I cannot think of another book that I read as a young man in the late 1960s, that was more influential on my subsequent life choices than Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. I contend that our life experiences around the time we read profound books may significantly affect the ways we receive them. In this column, In this column, I will consider how my understanding of Siddhartha changed as I went through three life key stages: young adult; career-focused family man; and reflective senior adult. I recall that Siddhartha was more of a nostalgic curiosity when I read it the second time in the 1980s, as a family man establishing a career and a new family. But what has been the most surprising is the way that I have gained new insights about this book and myself when I read and considered it a third time with a group of seniors at a recent monthly (Richmond, VA) Classic Book Club teleconference meeting. Let me start at the first stage.
As a young college youth, I was beginning to explore the boundaries of new freedoms of actions of thought and action. Like many others in my generation, I was feeling more liberated from the influences of my parents and from the strings tying me to conventional twentieth-century thinking. My generation believed that we had to ‘turn-on and drop out.” What adults were expecting us to sign up for fell way short of our idealistic hopes, dreams, and goals. We observed that our parents were not satisfied with the lives they had created for themselves striving for the American Dream. Many had found that wealth did not bring happiness. Their abuse of prescription drugs and alcohol was on the rise at the same time that they condemned youth who were experimenting with a new generation of psychedelic drugs. The Vietnam war was raging on, and we were wasting our human and capital resources on a senseless conflict that didn’t have any logical ending. Time Magazine was casking if both the family and God were dead.
To add to my particular confusion, my two sets of parents had been associated with the Jewish and Christian faiths as I was growing up. As I understood their respective religious messages, both faiths claimed to have been chosen as exclusive agents of God. And both placed God as being above and separate from humanity. I was told that you could strive to be like God, but unless you were a prophet, saint, or incarnation (like Jesus), you were bound to fall short. Christians emphasized that we were sinners and Jews could not even spell the word God in their holy texts. Neither religion offered man an inspiring vision for our generation.
So, with the social and cultural backdrop of the 60’s backdrop, Siddhartha arrived in the western world, along with a new interest in Eastern thought and meditation practices, and a pop-culture movement based on inward spiritual awareness and realization. Like most westerners, I did not know that Herman Hesse had first written the book in German in 1921, that it had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, or that it was first published in English in 1951. However, with the timely messages it brought, it seemed like it was written specifically as an antidote for the disillusioned youth of the 1960s and 70s.
One of the lessons from that book that caught our attention was that we couldn’t just accept the teachings of our parents; instead, we had to learn what was important to us from our own experiences.
During Siddhartha’s youth, “he found no joy inside himself.” He found that the world was caught up in endless suffering, both from the struggle to accumulate wealth and from the struggle to alleviate poverty. His goal was to try to find a way to eliminate suffering in his own life. The key, he believed, was to eliminate the desire for physical attractions and attachments by directing his pursuit for a connection to “the Eternal Heartbeat.” Rather than dwelling outside of himself, he believed that the divine source resided in every living being. As a young man, he looked around him and concluded that nobody around him showed him how to achieve that path: “not his teachers, not the wise men, and not the holy books.” He concluded that this realization could not be taught by his parents. But he asked his father’s blessing to release him so that he could go to the forest and study with the samanas (ascetics), who he believed also aspired to reach the path toward the highest spiritual realization. His father, who was an educated man of the Hindu tradition, agreed to release his son to go and study with the samanas, asking only that he return home and teach his father how to find bliss, once he discovered how to achieve it for himself. It seemed that the reasons Siddhartha used to leave home struck a chord with the youth of the 60s: We had to leave home and disassociate from the ways we were taught, in order to discover who we are and who we would become.
Siddhartha, like the adults around him, went through various cycles of experiences and learning at different stages of his life. Ultimately, he learned much from the samanas, and even from a meeting with the Living Buddha, but held fast that no one could teach him the wisdom he sought. In a later life- phase, he wanted to earn a living to impress Kamala, the object of his sensual desires. This choice certainly seemed like it might have been an extreme deviation from such a serious spiritual devotee, but it was simply portrayed as a key period of the life of a spiritual aspirant who was not seeking to be an ascetic or monk. His decision thus appealed to the youth of that time, who were also faced with making major career decision choices.
Siddhartha responded, “I can think, I can wait, and I can fast.”
I read the book for the second time in the 1980s when I was making important personal and family life choices. Siddhartha, who had then been an ascetic, was asked by Kamala what job skills he had. He responded, “I can think, I can wait, and I can fast.” When he said this on his one job interview to be a real estate broker for a wealthy man, he added that he could also read and write. We had read earlier that Siddhartha had the privileged classical education of a prince. One idea expressed by a participant of our group was that the book was unrealistic because it subsequently showed Siddhartha as a successful employee, even though Siddhartha had few apparent transferable job skills. But I disagreed with this assertion, believing that the skills he had listed were more than sufficient to succeed at a worldly job and make enough money to support a family. From my experience, an employee who can think clearly will certainly be a valuable resource for any job. In my career, finding clear-thinking people to employ was often the key to my success as a job supervisor. A worker who can wait until the results of their good work became evident is more concerned with quality than taking short cuts. An employee who can fast, can delay gratification and not be attached to the results of his/her work. It turned out that when Siddhartha started working, he also related well to people, and this also helped him to be successful in earning commissions.
I contend that when a person reads Siddhartha, and what they are doing at the time they read it, it may have influenced the way they interpret the book. Therefore, many adults who were the parents of 6os and 70s youth likely discounted the book. One member of our Classic Book Club, who is just a few years older than I am, was a young college professor during the period when this book was most popular. He observed that many of his college students used the book as an excuse to drop out of school or society, and do nothing but “gaze at the river,” as Siddhartha and the ferryman had done. But Siddhartha’s river gazing was symbolic of the idea that self-reflection is necessary before taking any important life action. I countered in our book club discussion that, from my experience, dropping out of society may have been true for some of the youth our professor was teaching. However, from my own observations, it did not hold true for all students and youth of that period. I conceded that a good many of the dropouts got trapped in drugs and dropped out permanently. Of course, several dropped out to the extent that they took their own lives. But, I cannot hold Hesse’s book as being responsible for their misguided actions. Many of us who were dropping out, including me, were refecting and trying to redirect our lives in another direction from the model blazed by the previous generation. I believe that many in the positive group were influenced by the most positive themes of Hesse’s writing. Although we may have tuned in to Siddhartha and dropped out for a while, many of the baby boomers from this generation ultimately accepted both new inspirations that Siddhartha had provided: to seek greater spiritual wisdom and to prepare for better job skills for raising families.
Recently a member of the book club recommended that we read and consider Siddhartha. Although it had been at least 30 years, since I last read it, I looked forward to reading it as a senior citizen the third time. After accomplishing this, it became apparent that either I had changed, or the book had changed. But I could not discount the influence that the book club discussion had on my new conclusion. Several of our members stated that they had gained more insight into the book than they had in earlier readings. Some thought it was still a compelling book, while some others thought that it wasn’t as meaningful as it used to be. To me, this supported my contention that the reader’s responses and experiences are crucial to the ways that they interpret any work of literature, especially a period-based classic book.
In the end, Siddhartha had gained powerful accumulated wisdom from his experiences and had attained the wisdom and spiritual realization he had sought. Yet, he was still subjected to the cause and effect laws of karma. His own son, from his union with Kamala, rejected Siddhartha’s teaching and fatherly guidance and went off to society to learn his own lessons. This was as bitter to Siddhartha as it been earlier to his father. Sadly, Siddhartha never went back to visit his father and teach him the path to bliss as his father had previously requested. We can assume that Siddhartha’s son never went back to visit with him. I think that Siddhartha’s abandonment of his father in his senior years amounted to unnecessary cruelty. Janet Clements, our book discussion moderator, conjectured that Herman Hesse may have constructed this plot outcome to reflect that he had rebelled against his father’s Protestant teachings. Also, Hesse never reconciled with his father.
In a redemption, Siddhartha’s final act was to transmit his spiritual realization, through love, to his dearest friend, Govinda. Although this was a satisfying ending to the novel, it brought up some questions about the consistencies in his teachings. Earlier in the book, Siddhartha had stated that one could not attain realization through any teacher. Was Hesse suggesting that Siddhartha had changed his mind on this subject? Or, was he implying that the path the author laid out was even superior to the traditional path of Buddhism for modern times? Another question the book leaves with is, can wisdom be taught or learned through any other source besides self-reflection and hard-life experiences? Readers will have to respond to this challenge by examining their own life and experiences.
Above all other literary considerations, Siddhartha was and still is a bridge book, It has helped many westerners think about spirituality and alternative lifestyles in different ways than they had previously considered. Like the river, Siddhartha has carried us back and forth toward and away from many new ideas. Many westerners are still interested in exploring eastern ideas, and there is still a decline in the serious commitment to many organized religions. However, there is an increasing interest in exploring Christianity in eastern countries that were once strongholds for eastern thinking, such as in Japan, South Korea, and Viet Nam. Perhaps these counter-trends indicate that people are no less interested in spirituality than they used to be. It may be that some are rejecting the intolerant and exclusive holds on truth offered by some faiths. Perhaps just as many of us are still seeking the same truths about God and eternity that Siddhartha explored.
I have now made peace with the teachings of my youth, my middle year experiences. And I and now am able to blend them with what I have learned in my later-life stages. I have concluded that experiences have taught me to see wisdom as well as inconsistencies in western and eastern religions. Both spiritual paths can point us toward a particular view of Truth. Yet, we must still continually listen to the river to find that “Eternal Heartbeat,” which, I believe, resides in each of us.
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