Siddhartha
[In the following essay, Boulby describes Hesse's familiarity with the East, apparent in Siddhartha and many of the author's writings.]
Hesse's journey to the East began in his childhood. His parents' personal experience of Southeast Asia, the indological expertise of grandfather Hermann Gundert with his specimens, books, and mastery of several oriental languages, the Asian visitors who came frequently to the house at Calw—the sources were early and varigated. This was, in any case, the age of the “Oriental Renaissance” in Europe. That movement which began in Germany with the Schlegels and with Schopenhauer had turned into a fashionable cult by the mid-nineteenth century, and in the time of Hesse's own childhood was if anything accelerated and intensified by the reaction against the pseudoscientific banalities of the Naturalist school.
Hesse's conscious, intellectual interest in India came first from a study of theosophical writings, all of which led him back to the same sources, in particular the Bhagavad-Gita. He became acquainted with the work of Hermann Oldenberg, Paul Deussen, and Karl Eugen Neumann, as well as with that of Leopold von Schröder.1 Schopenhauer, whom he began now to prefer to Nietzsche,2 merely confirmed for him the significance of Indian ideas he had already found elsewhere. Translations, however, often seemed to Hesse poor and badly written.3 Nonetheless, poor or not, those versions of the Sanskrit and Pali scriptures which he read did communicate to him an experience of religion on a par with that which he had received from the faith and practice of his parents: “I experienced religion in two forms, as the child and grandchild of pious upright Protestants and as a reader of Indian revelations in which I give pride of place to the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita and the sermons of Buddha. … From early childhood I lived just as much in the atmosphere of Indian spirituality as I did in that of Christianity.”4
In the interpretation of Hesse's works it is inadmissible to suppose these Indian influences largely subordinate to, or simply an intensification of, the stimuli of the German Romantic tradition;5 India was at least as old as Novalis in Hesse's imagination, each fructifies, at various times, the other. In any case the interaction was not at all a simple one; Hesse remarks that Indian religion offers more food for the imagination than does Protestantism,6 while Leopold von Schröder noted, not wholly absurdly, that the Indians were in a sense the Romantics of the ancient world.7
The journey of 1911, which took in Malaya, Sumatra, and Ceylon, was a severe disappointment to Hesse; it ended summarily that idealization of the East in which the hermit of Gaienhofen was seeking escape.8 Hesse found the Orient europeanized and having its own momentum of degeneration. Buddhism, with its ludicrous pomp and circumstance, was a decayed religion with which one could not sympathize, although one might feel for the good, gentle, and naïve peoples at whose foolish hands it had been destroyed.9 Though he was repelled by this, Hesse's attitude remained ambivalent; at least in the East he found a bond of ideal community together with some contact with a magical source, and Demianlike he harps upon the need for the “Northern European” to rediscover such things in his own culture, “in a higher form.”10 He writes still, to some degree, with the superiority, even the conventional smugness of the Western intellectual toward such matters, but as the years passed this shell fell away and a more positive kernel was revealed: “What remains is the experience of a dream-visit to distant ancestors … and a deep respect for the spirit of the East.”11
Retrospect or distance is perhaps the precondition of romanticization; whether Hesse subsequently reromanticized the East on the basis of the former, the latter condition having been lost, is a matter of opinion. At all events childhood, fairy tale, and above all home with a nuance of paradise are the imagery with which the Orient remains uncertainly and ironically bound in Hesse's later writings. In 1916 he finds the vital experience of the Indian journey had been that of the oneness of humanity, now thrown so into relief by the war. “Visit from India” (1922) recalls how he still felt in Kandy—just as he had felt in Europe before setting out—that identical homesickness for a contact with the true spirit of India, and how at length the realization came that physical contact was unnecessary, that a teacher was unnecessary, the fundamental insight into the universality and ubiquity of the magical sphere. “Here my education in magic began”; “Buddha and the Dhammapaddam and the Tao Te Ching [sounded] pure and familiar to me and had no riddles any more.”12 India, he eventually found, was all around him everywhere: the same magical thinking as in the Upanishads might be discovered in the novels of Dostoevsky; yoga belonged not only to those Indian practitioners he had personally known but was also, for example, the key to the personality of that curious Pietist who used to visit the Hesses in Calw, Herr Claassen. The magical bridges to the East were really built, however, in the time of Dr. Lang and Demian. And then the year 1920 apparently sees Hesse moving back from the Vedanta and the Buddhist scriptures toward “the true religious India of the gods, of Vishnu and Indra, Brahma and Krishna.”13
Siddhartha is the pinnacle of Hesse's orientalism; perhaps it is the high point of his art in the novel as well. It is the culmination, all but successful, of that struggle for a new style which characterizes this author's most productive, most impressive period, the years 1916–1925. Of Hesse's earlier and later novels probably only The Steppenwolf stands comparison with it as a formal achievement, and then for other reasons. It shares its high position in his life's work, however, with productions which are themselves not novels, with “Iris,” with Pictor's Transformations, with “Klingsor's Last Summer” and “Klein and Wagner,” and perhaps with the “autobiographies” of The Glass Bead Game. “Iris” and Pictor's Transformations are both Märchen; it is indeed practically only in the Märchen form that Hesse seems able to approach what in Demian recedes the farther the more it is pursued, namely, some resolution of the fundamental stylistic dualism, a language fit to render directly the constatations of magical thinking, the numinous experience of the soul. The approximation—which is all it can be—is principally achieved by surrendering mind to the hegemony of Märchen, by making of reflection the servant, and no longer the discursive critic, of dreams.
“Iris” (1918) is a story in which the reflective commentary is present only in a subtly muted form. When Anselm gazes into the calyx of the iris, “then his soul looked through the gate where things become mysteries and seeing becomes intuition” (III, 367). Only the sudden present tense lifts this sentence gently onto the plane of the reflective. The next paragraph—“Every earthly object is an image”—and that which shortly follows—“All children feel this way”—are generalizing language, but this is little more than the age-old moralizing of the Märchen, the distilling of wisdom. There is no tension between the narrating and the interpreting mind; the dualism, though not extinguished, is softened to the point of incipient harmony. Indeed, “Iris” is impressive just because of its harmony, its oneness, its being cast in a single mold. The debt to Novalis is decisive, but yet the story is no mere pastiche. Few works of its author, in fact, are so strikingly, so intimately his own work, the deepest expression of himself.
Hesse's central, poignant theme of childhood is here wholly translated into the fragile tissue of Märchen. Anselm (the name recalls E. T. A. Hoffmann) has one or two points of contact, in his childhood, with Hans Giebenrath; Iris, the bride “older than he would have wanted for a wife” (III, 371), has no doubt some qualities of Maria Bernoulli; but the autobiographical approach would be a total desecration of such a work as this. In the magic world of Anselm's childhood, in the entrancement of the garden, it is the iris which casts the deepest spell, arouses the deepest dream. He gazes into the calyx of the blue flower:
Long rows of yellow fingers grew out of the pale-blue flowery ground, between them a light path ran away and down into the calyx and the distant blue mystery of the flower … [He] saw the yellow delicate members sometimes as a golden hedge by the park, sometimes as a double line of beautiful dream trees which no wind stirred, and between them bright and interlaced with glassy delicate, living veins ran the mysterious way down into the interior
[III, 364].
In his dreams Anselm goes into this fairy palace and the whole world with him, “drawn by magic, down into the lovely gorge where every anticipation must be realized and every presentiment become truth” (III, 367).
It is of this dream of childhood, long lost, that the girl Iris, difficult, withdrawn, musical, and flower-loving, unconsciously reminds him when the subsequent professor and man of the world seeks a wife. But she hesitates, for she perceives that this young intellectual—successful, worldly, ambitious, furrows already upon his brow—is far from being at peace with himself and cannot harmonize with her soulful inner world. We have heard before, in Demian, of the music of fate—“the music and rhythm of my fate”14 (III, 178)—Iris speaks of “the music in my heart” (III, 373), and she will only marry a man whose “inner music” harmonizes with her own. She sets Anselm the task of searching in his memory to discover what it is of which her name always reminds him, and in this task he now sacrifices his entire empirical existence; in the pursuit of lost memories he forfeits forever his worldly posture, his material aims, his acquisitive will. He becomes a vagabond, but immersed in memory and thus close to wisdom, to nature and to truth. Finally, as an old man, he comes across an iris growing miraculously in the snow and, gazing into the calyx of the flower, he at last remembers his childhood dream. Iris herself is now long dead, but soon Anselm comes upon the spectral gate opened by the spirits only once in a thousand years. He goes within and down into the earth: “Anselm walked past the sentinel into the crevice and through the golden pillars down into the blue mystery of the interior. It was Iris into whose heart he made his way, and it was the iris in his mother's garden into whose blue calyx he stepped” (III, 382). The world within is that sphere in which there are no symbols, no images, no archetypes any more, but only reality, the I, the self.
This story, dominated by blue, is altogether rich in colors, as fairy tales often are, as Hesse's anoetic style invariably is. Yet it has the insubstantiality of a dream. The subjective mystery of the childish self, and its synesthetic mode of experiencing, are effectively evoked. This is the inward home, and its loss sets the human being off on that spiral journey—“the long, hard detour”15 (III, 369)—which is the course of the soul. For Anselm a modification of his childhood relationship with his mother was the first sign of the great sea-change. Adulthood also brought the impoverishment of memory. When Anselm eventually begins to re-enter his memory world, it is like uncovering a series of concealed frescoes; experiences rise from the past, sensations of spring and winter days, nameless and dateless, moments of childhood which were awakened moments and therefore stored up: “the gorges of memory” (III, 378)—we think not only of the “lovely gorge” of the iris itself but of the preface to Demian (“We all come out of the same gorge”). There are also here, as in Demian, allusions to the possibility and the nature of pre-existence. The path which Anselm treads is that which goes inward into the womb; and as Iris tells him upon her deathbed, he takes this path not for her, but for himself. Within him he becomes aware of a presence, a voice which directs him. A vagabond in search of his soul, he discovers anew how to converse with the things of nature, with trees and stones, as he could as a child (and as his Romantic forbears were able to do). If this verges on pastiche, the bird which sings to him and leads him to his final goal belongs intimately to Hesse's own symbolic vision. The bird finds its way inside him, its song comes from within his breast. It directs him to the spectral gate, the cleft in the rock, the way into the heart of the iris, and away from that sphere of mere phenomena in which men live.
The psychoanalytic approach to this work would constate the significance of the cleft which leads into the earth; but then, even more so than the biographical, it would destroy “Iris,” without understanding it. Novalis—above all “Hyazinth und Rosenblütchen”—might help us more discreetly. But “Iris,” in the last resort, lives in its own symbols, Hesse's symbols, the blue orifice and golden stigma of the flower, the mystery of memory, the song of the bird in the seeker's breast.
Pictor's Transformations (written 1922; first published 1925) is an equally intimate work; it was originally published in a limited edition of 650 copies, and is now available as a facsimile complete with Hesse's curious illustrations.16 The story of Pictor unfolds entirely in paradise, “in the home and source of life,” in the garden where grows the tree of life17—“it was both man and woman.” Here Pictor enters full of longing, and here metamorphosis is the controlling law. The bird of paradise is transformed into a “bird-flower”; the “bird-flower” turns into a butterfly; the “bird-flower-butterfly” into a ruby crystal, a magic carbuncle which threatens to sink away into the earth until Pictor hurriedly makes use of it, at the serpent's bidding, to transform himself into a tree. Years pass, and as a tree he is happy, until he finds that he is somehow excluded from the flow of the river of metamorphosis, he cannot transform himself any more. He has been trapped by the serpent's advice into assuming an immutable and therefore an agonizing form, since it is subject all the same to time, to sadness and decay. The fatal difference lies in the fact that the tree of life is androgynous, whereas Pictor is not. Then a girl enters paradise and sits beneath Pictor's tree, drawn to Pictor, in whom now new dreams are stirring. When the bird brings the carbuncle, her longings too are realized and she is united with the tree—“sprouted from his trunk as a strong, young bough.” For Pictor this monoecious state is “eternal transformation”—“He became a deer, he became a fish, he became a man and a serpent, a child and a bird. But in all his forms he was entire, he was a pair, he had moon and sun, man and woman in him, flowed as a twin river through the lands, hung in the sky as a double star.”
Pictor's Transformations is no doubt among other things a prose poem on loneliness, and the hope of surmounting it (and we may think of Hesse's eventual—unsuccessful—marriage to Ruth Wenger in 1924), but biography helps no further than this. At the heart of Pictor stands Peter Camenzind's tree, its mythical identity at last fully revealed; the bird of the soul flies through the air of paradise, while the twin river of metamorphosis is Siddhartha's stream. All Hesse's works from this period, from “Iris” through Demian to Siddhartha and ultimately Pictor are intimately interwoven, linked by “symbols of transformation.” In Pictor at times the rhythmical prose of the tale slips over, with its meter and internal rhymes, into undisguised verse. Pictor's Transformations is indeed a highly sophisticated Kunstmärchen, designed to convey “magical” insights; in a sense it is more hermetic still than “Iris,” in a sense also less overtly personal, for the fragile connection in the former with the world of common experience has in Pictor finally been abandoned. The story seeks to portray objective reality, that is, eternal change and flow.
Ensconced between these two Märchen lies Siddhartha, but not alone; apart from Demian itself, “Klingsor's Last Summer” and “Klein and Wagner” are the other principal works of Hesse's middle period, and in comparison with the Märchen both move on an external plane. Into both of these, the reflective, critical mind—which in the verbal context (at least) of Pictor finds no place—obtrudes.
“Klingsor” is a unique and outstanding work; its weakness is a certain imaginative overstrain, its harleqinade of self-dissipation is perhaps in some degree a theoretical speculation and its language a concession to Expressionist fashions.18 But the splendor of the language of “Klingsor” is, after all, unparalleled elsewhere in Hesse; the intoxicated, burning summer of 1919 in Tessin lives vividly and poignantly in such sketches as the walk to Kareno (Carona), while the scene in the grotto achieves a force rare in this often passive, slowly contemplative writer:
Klingsor, king of the night, lofty crown in his hair, leaning back in his stone seat, conducted the dance of the world, gave the beat, summoned forth the moon, vanished the railroad. … Painting was fine, painting was a fine, sweet game for good children. A different thing—grander and more massive—to conduct the stars, to project the beat of your own blood, the colored rings of your own retina out into the world, to let surges of your own soul rove forth in the wind of the night
[III, 583].
This drunken solipsist is wholly enmeshed and entranced by his own monologue; though famous, he is in reality the artist whose public has disappeared. This was Hesse's condition of mind in 1919, doubt in his public, desperate doubt in the sense and purpose of his own “profession.”19 Klingsor is moreover an artist in physical decline, an artist already ultimately engaged with death, for whom this is now his greatest source of inspiration; with the missiles from his palette Klingsor takes aim at death, with empty wine bottles for cannon he tries to shoot down time, death, and suffering. Around him as he moves through the sultry, virulent months of summer there is only “music of doom” (III, 588). “I believe in one thing alone: in doom. … All over it is the same: the great war, the great revolution in art, the great disintegration of the states of the west. … We are perishing, friends, this is our destiny, the key of Tsing Tse has sounded” (III, 591–592).
The gaunt figure of Klingsor, caught wandering ecstatic and lonely through these fabulous days, is already self-portrait enough; so also, however, in a sense is Li Tai Pe, is the Armenian astrologer, are the poets Hermann and Thu Fu, even Louis the Cruel (though the model was Hesse's friend Louis Moilliet). There is fragmentation of the ego. The powerful dialogue between the astrologer and Klingsor-Li Tai Pe is that between magical insight and death-wish, acceptance and frenzy, the seer and the artist. Klingsor's last picture of himself has many faces, even “prehuman, animal, vegetable, stony” ones (III, 611). Once again the metamorphosis motif is introduced and combined with allusions to prehuman forms of existence—both motifs from Demian, both occurring later in Siddhartha and Pictor; indeed, one of Klingsor's faces resembles Demian's—it is “like an idol's” (III, 609). Throughout the whole sounds the drunken music of fate, in which the Armenian magician's words ring out: “There is freedom of the will. It is called magic” (III, 595).
Hesse writes of that vital year, 1919: “Three circumstances combined to heighten this summer into an extraordinary and unique experience: the date of 1919, the return from the war to life, from the yoke to freedom, was the most significant, but to this was added the atmosphere, climate, and language of the South, and as a blessing from heaven there came in addition a summer like very few I have experienced.”20 In May 1919 he had taken up residence in the Casa Camuzzi in Montagnola, entirely alone and impoverished, convinced that the only possibility of further existence which remained to him was to live in and for his literary work.
“Klein and Wagner,” also, was composed in those days (it was the first work written in Montagnola); it is a novella of escape, of wrenching loose, escape over the wall of the Alps to the south, the feminine Without, yet another repetition of the “exemplary event” in which the innate death-wish apparently at last fulfills itself in Klein's suicide by water. “Klein and Wagner” is probably one of the most ruthlessly direct and merciless pieces of self-exposure in the whole range of modern German literature, of the same stuff as the later Crisis poems and The Steppenwolf. Friedrich Klein sees in flight from his marriage and flight to the south “the two most burning desires of his life” (III, 472); he has become a criminal, a refugee from justice, and the whole act seems to him “crime and revolt, abandonment of sacred duties, leap (Sprung) into cosmic space” (III, 477). While the word “Sprung” indicates the unconditional nature of this act, the adjective “sacred” is also telltale, pointing to its deepest sources, resonant of the past. Klein's theft and subsequent flight were in fact a milder substitute for a fearful blood bath modeled on that of the South German schoolmaster Wagner who murdered his entire family, and whose specter haunts Klein. But Wagner is also the name of that composer whom Klein now hates so intensely,21 thereby hating his own lost youth.22 For Klein has struggled all his life to repress his drives, to be a good husband and citizen; it is this moralizing Klein, whom painted women and sensuality still revolt, who now has to die, for he has been throttling his own soul.
Here lies the essential theme of the story, which follows Klein—through his casual affair with the elegant Teresina—on his concentrated course in ultimate self-insight. Klein's face is a mask, like Demian's and like Siddhartha's. When he gazes into a mirror, it is the face of Wagner he sees there. The narcissus figure with which Demian ends repeats and repeats in the works of these years; but in “Klein and Wagner” a new element is added, for this experience belongs to the “Wagner theater,” “the theater with the sign ‘Wagner’” (III, 529). Klein's dream of Lohengrin is the descent into the unconscious mind, the world of instincts unmasked and unbridled, in fact the “Magic Theater” of The Steppenwolf. In the long account of Klein's suicide the Erzählzeit expands to contain the expansion of Klein's consciousness, at the moment of bursting through the principium individuationis, of entering the magical sphere, the sphere of endless flow, of union with Brahman. For this is “the world-stream of forms” (III, 553)—many creatures and faces swim by. Moreover, it is also “a transparent sphere or dome of notes, a vault of music, in the middle of which sat God” (III, 554), not the throttling divinity of Calw but rather the Krishna of the Gita, beyond good and evil.
“Klein and Wagner” has something of the verbal pyrotechnics of “Klingsor,” the same dire mood of transience, combined with the claustrophobia and cacophonies of The Steppenwolf; it is of course not really a Schopenhauerian relapse vis-à-vis Demian, but just the other side of the very same coin, its doctrine the living out of fate. The neurotic criminal Klein, the thief who would steal freedom, has something in him of the saint; in this his Way is like that of the rake and the drunkard. In the figures of both Klein and Klingsor, moreover, other specific prototypes shine through, distant and distinguished luminaries remodeled at several Romantic hands, Don Juan and Faust. Klingsor at the end, as he paints his self-portrait, has been shrewdly diagnosed as a Faust with traits of a Buddha, as “already Siddhartha.”23
The first half of Siddhartha (up to the point at which Siddhartha leaves Buddha and Govinda behind) was written during 1919 and appeared as a fragment in the Neue Rundschau,24 with a dedication to Romain Rolland. The second section, up to the point at which Siddhartha is saved from suicide, was composed in the winter of 1919–1920 and the rest of the book not until a year or eighteen months later. The author could go no further for a time, he had exhausted his own experience: “When I was finished with Siddhartha the endurer and ascetic, the struggling and suffering Siddhartha, and wanted to portray Siddhartha the victor, the affirmer, the conqueror, I could not go on.”25 In the intervening months, in which he almost despaired of finishing the novel, Hesse occupied himself with painting, with the study of Bachofen, and with his reawakened interest in the Indian pantheon.26
The complete work is written in a strongly rhythmical, sensuous prose with ritual features. The use of leitmotifs, parallelism, and the repetition of phrases and of single words (especially threefold repetitions) in the liturgical manner is constantly reminiscent of the Bible, the Psalms, or—perhaps more directly—the Pali Canon. In none of Hesse's novels is the style more material to the nature of the act of communication sought after in the work; referring to the extreme parataxis and the apparently endless repetitions of Buddha's canonical preachings, like prayer mills, which had led to some ridiculing of Neumann's translations, Hesse explains: “Buddha's sermons are in fact not compendiums of doctrine, on the contrary they are examples of meditations.” In this special sense the language of Siddhartha may be characterized as meditative; the purpose of meditation is defined as “a shifting of the state of consciousness, a technique the highest goal of which is a pure harmony, a simultaneous and uniform functioning together of logical and intuitive thinking.”27 The function of the language of Siddhartha is to correspond to this purpose; each phrase (as, later on, each ideogram in the Glass Bead Game) is a possible threshold of meditation. Rhythm is the essential feature of this language, an undertone of chant; there is a predilection for adverbial openings to sentences because of their rhythmic effect: “Wonderfully did he feel the joy surge in his breast” (III, 690), and also for resonant inversion combined with repetition, alliteration, and assonance: “Dead was the singing bird of which he had dreamed. Dead was the bird in his heart. Deep was he snared in Sansara, disgust and death he'd sucked up from all sides, as a sponge sucks water till full. Full was he of ennui, full of misery, full of death” (III, 681). In that it is appositional, the style also betrays its sources: “Know ye, in Jetavana, in the garden of Anathapindika, tarries the exalted one” (III, 636); poetic meter, in fact, constantly recurs, while there are many stock epithets.
The language of Siddhartha, however, is unmistakably Hesse's own; “your wondrous doctrine” (III, 641), for instance, has an affective quality the ancestry of which is evidently German Romantic rather than Pali, and such touches are common both in the vocabulary and the cadences of the prose: “Sweetly sounded the legend of Buddha, magic wafted fragrantly from these tales” (III, 632). The unresolved stresses and disharmonies of Demian are replaced by a style much closer to “Iris” and Pictor. Its concreteness has frequently been remarked upon;28 it is indeed a curious interfusion of the tactile and the intuitive-visionary, a product of the esemplastic imagination. It might be possible to characterize it by that rather dubious term “magic realism,” since it does indeed seem to express magical insights, to circumscribe the “inner” world, in a language owing a debt both to this world and to “external reality,” having points of reference in both, but closer to the latter perhaps than would be appropriate in the Märchen.
And indeed Siddhartha is precisely not a Märchen; it is a species of legend, and as such it has marked hagiographical features. As Hesse remarked while in the course of composing this novel, “Now the fact is that the saint is the strongest and most attractive of models for me.”29 Almost timeless and unhistorical, Siddhartha is the presentation of an exemplary vita, and in this alone no Märchen. Like Demian it is constructed upon the basis of interleaving conversations and moments of enlightenment and insight. The apparent realism of Siddhartha is in the last resort a superficial thing; both characters and background are to a high degree stylized. What Hesse is concerned with above all else in the work is the depiction of a series of moments of awakening, in which the vita is borne forward Sometimes the description is cursory; sometimes, however, the Erzählzeit lengthens extraordinarily—these are the moments of freedom when the curtains draw back from the magical reality which it is the true purpose of this partially didactic novel to disclose.
The Sanskrit word “siddhartha” was the personal name of the most recent of the Buddhas, Gotama, bestowed on him by his father King Suddhodana, and means approximately “he who has achieved his aim.” Siddhartha is indeed the first of Hesse's heroes of which such a great claim might be made and almost the only one. The hesitant, scarcely discernible vita of Peter Camenzind took this form partly because he did not know his aim; in Demian, where the aim is much more conscious, the lines of the vita are starker. Siddhartha knows his own aim from the outset, and there is in the novel no element which does not directly subserve the tracing out of his Way. Siddhartha grows up on the riverbank, “in the shade of the Sal forest, in the shade of the fig tree” (III, 615)—sacred trees (the Sal Grove in Buddhist scripture) and also another tree which suggests, in Hesse's emblematics, the sensual and the profane. At the very beginning his achievements are not inconsiderable; he understands the use of breathing exercises, knows how to say “Om,”30 and knows that within him is the indestructible Atman, at one with Brahman, the universe. He has been impressed with the deep wisdom of the Samaveda Upanishads.31 He burns with a longing for knowledge, and his father hopes of him that he will become a prince among Brahmans; his mother, on the other hand, sees in him above all “the strong one, the beauteous one, he who walked on slim legs, he who greeted her with perfect seemliness” (III, 617–618). Demian too was physically impressive; and like him Siddhartha finds an admirer of his own sex, Govinda, “his shadow” (III, 618)32—whose life is consumed in emulation, imitatio.
Siddhartha is dissatisfied, the waters of the river send him dreams and restless thoughts; he is dissatisfied with ritual and the worship of the gods. He wishes to find his way to experience the Atman, but to this no one can help him—the Upanishads merely bestow abstract knowledge. Like Faust, it is his revolt against the frustrations of the intellect which sets him on his path. Deciding to cast his lot with the Samanas, itinerant ascetics, he is involved in a conflict of will with his father, “the pure one, the learned one” (III, 620), and in this he conquers. The Way of the Samanas is, however, ironically enough, really only an intensification of the father principle in Siddhartha's heart. In search of the spring of the self, the “Urquell,” Siddhartha joins these ascetics; their method involves a total rejection of sense experience, its suppression, the achievement of a condition of apparent emptiness. While killing the senses, the novice must learn to project himself, by meditative techniques, into the selves of other things; he must use multiple “ways away from the ego” (III, 627). But for Siddhartha these are all a disappointment; he shocks Govinda by the remark that such escape from the self may be obtained “in every tavern” (III, 628). The Faustian “Auerbach's Cellar,” as Hesse's protagonists mostly well know, is a kind of premature surrogate for the spiritual Way.
“Much time have I needed to learn and am still not at an end of learning, O Govinda, that nothing can be learned” (III, 630). Like Faust, Siddhartha expresses his disillusionment. But Govinda is more patient than he; Govinda already knows a good deal: “We do not go in a circle, we go upward, the circle is a spiral, already we have climbed many a step” (III, 629). It is of course not such a crass self-confidence, but there seems to be a resonance of Faust's famulus Wagner here; the irony is in the parallel implicitly drawn, that the rationalist Wagner is reincarnate as Govinda, apostle of gradualism upon the mystical Way. Siddhartha is his Faust, impatient and absolutist, demanding all at once, contemptuous of the method of knowledge, inevitably seeking nothing less than “the Way of Ways” (III, 630). Knowledge may indeed exist, but learning is impossible—this paradox demolishes, in Siddhartha's eyes, the whole philosophical structure of the Wagner-Govindas. In the eyes of Govinda, however, such iconoclasm also destroys the very dignity of the hierarchical system and thus of all pedagogy—“What … then,” he protests, “would become of everything … which is venerable?” (III, 631)—and a thought of the preceptors at Maulbronn is not too far removed.
Siddhartha, like his author, has discovered that comforting secret that a teacher is unnecessary. Hence he is prepared to refuse to accept even Gotama Buddha. What the Samanas hear of Buddha is first of all “legend,” and “Märchen”—the two spheres of the consummate saint. Here is one who is enlightened, who has reached Nirvana and need never descend again into “the turbid stream of forms” (III, 632)—apart from the significant adjective, these are the very words of “Klein and Wagner.” To refuse Gotama is tantamount to refusing all teachers, a decision already discernible in Beneath the Wheel. The conversation Siddhartha has with Gotama centers on the Buddhist doctrine of the unbroken chain of cause and effect; Buddha's teaching makes immensely clear the unity of the world, as Friedrich Klein had experienced it at the moment of death. But Siddhartha finds a logical flaw in this closed, apparently coherent system, the crack through which slips the doctrine of redemption, of the possibility of Nirvana. Gotama praises his perspicacity, but does not resolve the ambiguity; he merely emphasizes the pragmatic nature of the system, warning Siddhartha against “the thickets of the intellect” (III, 642).
Buddhism makes a moral judgment upon existence, a negative judgment which Siddhartha proves unable to accept. That Hesse could only laugh (in 1925) at being so often called a Buddhist is not surprising; overt world-denial is indeed nowhere to be found in his work: “At bottom I knew I was further from this confession than from any other. And yet there was something that was right, a particle of truth hidden in this that I only recognized somewhat later.”33 The reservation is intriguing; perhaps it refers to this renegade Protestant's insight that Buddhism itself was a reform religion, the Protestantism of ancient India.34 Hesse had believed in Buddha “for a while in my youth very faithfully,” had been interested in the Sankhya, and had understood Nirvana to be “the redeeming step back behind the principium individuationis, that is, expressing it in religious terms, the return of the individual soul to the universal soul.”35 But the notion that it was the individual's primary task to find his way back to this condition was counterbalanced in Hesse's mind by the doctrine of “letting-oneself-fall,” the true meaning of which is thus expressed: “Or should I not rather fulfill God's will precisely by letting myself drift (in a story I called it ‘letting-oneself-fall’), by doing penance with Him for His love of breaking Himself up and living Himself out in individual beings?”36 Now “letting-oneself-fall” was the ultimate doctrine of “Klein and Wagner,” and it is therefore implied that this was really the expression of an incipient “heresy against Buddha,” whose extreme rationalism and godlessness was perhaps revelatory of a certain unwillingness to submit fully to the fate of living and thus to the fatherhood of God.
Siddhartha as a whole must therefore be seen in the context of Hesse's movement away from Buddhism, not toward it, characterized also by the reference to his increased interest in the multiple Indian gods. Hesse was throughout his life probably more influenced by Hinduism than by Buddhism; he apparently found that yoga answered better the needs and yearnings of himself and his contemporaries than did the Eightfold Path.37 Yet Siddhartha differs in the end from all such faiths and systems by the extremism of its derogation of the intellect. Certainly, Siddhartha's experience leads him away from Buddhistic “pessimism”; it leads him away from ethical judgments to the total amoralism of chaos; while the doctrine of universal love points away from Indian teachings altogether toward that of St. Francis. We may note that Hesse remarks at this time that Jesus, with his doctrine of the childhood of men before God, was perhaps further advanced than the Buddha.38 The actual description given in Siddhartha of Gotama Buddha is not without its interest: “With a hidden smile, still, peaceful, not unlike a healthy child, the Buddha walked by” (III, 637). The harshness, the stoniness of Demian's trance face has been softened; the hermaphroditic smile of the Buddha speaks a serenity which in a later novel is to be transformed into laughter.
To leave Gotama and to leave Govinda, now Buddha's “shadow,” is a turning point in Siddhartha's life, a moment like a snake's shedding of its skin (a symbol beloved of the Upanishads). Now he seeks neither teachers nor a teaching, but only self-knowledge. This had been his error: in the pursuit of the Atman he had striven to escape from the self, but it is precisely the self which he must come to know, what the Vedas cannot teach, what no teacher can teach, “the secret called Siddhartha” (III, 646). At this point something happens:
He looked around him as if he were seeing the world for the first time. Beautiful was the world, colorful the world, strange and baffling the world! Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, sky and river ran, forest stared and mountain, everything beautiful, everything bewildering and magical, and in the midst of it he, Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the way to himself. All this, all this yellow and blue, river and forest, entered Siddhartha's eyes for the first time, was no longer the spell of Mara, was no longer the veil of Maya, was no longer the meaningless and accidental multiplicity of the world of phenomena, despised by the deep-thinking Brahmans, who scorn multiplicity, who seek unity. Blue was blue, river was river, and even if in the blue and the river in Siddhartha the One and the Divine lived concealed it was precisely the nature and sense of the Divine to be here yellow, here blue, there sky, there forest and here Siddhartha. Meaning and being were not somewhere behind things, they were in them, in everything
[III, 647].
This must be placed side by side with a passage from “Klein and Wagner”:
The wave went through him like pain and a thrill of pleasure, he shuddered with feeling, life resounded in him like surf, everything was incomprehensible. He tore open his eyes and saw: trees on a road, silver flakes in the lake, a running dog, cyclists—and everything was strange, a fairy tale and almost too beautiful, everything as though brand-new out of God's toy box, everything solely for him, for Friedrich Klein, and he himself only there to feel this stream of marvels and pain and joy shudder through him. Everywhere there was beauty, in every pile of dirt by the wayside, everywhere there was deep suffering, everywhere there was God. Yes, this was God, and unimaginable ages ago as a boy he had experienced Him this way and sought Him through his heart whenever he thought the thoughts “God” and “omnipresence.” Heart, burst not of your fullness!
[III, 515].
The moment of inward enlightenment involves, indeed often begins with, an awakening of sense impressions; remembering themselves, Siddhartha and Klein remember the world, and vice versa; the colors of the world light up, movement (“a running dog”) leaps to the eye, it is suddenly a world of concrete particulars, not just the hypothetical veil of Maya. It may certainly be regarded as an epiphany, but it is more important still to note that it involves a total change in the mode of consciousness; in Klein's case (and this reminds us of experiences of Emil Sinclair's) it results in a state of hypermnesia: “Once more there poured up from all the forgotten shafts of his life liberated memories, countless ones” (III, 515). A passage from “Dream Traces” adds rewardingly to our general insight:
He blinked out of a narrow crack between his closed eyelids and perceived, not merely with his vision, a light wafting and gleaming … somehow valuable and unique, transformed by some secret content from mere perception into experience. What flashed multi-rayed, drifted, blurred, surged, and beat its wings was not just a storm of light from without, and its theater was not just the eye, it was also life, a rising urge from within, and its theater was the soul and his own fate. This is the way in which the poets, the “seers” see, this is the delicious and devastating manner in which people see who have been touched by Eros. … Everything was eternal moment, experience, innermost reality
[IV, 424–425].
“Life resounded in him like surf”; “it was also life, a rising urge from within”—the connection between the world within and the world without, that of the affects and that of the senses, which connection Emil Sinclair experienced first and foremost as a linked movement of fate, can also be a bond of consciousness. The process may indeed begin in the senses or in the soul, but it eventually embraces both of these. It involves the feelings, but equally it involves the memory and the insight.
Above all, it is a state of awakened presence, magical thinking, the experience ascribed to Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin: “The highest experience for him is that half-second of highest sensitivity and insight which he has known several times, that magic ability to be for a moment everything, to feel everything, to suffer everything, to understand and affirm everything that is in the world.”39 This is a condition in which perceptions are transformed into experience. The passage from “Dream Traces,” it is worth noticing, is anything but naïve experience; in fact, the account which precedes it of the author enjoying the spring as he sits in a park is markedly intellectualized. A certain formal stylization in the Siddhartha passage is also undeniable—the colors are not from Klingsor's rich palette, they are representative only; in neither Siddhartha's case nor in Klein's is the outside world experienced wholly with naïve sensuality, but still with a certain detachment, and sub specie aeternitatis; Siddhartha's objects are no longer merely the veil of Maya but yet they are not just objects, like Klein's they have a soul, they have God within them as Siddhartha has; in this the things are replicas of the man, Siddhartha. For the magical realists, precisely, “objective reality” can never be simply “a storm of light from without” but must also be subjectively conditioned, by an awakening within the self; the locus in quo is essentially within, “its theater was the soul and his own fate.” This is, as we are told, the vision of poets, a form of mystical vision; it is intimately bound up with contact with Eros, and of course Siddhartha stands, at this moment, on the brink of his plunge into the erotic world. Thus each nodal point upon the vita may be regarded inter alia as a moment of poetic inspiration.
Siddhartha walks out of the grove of Jetavana, the grove of the Buddha, with the intention of returning home, to his father. But the ambiguous feast of the Prodigal Son is not for him. He stops short, “as if a snake lay before him on the path” (III, 647). Between him and home there lies a barrier of a spiritual, but evidently also of a specifically sexual kind (the snake symbol recurs again at a much later point in the novel). For the first time Siddhartha really feels his solitude, his homelessness; he belongs to no community, has no place even among Samanas, hermits, or monks. Out of the coldness of this experience “Siddhartha came to the surface, more I than before, more tightly coiled,” resolved to go on, “not home any more, not to his father any more, not to go back” (III, 649). The world of the senses is now evoked—“for the world was transformed” (III, 650)—the description, though vivid and colorful, is perhaps more like the Märchen than like “Klingsor”; all is subordinate to the laws of metamorphosis, that is, to Siddhartha's changing consciousness, to his “liberated vision.” Flickerings of archaic memories rise from the depths of the author's work; there is the characteristic animal movement as the pike hunts; the orgiastic force of “Klingsor” and “Klein and Wagner,” Eros, and even Dionysos is not far away: “Siddhartha saw a ram pursue a sheep and cover it” (III, 651). The world is beautiful when it is experienced thus, “without searching, so simply, in so childlike a way” (III, 650).
In fact, the second part of Siddhartha turns upon the paradox of enlightenment and childlikeness; in a sense these are one and the same, in a sense infinitely different: the Way is a spiral indeed, not a circle; and the world of the magician (cf. “Childhood of the Magician”) has deep analogies, but no identity, with that of the child.40 Siddhartha now goes to dwell among the “child-people,” an ambiguous term. Their childlikeness both is and is not that spoken of in the New Testament; theirs is the sphere of reality, with which the magical reality of Siddhartha can never coincide. As the magical realism of the novel differs from realism, in some such way does Siddhartha differ from the “child-people” among whom he now lives. This first night of freedom he dreams of Govinda, who in embracing him is transformed into a woman, from whose breast Siddhartha drinks the intoxicating milk; the characteristic transition from male to female, that fundamental structural element in Hesse's novels, may now be noticed again. The erotic motif now becomes dominant, but not before the ferryman Vasudeva (one of the many names of Krishna) has borne Siddhartha over the barrier of the river into the wide world. Vasudeva speaks briefly of the teaching which it is the river's to bestow, predicts Siddhartha's return, and makes a childlike impression upon the wanderer: he reminds Siddhartha of Govinda, but Siddhartha is to learn painfully of the ambivalence of childlikeness, and is with time to come to see the gulf which separates Govinda from Vasudeva, the perfected one.
Klingsor, on the road to Kareno, had had an encounter unlike any which had occurred in Hesse's work before: “Out of a dark stone room as though out of a primeval cave a woman appeared. … From her dirty clothes her brown neck emerged, a firm broad face, sunburned and handsome, a full broad mouth, large eyes, a rough sweet charm, her large Asiatic features spoke expansively and silently of sex and motherhood. … She was everything, mother, child, lover, beast, Madonna” (III, 575). Such words as these had, it is true, been used of Emil Sinclair's dream lover, but the physical reality had turned out somewhat contrived. This woman, however, is seen; and now a figure takes shape—in this book of Klingsor, Hesse's first Don Juan—fit at last to wrest to herself the hegemony which Peter Camenzind's statuesque Elisabeth had so long held. She is born at the same time as Klein's Teresina, is in fact her dissimilar twin; we may note that the peasant woman who comes to Klein when he stays the night in her hovel does so when he has just been dreaming about the elegant Teresina. It is a gypsy girl who later introduces Goldmund to the experience of love; and Siddhartha, once across the river, has a similar encounter, feels for the first time stirring “the spring of sex” (III, 654), but the call of some inner voice disperses his entrancement, he recognizes the animal in the woman, and his virginity is spared for Kamala.
Kamala herself,41 the courtesan, belongs to the school of Teresina and of Harry Haller's Hermine. There is more naïveté, more of the animal, in Teresina than in Kamala, whose oriental sophistication is of subtler kind; it is hard to imagine Teresina being converted, as Kamala eventually is, to Buddhism. Nevertheless, both are the type who always used to make that conscience-shackled bourgeois, Friedrich Klein, both disgusted and afraid. When Teresina first appears, Klein sees “a girl, strong and rhythmic, very upright and challenging, elegant, haughty, a cool face with painted red lips and dense high hair which was a bright, metallic yellow,” and then again “a calm and clever face, firm and pale, a little blasé, the painted mouth bloodred, gray eyes fully alert, a handsome, richly formed ear on which an oblong green stone shone. She was dressed in white silk, the slim neck sank away in opal shadows, encircled by a thin necklace with green stones” (III, 499). Kamala is unquestionably the same figure; the hair style, the eyes, the vocabulary, and the structure of the portraits are astonishingly similar; only race, and therefore some of the coloring, is different: “Beneath black upswept hair … a very bright, very delicate, very clever face, a bright red mouth like a freshly opened fig, eyebrows trained and painted in high arches, dark eyes clever and alert, light high neck emerging from a green and golden tunic, still bright hands long and narrow with broad gold bangles on the wrists” (III, 655). Kamala assures Siddhartha that she can dispense love at her will alone, as the Samana and Brahman can dispense spiritual truth. She can teach love, the graduated wisdom of kissing; on this Way too there are many stages, it is a hermetic mystery.
To be initiated, Siddhartha, who has just left one grove, must now enter another, Kamala's pleasure grove—“to go into the grove” is the emblematic phrase. Siddhartha now plunges into the world of sex, of the “child-people,” into the game. Friedrich Klein had let himself fall into the waters of the lake, but the truth was he could just as well have let himself fall into life—“letting-oneself-fall” in life, the doctrine of Demian, and of the Tao. Siddhartha now lets himself fall into life. He has understood the paradox of determinism, the nature of action. Real doing is the same as suffering; both are the execution of fate;42 to wait, to submit—this is the teaching of the Vedanta and of Lao-tzŭ. On those who have understood this most elusive truth and converted it into a way of life, as Siddhartha has, fortune smiles: “Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he goes through the things of the world like a stone through water” (III, 663).
This is magic, and through it Siddhartha succeeds in the commercial world of the “child-people,” where it astonishes his mentor, Kamaswami.43 He becomes rich, learns the life of the merchant detachedly, “like a game” (III, 666). Unlike Kamaswami, neither time nor money cause him the least concern. He is participant and spectator at one and the same time—the positive aspect of Klein's decadent schizophrenia. The life of ordinary people, child-people, seems to Siddhartha only a passionate game, with which, however, they are wholly identified. Kamala, for whom love is a game, is more like Siddhartha himself; like him she is inwardly detached, she has “a quiet place and refuge” (III, 671) within her. However much she teaches him, he does not really love her; as he says: “I am like you. You do not love either—or else how could you treat love as an art? People of our sort perhaps cannot love. The child-people can, that is their secret” (III, 672). Sexual love is an art, and art is a game; every game is dangerous, for the player may sooner or later forget it is a game.44
To let oneself fall, to submit, to play—like all great spiritual secrets this one too has its hellish converse. That which can liberate can also bind all the faster. Thus Siddhartha begins to forget, to lose the all-important power of discrimination, to lose awareness of the distinction between the game which he practices and the source, the stream, “the spring of his nature” (III, 670), which flows, or used to flow, within him. What he experienced at the peak of his youth—“that lofty, bright wakefulness” (III, 673)—this is no more; his soul, filled with world and sloth, falls asleep. His decline, like Hans Giebenrath's, is compared to that of a tree: “as dampness penetrates the dying tree trunk” (III, 673). Like Faust, whom he so often resembles, he all but succumbs to “flache Unbedeutenheit” (triviality). For the first time, pointing backward to Hermann Lauscher and forward to The Glass Bead Game, Hesse openly develops the symbol of the game as a figure for the aesthetic existence. Those who but play the game, be it in art or be it in life, in the end are lost in the game. However unsatisfactory the asceticism of the Samanas was, it remains a fact that without some degree of self-discipline, of self-recall, the spiritual life is impossible.
Siddhartha, becoming like the “child-people,” acquires only their painful, negative side, “the soul-sickness of the rich” (III, 675), their animal emotional life. He remains intolerably without their comfortable blindness, their anaesthetic self-confidence, the “tranquillity” of perpetual identification with purposes. He ends by being possessed by greed and by taking to dicing (apparently to demonstrate his contempt for money!), to wild gambling—most degraded of all forms of game. So he comes to feel—though at first in a superficially pleasurable form—that emotion which is characteristic of the “child-people” and which reduced Klein's life to hell, anxiety. Like Klein, haunted by Wagner, and like Klingsor, Siddhartha stares at his own face “in the mirror” (III, 676), stands outside himself and watches his decline, his “Wagnerization.” It is in this form, the mirrored or painted face, that the motif of the double, introduced into Hermann Lauscher, recurs most often in Hesse's later works.
A dream warns Siddhartha, the aging Kamala's wish to be told more about the Buddha strikes home with him; one day, she thinks, she will hand over her pleasure grove to the monks of Gotama. Into their lovemaking there comes a new element, fear of old age, of autumn, of death. In his disgust with himself Siddhartha sleeps and dreams of a bird, Kamala's singing bird, which he finds dead in its cage, extracts and throws into the gutter; then suddenly it seems as if he has thrown away everything that has value in existence. He surveys his life, he discovers the terrible truth that for the partially enlightened one to seek to be again like ordinary men makes him in fact far worse off than they; in truth, there is no reversal possible, no way back at all. Not even the game which Kamala plays can be endured any longer; and his mango tree, his pleasure garden, his riches—all is but a stupid game which he leaves there and then, without more ado, in the very same hour of the night. When Kamala hears of Siddhartha's disappearance she opens the golden cage, takes out her bird and lets it fly away. When Hermann Heilner fled from Kloster Maulbronn he breathed deeply and stretched his limbs, “as if he had escaped from a narrow cage” (I, 482). There are many varieties of cage; but Hermann Heilner and Siddhartha have at least this much in common, they both go on and not, like poor Hans Giebenrath, back.
On the bank of the river, beneath a huge cocos tree, Siddhartha contemplates suicide, death by water. He thinks of it in terms such as those which ran through the mind of Klein, “to smash to pieces the unsuccessful form of his life, to throw it away” (III, 682). Klein was pursued by the detailed vision of his body pulverized beneath the wheels of a train.45 His eventual suicide seemed to him “a child's trick, something no doubt not evil, but comic and pretty foolish” (III, 548); as for Siddhartha, his mind awakes in time and he perceives the absurdity of seeking peace through the destruction of the body. Looking into the mirror of the water, he perceives his own emptiness and spits at his own face. At this moment the word “Om,” rising from the depths of the self, stays his hand, as Faust's hand is stayed by the Easter chorus. The dreamless sleep (Tiefschlaf [III, 620])46 which now overcomes him and which, as the Upanishads teach, takes him temporarily to Atman, separates him utterly from his previous life, just as Faust is separated in the scene “Anmutige Gegend.” The moment of enlightenment which precedes the sleep, described at some length, is, however, summarized as “just a moment, a flash” (III, 683).
Immensely refreshed, joyful, awakened, and inquisitive again he is now confronted by a man in a yellow robe, Govinda, who has been watching over his sleep. For a short moment his friend, his former “shadow,” has reversed his role, has been his guardian and protector. To Govinda he relates about his rich and worldly life, now gone, for the Wheel turns. Govinda, full of doubt, goes on his way, watched by Siddhartha with love; the woman, Kamala, has duly given place to the man, Govinda, but Govinda is now a symbol for humanity, the object of a new kind of love. Now at last Siddhartha can really love; that is, he is free of the game, for those who only play cannot love. Siddhartha has lost his ascetic self, he has lost his worldly self, he must begin again as a child, a situation which brings him to laughter, “to laughter about himself, to laughter about this strange, foolish world” (III, 689).
At this moment of utter destitution, which is the beginning of freedom, Siddhartha's vita brushes against the author's life as it was in these lonely years, and indeed a note of Klingsor's “music of doom” sounds: “He was going downhill” (III, 689). In a passage extraordinarily close to the language and mood of “Iris” (III, 689) Siddhartha's life seems to him to have been a long and strange detour (wunderliche Umwege); these circuitous paths have brought him to be a “child-person”—the word is full of double-entendre—and the bird in his breast is not dead after all. It is an errant, maybe a foolish Way (närrisch; III, 690), perhaps even a circle, but he will continue to follow it. Recognition of this brings joy, as does something else, his escape like a bird from the cage, the charmed circle of Kamala's pleasure-grove: “that I have escaped, that my flight is a fact, that at last I am free again and stand here like a child beneath the sky. Oh, how good it is to have fled, to have become free!” (III, 690). Heilner's flight from the teachers, Klein's flight from marriage, Siddhartha's flight from Eros—all three coalesce; but it is above all the figures from “Iris” which are dominant here: “you have done something, you have heard the bird sing in your breast and you have followed it” (III, 691).
The dark night of the soul is past; Siddhartha now feels only joy that the bird is still alive, the bird whose voice is now identified with the source itself—“the bird, the merry spring and voice” (III, 691). Siddhartha no longer merely knows about, he understands the evils of the worldly life, that is, they are a part of his experience; he listens to the song of the bird in his breast and realizes that what has really died is his egoistic pride, his small willful self, that unconquerable enemy with which his haughty intelligence, his priestly knowledge, his self-mortification, and spiritual insight so long contended in vain. The reason for his erstwhile failure is really not far to seek, though inobvious: “Into this priesthood, into this arrogance, into this spirituality his ego had crept and had hidden itself there” (III, 692). Siddhartha told Gotama of his perceptive fear that his ego, instead of finding dissolution in Nirvana, might batten on to Buddha's teaching, or on to the pupil's veneration for Buddha, and thus grow fat. Now he has discovered, and thereby escaped from a similar, profounder, snare upon the Way—that the mainspring of spiritual development, the will-to-change itself, should become the ultimate hiding-place of that which is resolved to remain the same.
Siddhartha the Brahman and the Samana are long dead. Siddhartha the slave of the senses has now followed them. The first of these deaths is that we find prefigured in “Klein and Wagner,” in the liberation of the inhibited conscience-ridden Klein; the second is the final exorcism of Wagner, achieved by Klein only through suicide, by Siddhartha through satiation and enlightenment. Vasudeva the ferryman, with whom Siddhartha now comes to live and work, is already fully enlightened. He has understood the fundamental secret of listening: “I know only how to listen and to be devout, I've learned nothing else” (III, 697); this is “hearkening with a quiet heart, with waiting, open soul” (III, 698). Hermann Lauscher had in a sense been right after all; in a sense also the passivity of the Neo-Romantic impressionists was right; one must listen, it is, however, very material how one listens. Listening may appear to be purely a passive function; performed correctly, however, it is an active function of the rare genuine kind (here we may compare Josephus Famulus in The Glass Bead Game), for what men call active is really passive, while acceptance is true activity. Amor fati is active, submission is active; Vasudeva has learned through serenity what Klein discovered only in tumult: “that it is good … to sink, to seek the depths” (III, 697). Through the river, moreover, the river of life, this paradox of endless change and changeless presence, Siddhartha comes to penetrate the illusion of time: time, Klingsor's demon, does not really exist. The river, the flow, is indeed all things; in its sound may be heard all existing sounds, blended into the holy syllable “Om.” Siddhartha's illumination now commences, he becomes like Vasudeva, “childlike and aged” (III, 699), as the years pass. Then monks go by, on their way to the dying Buddha, from whom Siddhartha himself no longer feels in any way separated; once more the thought is formulated that teachers and teachings can only lead astray: “No, a true seeker could not accept any doctrine. … But he who had found could approve every doctrine” (III, 701).
Kamala, pilgrimaging with Siddhartha's son to the scene of the dying Gotama, expires in her former lover's arms of snake bite;47 she recognizes him and reads in his eyes that he is now at peace. The boy whom she leaves behind is to be Siddhartha's final trial; as he once struggled with the will of his father, so his own son now revolts against him. Siddhartha resists Vasudeva's recommendation that the boy be released to go out into the world, since this would mean committing him to Sansara—at which objection the river laughs, for Sansara is indeed the lot of all and cannot be avoided. Thus the issue of the Prodigal Son is apparently resolved—the father perceives the inevitability of the son's departure, of his son's corruption by the world. The lesson is harsh, for Siddhartha for the first time feels truly possessive love, strongest of all the passions, characteristic emotion of the “child-people,” belonging truly to “the turbid stream of forms,” for it is “a turbid spring, a dark water” (III, 710), a necessary folly, however, upon the Way. Saintliness does not captivate the boy; he runs away, resolved rather to be a robber and a murderer than a saint like his father. Siddhartha goes after him, as far as Kamala's pleasure grove in which the yellow-robed monks now walk, and then returns, empty and wounded, to the place of his meditation; his son has not to become like his father, any more than Emil Sinclair had to become like Demian; he has to become himself.
The paradoxical term “child-person” at last discloses its full significance: “Although he was nearing his perfection … it still seemed to him that the child-people were his brothers” (III, 715). Their passionate, darkened lives are also Brahman. A necessary and lofty stage upon the Way is the pilgrim's realization that he is after all no different from other men.48 Perhaps even the great secret itself, knowledge of the One, is nothing but “a childishness of the think-people, of the think-child-people” (III, 716). Staring into the water at his own reflection, Siddhartha this time sees in it his father's face. Wisdom is indeed knowledge of the One, of endless repetition too, “this running in a fateful circle” (III, 717), again and again the same conflict of father and son, the same suffering. Siddhartha's pursuit of his son toward the city had itself been a kind of flight, he himself a “childish refugee” (III, 718), for what repeats, repeats on many levels. Thus he confesses to Vasudeva, that “confession to the father” to which Hesse's protagonists so often come, Vasudeva listening silently like the later Josephus Famulus, sucking in his confessions “as a tree does rain” (III, 718). This seems like, and is, a confession to the eternal, to God.
Vasudeva, in love and serenity (Heiterkeit), takes Siddhartha to the river, bids him watch and listen again: “And the river's voice sounded full of longing, full of burning pain, full of invisible yearning. … All things together made up the river of events, the music of life” (III, 719–720). These are the many voices of Klein's universal stream, over which rises God's temple of music; more, it is suddenly the language of the German Romantics again, a language which describes no music better than it does that of Richard Wagner. Siddhartha, now “seeing,” and thus united with the One, bids farewell to the departing Vasudeva, now Sri Krishna leaving this incarnation: “Radiant he departed” (III, 721).
Siddhartha remains for his ultimate task, the meeting with Govinda, with the “friend” who has not yet found salvation, which we may understand as the final confrontation with his own intellect, his questioning, reflective self. Govinda has made the mistake of too much searching, while to find is precisely “to be free, to be open, to have no goal” (III, 723). Siddhartha cannot teach Govinda anything, for truth cannot be taught; his highest secret, with which he permanently confounds the logical faculty, is the paradox of paradoxes, that of each truth the opposite is equally true. The apparent flaw in Buddha's coherent system, the unfounded division of the world into Sansara and Nirvana, was merely a teaching device. It is taught that the sinner at this moment of time will one day, in some later incarnation, evolve into a Buddha, but since time itself is an illusion this can only mean that the world is already complete in every moment of its existence, all is Brahman. While Siddhartha might previously have venerated a stone because of its divine potential, he reveres it now because all levels of existence, including the divine, are already contained within it. At the same time, he loves the stone because it is a stone, he loves things, and not doctrines, ideas, or words. Govinda intellectualizes; he protests that this “loving the world” is the very opposite of the Buddha's teaching: “He commands benevolence, consideration, pity, tolerance, but not love” (III, 729), but Siddhartha dismisses the objection as a theoretical confusion. Govinda, though impressed by his friend's saintly appearance, finds his doctrine foolish (närrisch), which for such as him is a serious matter. Kissing Siddhartha's brow, with that symbolic kiss which links the two “friends” in novel after novel, he looks into his face: there he sees many faces, first of all fish—Hesse's favorite figure for the prehuman stage—then, Wagner-like, the face of a murderer as he drives his knife into his victim's body (his execution follows), then men and women in acts of sensual frenzy, animal faces of all kinds, gods—Krishna and Agni—a stream of faces in constant metamorphosis behind a mask, a smiling mask of water, Siddhartha's face smiling the masked smile of Gotama.
So Siddhartha concludes with the confrontation of the two “friends,” two students of the eternal, the one who, by turning his back not only upon family but also upon teacher and tradition, by bursting into the vast Without alone, has found serenity and wisdom, the other who has failed because he remained with the other monks within the grove of Jetavana, celibate within the walls of the Spiritual Academy.49 It is not in fact an idle allusion to compare Govinda with Faust's famulus, Wagner, for at the very least the comparison illuminates Hesse's fundamental, ironical analogy between the ladder of the traditional pedagogical hierarchy and the ladder of the “conventional” spiritual Way—that is, the Way which depends upon the relationship of pupil and guru. On the basis of this analogy, throughout this author's works, that monastic tradition which has always yoked divine and secular knowledge is constantly alluded to; but over and above all this a third kind of “knowledge” is proposed, which cannot be learned in the Christian monastery or in its Indian equivalent.
In 1931, in the essay “My Faith,” Hesse delivered himself of a categorical assertion: “I once attempted, a little more than ten years ago, to express my beliefs in a book. The book is called Siddhartha, and its convictions have often been examined and discussed by Indian students and Japanese priests, but not by their Christian colleagues” (VII, 370). It is a fact that no other novel of Hesse's (with the possible exception of The Journey to the East) gives such expression to his deepest insights, for in none is the form, that of legend,50 so perfectly adapted to the experience conveyed. Other effects, perhaps equally admirable, are achieved in The Steppenwolf in quite a different manner, by a new tension between matter and form. Siddhartha discloses finally and unmistakably the significance of hagiography, of the saintly vita, as a formal conditioning factor in Hesse's work; the book's doctrine of love is not Indian at all, but Franciscan, or at the very least Christian.51 The conception of spiritual development which the vita form implies and involves, having its roots in Calw, is linked with the trans-Darwinist dogma of “psychic evolution” so popular in Hesse's youth,52 and prominently reflected in the Karamazov essay, which itself suffers from the inextricable ambiguities of these doctrines, their inability to distinguish clearly between the evolution of the individual and that of the race. “On the Soul” informs us that man is to be seen as “the special order of beings whose present task it is to develop soul” (VII, 69). This very ambivalence lends a certain arrogance and artificiality to the last pages of Demian; but Siddhartha is free of such things, and its individualism is the more intense for this, its self-revelation the more genuine.
Hesse's theoretical framework for the spiritual evolution of man is laid down in “A Bit of Theology” (1932): the first stage is a state of no responsibility, called paradise or childhood, succeeded by the demands of culture and ideals, religion and morality with the correlate experience of sin and guilt; if this second stage is fully experienced, it leads inevitably to the realization of the inadequacy of the will, hence to despair—a condition which may mean destruction. “This despair leads either to destruction or to a Third Kingdom of the Spirit, the experience of a condition beyond morality and law, an advance to grace and redemption, to a new, loftier kind of irresponsibility, or in short: to faith” (VII, 389). This is not unlike the conventional, triadic structure of most mystical systems. Hesse finds that faith, irrespective of the particular religious garb it wears, is essentially a realization of the need for submission to the forces which rule man, a state of confident acceptance. He finds his formulation “European and almost Christian” (VII, 389); Brahmanism, together with Buddhism, constitutes the loftiest achievement of Theological Man, but has different categories from the Christian—first, the condition of childish or naïve man, then the stage of yoga which corresponds to that of “works,” and finally enlightenment, in Christian terms “grace.” In such analogies between systems Hesse finds “my suspicion of a central problem confirmed” (VII, 390). The second stage, that of the end of innocence, of the beginning of polarity, of the struggle of the will—that stage, indeed, with which Demian begins—terminates always in despair; it may lead “to destruction or redemption: that is to say, not backward beyond morality and culture to the paradise of the child, but forward beyond them to the capacity to live in faith” (VII, 391). This is the vital transition, the point of hazard between self-realization and infantile regression. Beneath the Wheel was also in this respect the early psychological paradigm of the later conceptualized spiritual Way; for Hans Giebenrath, after the desperate struggle of his will, regresses. The breakout (which he did not make), the “exemplary event,” therefore, may be seen as the qualitative leap from the second to the third stage. This issue is also cardinal at the end of The Glass Bead Game, where the transition is seen to be full of ambiguities.
For the understanding of Siddhartha it is, however, of importance to notice that the theoretical pattern, as adumbrated in “A Bit of Theology,” does not fit very well; the episode with Kamala, the approach to the life of the “child-people,” falls out of the pattern, and it is much too negative to regard this episode as being simply a regression to paradise. Perhaps Siddhartha's experience with the Samanas, with Buddha, and with Kamala and the “child-people” should all be regarded as part of the meandering via purgativa; the syllable “Om,” then, is the overture to the via illuminativa which follows. The important distinction between via illuminativa and via unitiva is blurred in Hesse's writings; but Siddhartha scarcely corresponds even to his own system, since illumination eventually comes to the hero through a despair which springs, not from the breaking of the will, but from satiety and disgust with the world.
“The Third Kingdom of the Spirit”—Christian dogma, Novalis and Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the old dream of the Third Kingdom, the chiliastic visions of the turn of the nineteenth century and of the Expressionists here combine in a term which has interesting applications in all Hesse's later novels. It refers to the condition of faith, of chaos, of magical thinking, of perception of the One. Fundamental to its attainment is submission to an inner autocrat, the law of the self wheresoever it may lead, just as the tragic hero, with his “self will” (Eigensinn), follows his star.53 Willfulness54 is one thing, it leads away from fate; true will, however, is identical with fate. The most successful exposition in allegorical minuscule of these basic ideas is the little-known Märchen “The Steep Road” (1917). This story has some stylistic and thematic affinities with Franz Kafka; it tells of a man who is led by a guide to climb an insurmountable mountain. They are teacher and pupil setting out together upon the Way, and the pupil painfully follows his teacher out of the pleasant valley of flowers and sunshine, picks up his chant: “I will, I will, I will” and significantly changes it to “I must, I must, I must” (III, 325). There is, once started on the Way, no turning back; there is no choice but to go on. Sometimes through effort, if it is strong enough, a change of state is produced and real will is born: “Now the climbing became easier, I did not have to any more, but really wanted to. … Within me it became bright” (III, 325). In this transformation is symbolized the rewards which may be bestowed from time to time on those who follow the Way of works, of yogic schools, or of extreme asceticism (fakirdom), which are, on their deepest level, all one and the same; but therefore all lead to the same end, which is an intolerable end, the summit of the mountain:
That was a strange mountain and a strange peak! On this peak … a tree grew out of the stone, a small, thick-set tree with a few short, tough boughs. There it stood, unimaginably lonely and strange, hard and rigid in the rock, the cool blue of the sky between its boughs. And at the top of the tree sat a black bird and sang a hoarse song.
Still dream of a moment's rest, high above the world: sun blazed, rock burned, tree sternly stared, bird sang hoarsely. His hoarse song was: Eternity, Eternity! The black bird sang, and his hard shiny eye gazed at us like a black crystal [III, 326].
In this fascinating passage, likely enough reflecting memories of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, the figures for the soul and the self, bird and tree, appear terrifyingly petrified; they are “in a stringent, ludicrously thin air,” in the mocking ether, indeed, of Harry Haller's Immortals,55 and the sky is a cool blue. For this summit is not the true goal—a moment of awakening, certainly, immense and lucid (the dropping of the article—“Tree sternly stared,” and so on—is often a feature of such passages; compare the Siddhartha excerpt quoted on page 138. This moment as the high point of willed effort is the ultimate incarnation of the father, the mind, a mere half or, worse, a dream surrogate (“still dream”) for the full self; it is that state of tension before the hermetic union has taken place which is the sense of Pictor's Transformations, in effect, before grace. To bring about this ultimate union, first the guide and then the pupil, following the bird, hurls himself into endless space: “And already I fell, I hurtled, leaped, I flew: I shot … downward through infinity to the breast of the mother” (III, 327). Only through the unbearable intensification of the father principle can the breasts of the mother be found; it was only Demian who could lead Emil to Frau Eva.
Thus it is that Siddhartha went first to the Samanas before he found himself and so found Kamala; this detour was indispensable. Later still he discovered how to unite the two in one, like Pictor's tree. Hesse is, despite certain ambiguities of statement, evidently traditional in his mystical formulations; there is nothing new in these conceptions, a fact which implies nothing at all as to either their depth or their fatuity. The act of submission, “letting-oneself-fall,” this is also, “as the German mystics called it, ‘de-becoming’ (Entwerden),”56 diastole. It is all the “perennial philosophy,” and it may be interpreted without difficulty in psychological terms, without the aid of metaphysical postulates. The parallelism of religious ideas and Jungian doctrines is a conditioning factor in Hesse's art at this period, of which he was well aware: “There began in me what the Christian calls ‘contemplation,’ the psychoanalyst ‘introversion.’”57 It is not at all surprising to find the mother-figure of his analyzed dreams in conscious association with the Madonna, when he confesses wryly to his own form of mariolatry and, à la Jung, to “my own cult and my own mythology.”58 There is much justification, however, for the view, to which he himself held,59 that the mainspring of his work was the religious impulse, an impulse corresponding, moreover, to an objective metaphysical correlative (though he may use the word “God” but rarely).
Out of all this, for Hesse's art as a writer it is the momentary experience of awakening which is of primary significance. Siddhartha's awakening on leaving the grove of Jetavana is the culmination of the first section of the novel and sets the lines for all that follows. The experience is one to which Govinda comes only at the very end, in contemplation of his friend's face. “No longer sure whether time existed, whether this vision had lasted a second or a century” (III, 732)—the destruction of the time sense, reflected in the style in the sudden expansion of Erzählzeit, is the telltale feature. This is that state which is localized both without and within—“as though wounded in his innermost self by a divine arrow, a sweet-tasting wound, bewitched in his innermost self and dissolved, Govinda stood for a little while longer bent over Siddhartha's face which he had just kissed, which had just been the theater for all the forms, for all existence” (III, 732). The analogies between this passage and that which describes Siddhartha's first moment of awakening are close, and with that which describes Klein's perhaps closer still. Not the surface of objects only but their spiritual texture, their inner divinity is opened to insight. In Govinda's experience the sensual has succumbed to the visionary, to the “magical,” not, however, to the reflective. This numinous translucency of the material world is more than the intrusion of reflection.
It is also very interesting that the last chapter of Siddhartha shows a change of standpoint: suddenly the author has moved out of Siddhartha and stands behind Govinda's eyes. “Deeply Govinda bowed down” (III, 733), for Siddhartha is now the image of the divinity, that archetype in Govinda's own soul before whom Govinda must bow. In “A Bit of Theology” Hesse had set up an elementary theory of types, dividing men into two classes, “the devout” and “the rational.” Govinda, to some extent still “rational,” has to learn like Siddhartha to be wholly “devout.” Veneration is said to be the chief characteristic of the devout,60 and in Govinda's heart there is now “the feeling of warmest love, of most humble veneration” (III, 733). At the end of Demian, Emil Sinclair climbed down inside himself, bent and regarded his own reflection in the dark mirror of the water within, and saw in fact the face of his friend. This was an act of narcissism, of reflection indeed. But now when Govinda bows down before his friend there is change and maybe progress: for one who has always been cursed with reflection this offers a possibility of escape, that the act of reflection become the act of worship.
Notes
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The most important translations with which Hesse was acquainted include: P. Deussen, Vedanta-Sutra (1887) and Sechzig Upanishad's des Veda (1897); H. Oldenberg, Buddha (1881; long the standard German work on the subject) and Die Literatur des alten Indien (1903); K. E. Neumann, Die buddhistische Anthologie (1892) and Reden Gotamo Buddhas (1896).
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Presumably in the early 1900's. See, e.g., “Kleines Bekenntnis” in H. Kliemann and K. H. Silomon, Hermann Hesse: Eine bibliographische Studie zum 2. Juli 1947 (Frankfort, 1947), p. 74. Cf. also “Aus einem Tagebuch des Jahres 1920,” Corona, III (1932–1933), 200.
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Cf. “A Library of World Literature” (1929; VII, 338–339).
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“My Faith” (1931; VII, 371).
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As Baumer, among other authorities, seems rather inclined to do.
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“My Faith” (VII, 372).
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Leopold v. Schröder, Indiens Literatur und Kultur in historischer Entwicklung (Leipzig, 1887), p. 7.
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In Rosshalde, which in part reflects Hesse's attitude before the journey, Veraguth dreams of the East as offering “a new, still pure, innocent atmosphere free of pain” (II, 504).
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Cf. “India” (1911; III, 841).
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III, 850. Cf. Hesse's review of the new, cheap edition of Neumann's Die Reden Buddhas aus der mittleren Sammlung: “When we Westerners have finally learned how to meditate we shall get quite different results out of it than do the Indians. For us it will not become an opiate, but will lead to a deepened self-knowledge” (Neue Rundschau, XXXII, i [1921], 118).
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“Recollections of India” (1916; III, 852).
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“Visit from India” (1922; III, 858).
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“Aus einem Tagebuch des Jahres 1920,” op. cit., p. 201. In his review entitled “Hinduism,” Hesse writes of the new Western interest in the manyarmed gods now penetrating “by many routes, by the routes of occultism … of collectors … of scholarship” (review of H. v. Glasenapp's Der Hinduismus, Neue Rundschau, XXXIV, ii [1923], 669).
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Demian actually postdates “Iris.”
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“The winding path (Umweg) of the libido seems to be a via dolorosa” (Jung, Symbols of Transformation, p. 54). Hesse is very fond of the word “Umweg” at this period, and it may well be a Jungian resonance.
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Frankfort, 1954.
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Cf.: “I told him I was on my way to Asia to see the holy tree and the serpent” (“India”; III, 806).
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Ball, who argues in this way, is perhaps a trifle severe.
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Hesse later points out (IV, 867–868) that previous generations of writers still had some sense of community with their audience; Keller had it, and Hesse himself had still felt it in his earlier works.
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“Recollection of Klingsor's Summer” (1938; VII, 412).
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Hesse is several times critical of Wagner; cf., e.g., Zarathustra's Return (VII, 225) and Letters (VII, 571).
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In Rosshalde, Wagner is referred to as the great musical love of Veraguth's youth (II, 538).
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K. Weibel, Hermann Hesse und die deutsche Romantik, p. 60.
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Neue Rundschau, XXXII, ii (1921), 701–724.
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“Aus einem Tagebuch des Jahres 1920,” op. cit., p. 193.
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Cf. ibid., p. 204.
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Neue Rundschau, XXXII, ii (1921), 1118.
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Ball notes an attempt to integrate the religious devotion wholly in the objective world of symbols and points back to the technique of Peter Camenzind (Hermann Hesse, p. 32). Weibel argues that the love of things in Siddhartha is an anti-Romantic characteristic of the novel (op. cit., pp. 66–67).
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“Aus einem Tagebuch des Jahres 1920,” op. cit., p. 200.
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Siddhartha (III, 621) recites (with a minor variation) three lines from the Deussen translation of the Dhyânabindu-Upanishad:
“Om ist Bogen, der Pfeil Seele,
Das Brahman ist des Pfeiles Ziel,
Das soll man unentwegt treffen …”(P. Deussen, Sechzig Upanishad's des Veda, p. 661).
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Many of the references in the first chapter of Siddhartha seem to be traceable to the Chândogya, the principal Upanishad of the Samaveda.
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Here we must again take note of Jung's doctrine of the “shadow.” The “shadow,” the suppressed alter ego, “can manifest itself … in the guise of a figure from our field of consciousness, e.g., our elder brother (or sister), our best friend, when this person represents our opposite, as for instance Faust's famulus Wagner does” (Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung [New Haven, 1951], pp. 145–146).
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“A Short Autobiography” (IV, 482).
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“Aus einem Tagebuch des Jahres 1920,” op. cit., p. 201.
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Ibid. p. 206.
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Ibid.
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“The general longing is not so much for Buddha or Lao-tzŭ as for yoga” (Neue Rundschau, XXXII, ii [1921], 1117).
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“Aus einem Tagebuch des Jahres 1920,” op. cit., p. 207.
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VII, 182.
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“We do not want to go back to the child, the primitive, but onward, forward, to personality, responsibility, freedom” (“On the Soul”; VII, 72).
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Kama is the Hindu god of love and of sensual experience; the peasant girl's attempt to entice Siddhartha with “the tree climb” is, of course, a reference to the Kama Sutra of Vatsyanyana.
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“Doing and suffering, which together make up our existence, are one whole, one and the same” (Zarathustra's Return; VII, 212).
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Again a name with a meaning, presumably “master” (swami) of the “material world” (kama).
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H. Mauerhofer points out the tendency of the extreme introvert to seek refuge in “game” and then: “Es ist eine geschaffene Welt, in der nun der Introvertierte lebt” (It is an invented world in which the introvert now lives) (Die Introversion, pp. 20–21).
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Wilhelm Stekel (Die Sprache des Traumes [Wiesbaden, 1911], p. 536) observes: “Unter die Lokomotive wirft sich nur der Neurotiker, der einen andern auf diese Weise zermalmt sehen wollte” (The only neurotic to throw himself under a locomotive is the one who would like to see someone else crushed like this).
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The term is evidently taken from Deussen, op. cit., p. 470 and passim.
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Once more the snake. The psychoanalytic interpretation seems cogent—she pays the penalty in the end for her way of life, dies from the poison of that for which she has lived. Hesse thus, unconsciously, judges Kamala.
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This, of course, is also a paradox, true and not true. In The Glass Bead Game, Dion Pugil makes a sharp distinction between child-people and partially enlightened ones. Cf. VI, 636.
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“Platonic academies” are mentioned in the same breath as yogic schools. See Letters (VII, 640).
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For an attempted definition of “legend” as a specific literary form see André Jolles, Einfache Formen (Halle, 1930).
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Hesse notes this Christian element, even calling it “a truly Protestant trait” (“My Faith”; VII, 372).
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Given a great impetus by Nietzsche, who transmutes Darwinist conceptions much in this way. The idea, of course, is found widely in the fin de siècle, frequently linked with traditional occult and gnostic notions (for instance, in Germany, in the works of Johannes Schlaf). Nietzsche had pointed out the ambiguity of the idea of health, and we may compare Hesse's remark “that the diseases of today may be the healths of tomorrow” (“On Good and Bad Critics”; VII, 369).
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VII, 196.
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“Unclean and distorting is the gaze of the will.” “On the Soul” (VII, 68). Hesse, in the same essay, speaks of a “net, woven of mere distractions from the soulful” (VII, 71).
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We may compare also “The Rainmaker” in The Glass Bead Game, where the stars are “so ludicrously superior to him with their grand cold majesty and eternity” (VI, 590).
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Letters (VII, 545).
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“World History” (VII, 122).
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“Madonna Festival in Tessin” (1924; III, 896).
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“We poets and other outsiders … we religious people” (VII, 123); also: “I myself consider the religious impulse to be the decisive characteristic of my life and works” (Letters; VII, 497).
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VII, 397.
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Siddhartha: The Landscape of the Soul
Hesse's Use of Gilgamesh-Motifs in the Humanization of Siddhartha and Harry Haller