development from the spiritual into the sensuous, Siddhartha must reject maya as illusion and accept it as real in order to experience it. This is exactly what his first sense experiences during his awakening lead him to do:
All dieses [the world he seems to be seeing for the first time] … war nicht mehr Zauber Maras, war nicht mehr der Schleier der Maya, war nicht mehr sinnlose und zufällige Vielfalt der Erscheinungswelt …
(647)22
While Hesse portrays the action of the second epoch in such a way that there is no doubt about its immediate reality, he is also careful to call it samsara and to indicate that from the perspective of the whole novel it is dreamlike. One whole chapter is entitled “Sansara” (672–681). Toward the end of this chapter the whole world of the Kamaswami-Menschen is likened to a game and “Dieses Spiel hieß Sansara …” (680). At the beginning of the next chapter Siddhartha is described as follows: “Tief war er in Sansara verstrickt” (681). The one element of this world of the Kindermenschen which follows Siddhartha into his life on the river as ferryman is his son and his love for his son. This love is called samsara (710).
After some twenty years of his life among people Siddhartha is intent on rejecting it. In the scenes in the forest and on the river there are two details which indicate that the action of the second epoch has been a dream. The first is the use of the word “Traum” in reference to the life he has decided to reject: “… es gab nichts mehr als die tiefe, leidvolle Sehnsucht, diesen ganzen wüsten Traum von sich zu schütteln …” (682). The second detail occurs close to the end of these scenes and is contained in a remark which implies that what happened during those “häßliche Jahre” was only a dream. He speaks of himself now as “ein neuer Siddhartha … aus dem Schlaf erwacht” (692).
As already noted this epoch of the years Siddhartha spent in the city is framed by two dreams: the first, the Govinda-woman dream, looks forward toward the sensual experiences and the second, about Kamala's dead songbird, looks back toward the death of Siddhartha's soul. This framing seems another device which is intended to place the whole epoch in the context of a dream.
There is a third device which Hesse uses to convey the dream nature of the samsara epoch. By handling the narrative material with great subtlety he is able to present this whole epoch literally as a dream.23 There is a place in the narration when the otherwise consistent and pervading flow of action is broken. This occurs soon after the beginning of the chapter entitled “Kamala” (650–663) when the scene shifts abruptly from Siddhartha's thoughts and aimless wanderings (narrative in the iterative-durative style) to a specific scene:
In der Nacht, da er in der strohernen Hütte eines Fährmannes am Flusse schlief …
(652).
The previous paragraphs describe the hero's wanderings and his ruminations about the encounter with the Buddha, his search for Self, and how it is necessary to follow the command of the inner voice in this search. Time and setting are vague. There is no connection in the narrative between this subject matter and the scene in the hut. The clearly, concisely described setting, particularly the detail of the straw hut, is unexpected and its specificity only points up the complete shift from the general places and thoughts described in the immediate preceding paragraphs. The scene in the hut is already in progress—Siddhartha is asleep—although the reader has no knowledge of how or when. A bridge to maintain the characteristic flow of narrative is missing.
The passage of time throughout the day, the meeting with the ferryman, the invitation to share the hut for the night are in the novel but do not appear until the beginning of the two-day phase which contains Siddhartha's departure from the city. This phase ends well into the night after Siddhartha has told his story to Vasudeva with the ferryman's gentle suggestion: “Laß uns nun zur Ruhe gehen, Siddhartha” (697). This remark is the narrative bridge which was missing from the beginning of the scene of Siddhartha's first night on the river. Thus a special connection is made between these two episodes: their complementary fit is such that all the action transpiring in the time between the two scenes lasted no longer than a night, was a dream in which Siddhartha at the breast of the Govinda-woman figure
trank, süß und stark schmeckte die Milch [, die] nach Welt und Mann, nach Sonne und Wald, nach Tier und Blume, nach jeder Frucht, nach jeder Lust [schmeckte]. Sie machte trunken und bewußtlos.
(652)
All the tastes of this milk are the tastes of the phenomenal world, the tastes of maya which Siddhartha drank in the course of a single dream.
The attraction India and its culture exerted on Hesse was obviously strong. Otherwise he would never have written “an Indian work.” But it should be equally obvious that Hesse's intent was not to write an authentic Indian work which would represent any Indian religion or philosophy, or even his adoption or interpretation of some aspect of Indian culture. Hesse had his own belief which he wanted to put on paper. Siddhartha, aside from being a milestone in his development as a writer and a reflection of his ideas, is an example of that aspect of Hesse's artistry which has to do with his use of established, traditional material. Within the framework of what Hesse wants to say, things Indian do exert an influence on how the novel takes shape. With his new wisdom in mind Hesse turned to India and saw that a Buddha was the most appropriate vehicle. Desiring an exemplary biography as the basis of the novel, he wrote in reference to the life of Gautama. The four life goals of success, duty, pleasure, and liberation (Artha, Dhama, Kama, and Moksha) offered Hesse the basis of four main characters but he altered their original religious configuration to suit the structure he had in mind. And finally Hesse's conviction that importance lies in the inner and not the outer life led him to the concept of maya. Hesse represented the epoch of Siddhartha's life in the outer world as maya by portraying it as a dream, by placing it between the two halves of a single night in the story.
To understand this method of using the old in the representation of the new is basic to a full appreciation of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Close attention to things Indian in the novel may not open Hesse's mind but it will serve very well as a key to his artistry.
Notes
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The German Quarterly, 48 (1975), 358–69.
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Kunze in her Lebensgestaltung und Weltanschauung in Hermann Hesses Siddhartha (S'Hertogenbosch, n.d.) speaks of a “große Ähnlichkeit … mit … der ‘Bhagavad-Gita’” (69) and says “diese Dichtung [hat] zu dem dritten Teile des Siddhartha Pate gestanden” (69). Beerman in his “Hermann Hesse and the Bhagavad-Gita” (Midwest Quarterly 1 (1959), 27–40) undertakes to show indebtedness to Indian philosophy with particular reference to the Bhagavad-Gita …” (28). Timpe in his “Hesse's Siddhartha and the Bhagavad-Gita” (Comparative Literature, 22 (1970), 346–57) undertakes to show “that Hesse was influenced largely by the Bhagavad-Gita when he wrote his book and that his protagonist was groping his way along the path prescribed by the Bhagavad-Gita …” (347).
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Shaw in his “Time and the Structure of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha” (Symposium, 11 (1957), 204–24) states that “the life of Hesse's protagonist runs almost parallel to “the Buddha's” (206) and that “this parallel … forms the structural backbone” of the novel (207). Schludermann and Finlay in their “Mythical Reflections of the East in Hermann Hesse “(Mosaic, 2 (1969), 97–111) imply that Hesse's personal interpretation of the Buddha myth is basic to the novel and they state “the story … runs parallel to the traditional tale of Buddha” (100).
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Kunze (73 f.) is the only one of the critics mentioned here who acknowledges any discrepancy, but whereas she specifies three points of divergence she does not attribute the difference to Hesse's technique.
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Indian Literature, 11 (1968), 111–23.
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Misra clearly differentiates between the Buddha's life and Siddhartha's: “[Hesse] reshaped the legendary tale of Buddha to create Siddhartha as an imaginative non-conformist” (121 f.).
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Mayer does not consistently equate the narrative line in the novel with the “östlich-mystischer Heilsweg.” The word “formal” cannot be understood in the sense of “structurally.”
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See the whole of Chapter V, “Hesse, India as a Symbol of the ‘Inner Voice’” (100–145) and especially the section on Siddhartha (105–138).
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T. W. Rhys Davis, “Buddha,” The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., 29 vols. (Cambridge, 1910), IV, 737–742.
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“Doctrine” is of course inappropriate for Hesse, and Siddhartha, who rejects all doctrines after his encounter with Gautama and in his final meeting with Govinda, explains that real wisdom cannot be communicated (III, 724). In this and other respects Hesse's new wisdom strives to contrast itself to that of Buddhism and it is this effort which leads Ziolkowski to the conclusion that Siddhartha is “an implicit critical exegesis of Buddhism” (Ziolkowski, 154 f.). Gautama's attitude toward the value of doctrine is not so simple as implied and not so far removed from Siddhartha's attitude as one might conclude. In his dialogue about the man who builds a raft and departs the world on it for nirvana, Gautama indicates that the importance or unimportance of doctrine is relative to the degree of spiritual development (See, for example, Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India [n.p., 1951], 477 f.).
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I am indebted to Professor Joseph Mileck for his helpful criticism which kept my observations on this point in accord with Hesse's purpose. The divergence between Gautama and Siddhartha should not be taken to imply superiority for the one or the other. Both attain the same ultimate degree of spirituality but by distinctly different means, e.g., the teacher-disciple relationship suited to doctrine for Gautama and the individual's inner voice guiding toward experience for Siddhartha.
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Ziolkowski, 154. I also agree with Professor Ziolkowski's rejection (154n) of Leroy R. Shaw's attempt to analyze the novel in the same terms (“Time and the Structure of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha,” Symposium, 11 (1957).
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Cf. John B. Noss' Man's Religions (3rd ed., New York, 1963, pp. 254–56) or Huston Smith's The Religions of Man (New York, 1958, 16–25) or Zimmer (35–42, et passim).
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Ziolkowski in his analysis of Hesse's style in Siddhartha distinguishes three main types of narrative units each with its own particular type of content and action: two-day phases in which the action takes place over a period of a day and the following night and day, scenes of shorter duration, and iterative-durative passages of indeterminate length (163–165). Close examination reveals that some of the two-day phases are actually longer than the name implies. In spite of this slight discrepancy I find Ziolkowski's distinction entirely valid and have used it as the basis of this discussion of maya.
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This and other passages from Siddhartha are quoted from volume III of the Gesammelte Schriften.
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Ziolkowski, 163. Professor Ziolkowski's division of the novel into three “epochs” of approximately 20 years seems ingenious and totally justified (160–170).
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Zimmer, 19.
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Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (13 vols., New York, 1908–1927), VIII, 503.
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op. cit., 504.
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Smith, 73 f.
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Zimmer, 53 and 174 respectively.
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Three themes are present here: the reference to Mara's seductive magic calls to mind the Buddha's temptation and indicates how Siddhartha unlike the Buddha does fall victim to it; maya and its content samsara; and the apparent multiplicity which ignorance causes man to see rather than the real unity. This last theme, the most important of the whole novel, is emphasized more than the other two as the sentence concludes “… verächtlich dem tiefdenkenden Brahmanen, der die Vielfalt verschmäht, der die Einheit sucht.” The possible irony of Siddhartha's awakening almost immediately prior to his succumbing to illusion which will be portrayed as a dream is gentle if it exists at all. That the pursuit of the sensuous and the sensual is as doomed to failure as the pursuit of the spiritual was, is ultimately immaterial because both are paths to the one and therefore good. (Cf. 689 f.)
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“Der indische Lebenslauf” of 1937 is another portrayal of maya in Hesse's work. In this instance the presentation is clearly and straightforwardly that of a dream.
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