Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
Hi people,
I picked this book up thinking it’s some foreign author writing about Buddhism and Gautama Buddha (pretty dumb of me ik). While it does brush up on these topics it’s very different.
It’s about a Siddhartha, a boy who questions everything he’s being taught and sets himself on a path to find the self - “Atman”.
The book revolves around this one main idea - "wisdom cannot be taught"
Knowledge is something you learn from the books or religious texts, but wisdom is something no one can hand you.. you have to learn it for yourself.
Siddhartha learns life’s lessons through his encounters with different characters in the book.
The samanas(the band of ascetics) teach him discipline and detachment, but he realises that their path of denial only numbs the self.
He finds the Buddha’s teaching the most sensible but he walks away because he believes that even if the answer is right in front of you it cannot be handed to you, you have to figure it out for yourself.
From Kamala the courtesan he learns how to love, which he spent his entire life denying as Maya.
Kamaswami the merchant teaches him ambition and wealth creation, he masters it without being consumed by it like an outsider.
And Govinda his oldest friend spends his years following the right teacher and the right doctrine not having experiencing anything himself.
It’s a short book that packs a heavy punch. Still I took fair amount of time digesting it.
One thing I took straight out of the book -
Siddhartha learns three things from the Samanas that he later says are the key to achieving anything: to think, to wait and to fast. Not in the literal sense.
To think — hold your goal with total clarity, don't let it get muddied by every passing distraction.
To wait — move toward it without desperation. No panic, no grasping.
To fast — be able to go without. Want it, don't need it.
There are some Aha moments in book as well, where what Hesse is saying just clicks to you.
“The river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.”
Using this example of a river he explains what is known as the Block universe theory in physics.
It is the idea that past, present and future all exist equally and our sense of time “flowing” is a feature of consciousness, not of reality itself.
The lesson to learn from the book is to “stop needing teachings” :p
Figure things out for yourself. Try, fail and attach more importance to things than to thoughts and find what you are looking for.
Do give it a read.
I am currently reading Musashi. So I will be reviewing that next.
Toodles!