Siddhartha
Siddhartha, novel by Hermann Hesse based on the early life of Buddha, published in German in 1922. It was inspired by the author’s visit to Sri Lanka and Indonesia before World War I. Illness prevented him from visiting India itself as he had planned, but Hesse returned from his visit to South Asia with an idealized view of an India grounded in spirituality and religious devotion that remained with him for the rest of his life.
Summary
The theme of the novel is the search for self-realization by a young Brahman, Siddhartha. Realizing the contradictions between reality and what he has been taught, he abandons his comfortable life to wander. His goal is to find the serenity that will enable him to defeat fear and to experience with equanimity the contrasts of life, including joy and sorrow, life and death. Asceticism, including fasting, does not prove satisfying, nor do wealth, sensuality, and the attentions of a lovely courtesan. Despairing of finding fulfillment, he goes to the river and there learns simply to listen. He discovers within himself a spirit of love and learns to accept human separateness. In the end, Siddhartha grasps the wholeness of life and achieves a state of bliss and highest wisdom.
Analysis and reception
As the son of a Brahmin, Siddhartha enjoys comfort and privilege while sequestered in his home village. However, as he grows older, his heart is moved by a burning desire to acquire wisdom and new experiences. Telling his father his intentions, Siddhartha and his childhood friend, Govinda, leave the safety of home to join the Samanas, a group of wandering ascetics.
As Hermann Hesse’s novel unfolds, we follow Siddhartha in his search for meaning and truth in a world of sorrow and suffering. Drawing on both Hindu and Buddhist teachings, Siddhartha expertly explores the tension between the doctrinal dictates of organized religion and the inner promptings of the soul. As Siddhartha grows older, a fundamental truth gradually becomes apparent both to him and to us: there is no single path to self-growth, no one formula for how to live life. Hesse challenges our ideas of what it means to lead a spiritual life, to strive after and to achieve meaningful self-growth through blind adherence to a religion, philosophy, or indeed any system of belief.
We should, rather, seek to seize hold of the reality of each moment, which is always new, alive, and forever changing. Hesse uses the potent symbol of a river to convey this sense of vibrancy and flux. The particular brilliance of this novel is the way in which its profound message is delivered through a prose that flows as naturally and shimmeringly as the surface of the river beside which Siddhartha spends the final years of his life.
Siddhartha did not make much of an impression when it was first published in German, but, issued in English in 1951 by New Directions, a publishing house associated with literary modernism and the first stirrings of the literature of the Beat movement, the book was enthusiastically adopted by young readers seeking spiritual enlightenment. A canonical text of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, it remains a popular book today. As of its hundredth anniversary in 2022, it had sold more than four million copies in the United States alone.