Siddhartha

Siddhartha

Introduction

Hesse has stated, “All the prose works of fiction I have written are biographies of souls.” Siddhartha, his most widely read work of fiction, is a biography of the soul in the essential sense of the term. It evokes the magical realm of the spirit in exploring the protagonist's quest for self-knowledge and the unity of being (Boulby, 2007).

Hesse called Siddhartha “an Indic Poem.” Of all his fictional works, it is undoubtedly the one most impregnated with Indian religion and philosophy. Hesse himself unequivocally acknowledged his long-standing interest in India and his preoccupation with Hinduism, Buddhism, Vedanta, and Yoga. “More than half of my life,” he stated, “I tried to come to an understanding of the Indian view of Life.” India had been his family's spiritual homeland for two generations, and he himself had undertaken a voyage to India in 1911 “to go back into that source of life where everything had begun and which signified the Oneness of all phenomenon.” Siddhartha was an artistic expression of his understanding of the Indian view of life, modified by his own romantic vision (Field, 2006) (Boulby, 2007) (Boulby, 2007).

Major Themes

The single theme of the novel is Siddhartha's search for unity, which is identical with his search for the true nature of the self. He cannot find either by rejecting the world, but neither can he take the opposite route and indulge the senses. He must indeed embrace the world, but only when he is able to experience it sub specie aeternitatis, in its essential form. He must come to know that the individual self, the Atman, is identical to the universal self, the Brahman, although by the end of the novel the terms have shifted. He has, even while remaining an individual, become indistinguishable from the universal nature of the Buddha (Hesse, 2002).

To attain this enlightenment, the most important lesson he learns is the ability to be passive, to wait and listen. If he can cease his own small willing and striving, he can learn to embrace the great contradictory harmonies of the world. He can, in his own person, reconcile all the strife of opposites; he can overcome the illusion of time and thus experience the myriad, diverse forms and events—past, present, and future—as a simultaneous present, and hold them in a quiet serenity which accepts and loves everything, seeing no fault (Otten, 2007).

Hesse's work deals with the painful process of spiritual growth. In part, the novel retraces the legendary life of the Gotama the Buddha—the name “Siddhartha” was one of the Buddha's own appellations—and presents central teachings of Buddhist thought. The name of the beautiful courtesan—“Kamala”—for example, contains the Sanskrit word kama that means desire, and in the Buddha's teachings, desire is the force that causes and perpetuates the suffering that is existence. In order to gain spiritual salvation, the individual must learn to renounce the veil of illusion, or maya, that is generated by desire. Thus, Siddhartha leaves Kamala and his luxurious life in the city because ...