Siddhartha E-Book

Hermann Hesse

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 194

Beschreibung

An inspirational classic from Nobel Prize-winner Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha is a beautiful tale of self-discovery 'A subtle distillation of wisdom, stylistic grace and symmetry of form' Sunday Times 'It's hard to think of a more recent novel that has sung so eloquently the joys of being alone' Guardian Dissatisfied with the ways of life he has experienced, Siddhartha, the handsome son of a Brahmin, leaves his family and his friend, Govinda, in search of a higher state of being. Having experienced the myriad forms of existence, from immense wealth and luxury to the pleasures of sensual and paternal love, Siddhartha finally settles down beside a river, where a humble ferryman teaches him his most valuable lesson yet. Hermann Hesse's short, elegant novel, echoing the life of the Buddha, has been cherished by readers for decades as an unforgettable spiritual primer. A tender and unforgettable moral allegory, it is an undeniable classic of modern literature. Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe

Leseprobe

‘A writer of genius’

THE TIMES

‘A touchstone that somehow keeps one company through life, growing older and more mature as the reader does’

PICO IYER

‘Its simple prose and rebellious character echoed the yearnings of a generation that was seeking a way out of conformity… Siddhartha emerged as a symbol; the symbol of those who seek the truth’

PAULO COELHO

SIDDHARTHA

HERMANN HESSE

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY HILDA ROSNER

WITH A FOREWORD BY PICO IYER

PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEFOREWORDPART ONETHE BRAHMIN’S SONWITH THE SAMANASGOTAMAAWAKENINGPART TWOKAMALAAMONG THE PEOPLESANSARABY THE RIVERTHE FERRYMANTHE SONOMGOVINDAGLOSSARYTHE STORY OF PETER OWEN PUBLISHERSAVAILABLE AND COMING SOON FROM PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICSABOUT THE AUTHORCOPYRIGHT

SIDDHARTHA

7

FOREWORD

THE BEAUTY OF SIDDHARTHA’S WEAKNESSES

‘I can think, I can wait, I can fast.’ As an innocent fifteen-year-old, incarcerated in a fifteenth-century boarding-school in suburban Berkshire, I scribbled down those words upon my first encounter with Siddhartha and felt transformed. How could wisdom be at once so simply phrased, I thought, and yet so radical – so much deeper than everything I heard from my teachers or my parents? After many years of chapel I was trained to tune out any word that began with a capital letter, and I didn’t have a clue what Hesse was going on about with all his talk of ‘Brahmins’ and ‘the Illustrious One’. But something in the clarity and directness of Siddhartha’s arrowed proclamation stirred me, spoke to a secret restlessness – and I didn’t read closely enough to see that even that bold assertion will be undercut, as so many of Siddhartha’s illuminations are, before the novel is over.

I’d already devoured Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund, a tale of a romantic adventurer and a monk that seemed made for us boys in our medieval monastic cells, longing for foreign places and girls. I had guessed that it was acceptable to read Hesse because he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and so 8 seemed as legitimate as the Thomas Mann or Jean-Paul Sartre with which we precocious boys were so eager to impress one another. I knew, too, that Hesse’s starting-point – that there must be something more to life than comfort and material possessions – had truth, since all of us were living in a luxurious sanctuary with its own secret gardens and rivers and Gutenberg Bible, and still we wanted to be out in the world, confounded.

What I didn’t know – couldn’t have accepted then – was that literally millions of others were thrilling to the same book across the world, in much the same way; to me – and this is part of Hesse’s strength – it seemed the story of me alone, someone whose ideas and destiny were apart from those of the normal world. As a boy, I could not make out the complexity of the book, its suppleness and ease with paradox, and was in no position to discover how, for Hesse (a patient of Jung’s while completing Siddhartha), his story was less about finding the light than about confronting the shadow and looking past a high-minded boy’s ideas of being superior or apart. For a teenager, the novel touched the same hidden place as some of the simpler parables of D.H. Lawrence (The Virgin and the Gypsy, The Man Who Died), the questing ballads of Leonard Cohen, the novels we eagerly slipped one another under our desks, Le Grand Meaulnes and The Magus.

Those books that capture the world’s imagination, at least as cosmic, universal fairy-tales – from The Little Prince to The Alchemist – depend for their power on a disarming combination of parable and complexity; they can be read by any kid, 9 in other words (‘age 14 and up’ advises my edition of Siddhartha), but they’re best savoured by someone who’s known something of suffering and loss. They speak in several languages at once. As a boy, I was too young to follow most of the implications of Hesse’s attack on ‘spiritual materialism’, as it’s called, the sense of ambition and pride and self that lies even in the wish to be free of self; I couldn’t see that his wisest line here might be that ‘The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.’ I simply responded to the vague outlines of the tale, its sense of yearning. When I go back to it now it’s the refusal to accept any answers and Siddhartha’s final assertion that it’s seeking itself that obscures the truth that impress me more with their unexpectedness. Inside the guise of a simple Eastern fable, Hesse is delivering an anguished German Bildungsroman about a young man who comes upon a new self-cancelling revelation every day and has finally to shed his cleverness, his pride and, most of all, his love of nothing but the quest.

When I was young, in short, I thrilled to the beginning of Siddhartha. Now, a lifetime later, I am more moved by the end, with its many separations, its renunciation of all exalted notions, its touching human accounting of friendship and of loss.

It’s tempting, I know, to dismiss Siddhartha as one of those diversions one has to put away with childish things; it casts 10 such a spell over so many of us in our formative years that we’re inclined to think of it in the same breath as the purple passages and sappy love songs we loved when we were too young to know better. Going back to it now, I do indeed find much of the book a little shakier and gauzier than I recall. But many other parts are far subtler, if only because the book is shaped according to an Eastern sense of time as cyclical instead of the more linear pattern I was brought up to honour. The more Siddhartha comes to appreciate the circular nature of life – when he becomes a father, in short, and not just a son – the more he comes to understand what may be the central idea in all Hesse’s writing, that the life of holiness and truth runs right through the centre of the world and all its confusions, squalor and humiliation. It’s Siddhartha’s mistakes in the book (as he tries to impose holiness on his young son, for example) that appeal to me more than his discoveries.

The book’s relation to the Buddha story intensifies this complexity. If you’d asked me what Siddhartha was about before my most recent rereading, I’d have answered airily, ‘Hermann Hesse’s retelling of the Buddha story.’ I’d completely forgotten, in other words, that Siddhartha deliberately walks away from the Buddha – much though he respects that great contemporary’s teachings – and repeatedly scorns those who follow any doctrine (the scorn itself, of course, part of what Siddhartha has to work through). There are aspects of this that may sound like heresy to certain pious Buddhists; but after having lived in deeply Buddhist Japan for twenty-five years now and 11 talked and travelled with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama for thirty-eight, I can see that there’s also a Buddhist aptness to Hesse’s highly individualistic telling of the story. The Buddha himself, after all, always urged people not to follow his word blindly – not to become ‘Buddhists’, as it were – and not to rely on the testimony of others; each of us has to wake up (to use the central metaphor of the book) by ourselves and see things as they are, beyond the reach of projection or ‘some imaginary vision of perfection’.

This may sound like the ‘pathless path’ of Jiddu Krishnamurti, or even the ‘No Guru, No Method, No Teacher’ chorus of Van Morrison, but in Hesse’s sometimes ironic telling it also sounds wonderfully akin to that German traveller you’re likely to meet in Dharamsala tomorrow, who dogmatically rants about how he hates all dogmas and opinions.

Hesse was in his mid-forties when he published Siddhartha and, coming out in the same year as ‘The Waste Land’ and Ulysses, it deliberately turned its back on the dailiness and sometimes self-annihilating learning of those modernist masterpieces to face another direction, more timeless and less, you could say, Brahminical. The book may seem young to those of us anxious to outrun our youth and parade our knowingness and maturity, but when Siddhartha says, ‘In every truth the opposite is equally true,’ he’s delivering exactly the sentence that the Nobel prize-winning physicist Nils Bohr enunciated around about the same time. And when he says, ‘It also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom 12 to one man seems nonsense to another,’ he serves up a kind of modesty, a realism, that I can well appreciate at fifty-five.

Perhaps that’s one reason the book outlasts fashion and speaks to so many, in every kind of circumstance. When I wanted to write this foreword, I headed to the nearest bookshop in a small town in California where I happened to be staying and there discovered – to my surprise – nine separate editions of Siddhartha vying for my attention; the one I bought was in its eighty-seventh reprinting.

‘I’m glad it still sells,’ I told the earringed man at the cash register.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I sell these all the time. They read it in schools a lot; well, all kinds of people are picking it up.’

It doesn’t matter, I think, that Siddhartha himself is not a very individualized character – more, really, of a soul with an auspicious name, a shadow attached to a longing and walking through a compact lyric poem. It doesn’t matter that so many of us, when young, read the book in our own way and take it to be exactly what it later doesn’t seem to be at all: a call to find and listen to your ‘bright and clear inward voice’ and not, in fact, a reminder that knowledge ‘has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge’. It doesn’t even matter if this seeker’s scripture is associated more with dreadlocked kids tramping around the Himalayas than with the existential searchingness of Hesse’s Magister Ludi or Steppenwolf.

Precisely through its looseness, Siddhartha can encompass many more readings than one first supposes and can become 13 a touchstone that somehow keeps one company through life, growing older and more mature as the reader does. At seventeen, two years after my discovery of the book, I was asked to deliver a formal recitation in an imposing hall at school, furnished with busts of Pitt the Elder and Gladstone and other eminences who had walked the corridors before us; I chose, instead of the expected Xenophon or Seneca, some passages about the river in Siddhartha to horrify the assembled worthies. When I was twenty-nine, and left the job of my dreams – writing on world affairs for Time magazine in a twenty-fifth-floor office four blocks from Times Square – to stay in a monastery in Kyoto, I knew I couldn’t liken myself to the Buddha, leaving his gilded palace at twenty-nine, but perhaps I had something of the unformed and often annoying Siddhartha in me.

When I met my Japanese future wife in Kyoto a little later, one of the main things that we shared was a youthful appreciation for Hermann Hesse’s books about seminaries and adventure. And as it happens, like many boys of Hindu origins, I was given at birth by my parents the first name of the Buddha, Siddharth, although they also gave me a shorter Italian name that has served me well on my global journeys.

Travelling the world for the past thirty years I’ve noticed the same thing happening again and again, from Havana to Singapore and Paris to Peru. I’ll hand over my credit card or my passport and an immigration official or cashier will see my official first name inscribed upon it. 14

‘Like the Hesse novel?’ he or she will say.

‘Yes,’ I confess. ‘Same name, but without an “a”.’

‘I love that book,’ comes the answer. ‘It really and permanently changed my life.’

Pico Iyer Nara, Japan

15

PART ONE

16

17

THE BRAHMIN’S SON

In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river-bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree, Siddhartha, the handsome Brahmin’s son, grew up with his friend Govinda. The sun browned his slender shoulders on the river-bank, while bathing at the holy ablutions, at the holy sacrifices. Shadows passed across his eyes in the mango grove during play, while his mother sang, during his father’s teachings, when with the learned men. Siddhartha had already long taken part in the learned men’s conversations, had engaged in debate with Govinda and had practised the art of contemplation and meditation with him. Already he knew how to pronounce Om silently – this word of words, to say it inwardly with the intake of breath, when breathing out with all his soul, his brow radiating the glow of pure spirit. Already he knew how to recognize Atman within the depth of his being, indestructible, at one with the universe.

There was happiness in his father’s heart because of his son who was intelligent and thirsty for knowledge; he saw him growing up to be a great learned man, a priest, a prince among Brahmins.

There was pride in his mother’s breast when she saw him walking, sitting down and rising; Siddhartha – strong, handsome, supple-limbed, greeting her with complete grace.

Love stirred in the hearts of the young Brahmins’ 18 daughters when Siddhartha walked through the streets of the town, with his lofty brow, his king-like eyes and his slim figure.

Govinda, his friend, the Brahmin’s son, loved him more than anybody else. He loved Siddhartha’s eyes and clear voice. He loved the way he walked, his complete grace of movement; he loved everything that Siddhartha did and said, and above all he loved his intellect, his fine ardent thoughts, his strong will, his high vocation. Govinda knew that he would not become an ordinary Brahmin, a lazy sacrificial official, an avaricious dealer in magic sayings, a conceited worthless orator, a wicked sly priest, or just a good stupid sheep among a large herd. No, and he, Govinda, did not want to become any of these, not a Brahmin like ten thousand others of their kind.

He wanted to follow Siddhartha, the beloved, the magnificent. And if he ever became a god, if he ever entered the All-Radiant, then Govinda wanted to follow him as his friend, his companion, his servant, his lance-bearer, his shadow.

That was how everybody loved Siddhartha. He delighted and made everybody happy.

But Siddhartha himself was not happy. Wandering along the rosy paths of the fig garden, sitting in contemplation in the bluish shade of the grove, washing his limbs in the daily bath of atonement, offering sacrifices in the depths of the shady mango wood with complete grace of manner, beloved by all, a joy to all, there was yet no joy in his own heart. 19 Dreams and restless thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the twinkling stars at night, from the sun’s melting rays. Dreams and a restlessness of the soul came to him, arising from the smoke of the sacrifices, emanating from the verses of the Rig-Veda, trickling through from the teachings of the old Brahmins.

Siddhartha had begun to feel the seeds of discontent within him. He had begun to feel that the love of his father and mother, and also the love of his friend Govinda, would not always make him happy, give him peace, satisfy and suffice him. He had begun to suspect that his worthy father and his other teachers, the wise Brahmins, had already passed on to him the bulk and best of their wisdom, that they had already poured the sum total of their knowledge into his waiting vessel; and the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still. The ablutions were good, but they were water; they did not wash sins away, they did not relieve the distressed heart. The sacrifices and the supplication of the gods were excellent – but were they everything? Did the sacrifices give happiness? And what about the gods? Was it really Prajapati who had created the world? Was it not Atman, He alone, who had created it? Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient? Was it therefore good and right, was it a sensible and worthy act to offer sacrifices to the gods? To whom else should one offer sacrifices, to whom else should one pay honour, but to Him, Atman, the Only One? And 20 where was Atman to be found, where did He dwell, where did His eternal heartbeat, if not within the Self, in the innermost, in the eternal which each person carried within him? But where was this Self, this innermost? It was not flesh and bone, it was not thought or consciousness. That was what the wise men taught. Where, then, was it? To press towards the Self, towards Atman – was there another way that was worth seeking? Nobody showed the way, nobody knew it – neither his father, nor the teachers and wise men, nor the holy songs. The Brahmins and their holy books knew everything, everything: they had gone into everything – the creation of the world, the origin of speech, food, inhalation, exhalation, the arrangement of the senses, the acts of the gods. They knew a tremendous number of things – but was it worth while knowing all these things if they did not know the one important thing, the only important thing?

Many verses of the holy books, above all the Upanishads of Samaveda, spoke of this innermost thing. It is written: ‘Your soul is the whole world.’ It says that when a man is asleep, he penetrates his innermost and dwells in Atman. There was wonderful wisdom in these verses; all the knowledge of the sages was told here in enchanting language, pure as honey collected by the bees. No, this tremendous amount of knowledge, collected and preserved by successive generations of wise Brahmins, could not be easily overlooked. But where were the Brahmins, the priests, the wise men, who were successful not only in having this most profound knowledge, 21 but in experiencing it? Where were the initiated who, attaining Atman in sleep, could retain it in consciousness, in life, everywhere, in speech and in action? Siddhartha knew many worthy Brahmins, above all his father – holy, learned, of highest esteem. His father was worthy of admiration; his manner was quiet and noble. He lived a good life, his words were wise; fine and noble thoughts dwelt in his head – but even he who knew so much, did he live in bliss, was he at peace? Was he not also a seeker, insatiable? Did he not go continually to the holy springs with an insatiable thirst, to the sacrifices, to books, to the Brahmins’ discourses? Why must he, the blameless one, wash away his sins and endeavour to cleanse himself anew each day? Was Atman then not within him? Was not then the source within his own heart? One must find the source within one’s own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking – a detour, error.

These were Siddhartha’s thoughts; this was his thirst, his sorrow.

He often repeated to himself the words from one of the Chandogya-Upanishads. ‘In truth, the name of the Brahman is Satyam. Indeed, he who knows it enters the heavenly world each day.’ It often seemed near – the heavenly world – but never had he quite reached it, never had he quenched the final thirst. And among the wise men that he knew and whose teachings he enjoyed, there was not one who had entirely reached it – the heavenly world – not one who had completely quenched the eternal thirst. 22

‘Govinda,’ said Siddhartha to his friend, ‘Govinda, come with me to the banyana tree. We will practise meditation.’

They went to the banyana tree and sat down, twenty paces apart. As he sat down ready to pronounce the Om, Siddhartha softly recited the verse:

‘Om is the bow, the arrow is the soul,

Brahman is the arrow’s goal

At which one aims unflinchingly.’

When the customary time for the practice of meditation had passed, Govinda rose. It was now evening. It was time to perform the evening ablutions. He called Siddhartha by his name; he did not reply. Siddhartha sat absorbed, his eyes staring as if directed at a distant goal, the tip of his tongue showing a little between his teeth. He did not seem to be breathing. He sat thus, lost in meditation, thinking Om, his soul as the arrow directed at Brahman.

Some Samanas once passed through Siddhartha’s town. Wandering ascetics, they were three thin worn-out men, neither old nor young, with dusty and bleeding shoulders, practically naked, scorched by the sun, solitary, strange and hostile – lean jackals in the world of men. Around them hovered an atmosphere of still passion, of devastating service, of unpitying self-denial.

In the evening, after the hour of contemplation, Siddhartha said to Govinda: ‘Tomorrow morning my friend, 23 Siddhartha is going to join the Samanas. He is going to become a Samana.’

Govinda blanched as he heard these words and read the decision in his friend’s determined face, undeviating as the released arrow from the bow. Govinda realized from the first glance at his friend’s face that now it was beginning. Siddhartha was going his own way; his destiny was beginning to unfold itself, and with his destiny, his own. And he became as pale as a dried banana skin.

‘Oh, Siddhartha,’ he cried, ‘will your father permit it?’

Siddhartha looked at him like one who had just awakened. As quick as lightning he read Govinda’s soul, read the anxiety, the resignation.

‘We will not waste words, Govinda,’ he said softly. ‘Tomorrow at daybreak I will begin the life of the Samanas. Let us not discuss it again.’

Siddhartha went into the room where his father was sitting on a mat made of bast. He went up behind his father and remained standing there until his father felt his presence. ‘Is it you, Siddhartha?’ the Brahmin asked. ‘Then speak what is in your mind.’

Siddhartha said: ‘With your permission, Father, I have come to tell you that I wish to leave your house tomorrow and join the ascetics. I wish to become a Samana. I trust my father will not object.’

The Brahmin was silent so long that the stars passed across the small window and changed their design before the silence 24