The Journey Through Experience

The search for knowledge is an age-old pastime of humans. They are constantly advancing into and out of higher levels in all subjects. This does not only include intellectual material, but the philosophical and spiritual as well. In fact, some prize the spiritual understanding of the world to be the utmost achievement in any one life. The Buddhist goal of existence is to reach this level of understanding and push out of the cycle of reincarnation. This coincides with the wave of modernism, some two millennia later, by focusing much more on the self than in previous generations. The spiritual journey needs to be isolated from the world, and given space for free thinking, and the modernist writers picked up on this since they focused on deviating from the "great machine" of society that everyone is pulled into. With this modernist theory affirmed by Buddhism, Hermann Hesse conceived Siddhartha, a story of a spiritually insatiable person who travels all over India, learning an enormous amount of material. Siddhartha is constantly searching for new aspects of life to study and master, especially the path to the expulsion of the Self, and Enlightenment. Ironically, however, it is this striving to achieve that is the largest detriment to his cause. Although the desire for new information is good, one cannot reach the utmost level of spirituality unless they throw off this desire, and let the information come in organically.

Siddhartha is a very gifted student, in everything he does. For example, he learns all the teachings his father has for him and needs more. "He had begun to suspect that his venerable father and his other teachers, all wise Brahmins, had already given him the richest and best part of their wisdom, had already poured their plenty into his waiting vessel, yet the vessel was not full" (Hesse 5). He is not contented with what he has learned. Like a child, he always wants what he does not have, but once he has it, it becomes worthless. This immaturity is also a central theme in Siddhartha's journey, as his arrogance gets him nowhere toward his ultimate goal. Among the Samanas, Siddhartha spends many years mastering their craft, learning how not to need anything. After a while, though, he grows annoyed at the nonexistent fruit this practice has bore, and questions another time the validity of his teachers. "'...I have little faith in words that come to us from teachers. But be that as it may, dear friend, I am prepared to hear these teachings, though in my heart I believe we have already tasted their finest fruit'" (Hesse 20). He has learned for years under the Samanas, yet does not believe he is getting enough. Just as arrogant as before, he abandons the Samanas for the Buddha, the only success story in many Hindus' strife. This ends unfruitful as well, and Siddhartha is left with a number of different teachers, from whom he has learned a lot, but that have not helped him in reaching his goal, so he decides to swear off teachers, and to learn from himself alone. As a last resort for seeking new knowledge, Siddhartha declares to be rid of teachers and doctrine. "I'll be my own teacher, my own pupil, I'll study myself, learn the secret that is Siddhartha" (Hesse 35). This is a particularly childish declaration, as completely swearing off something shows stubbornness and also cuts one off from a source of knowledge. He should be open to everyone and everything, but instead swears off teachers and decides to learn from himself, which has huge ramifications. Just the idea of this goes against his core beliefs. To get rid of the Self, Siddhartha should not embrace it and learn from it, but rid himself of ego. This is completely unseen by the main character and exemplifies his blind search for knowledge based on arrogance and immaturity.

The most obvious example of how Siddhartha's search for knowledge hurts his cause is his time with Kamala and the "child people." This chapter in Siddhartha's life does make room for additional knowledge, and the mastering of a new craft, love, but ultimately leads Siddhartha into despair and sorrow. He is introduced to the child people and immediately lust springs as his new test, a test that was not overcome. "'...Kamala, I would like to ask you to be my friend and teacher, for I know nothing of the art of which you are the master'" (Hesse 48). Wanting to learn from the child people is a huge indicator that Siddhartha is off his path. He had been committed to celibacy for his whole life but now is quickly wrapped up in the intricacies of love. He quickly, then, throws off his trappings of a Samana, and begins to become one of the child people, and likes it. "Simple is the life one leads here in the world, Siddhartha thought. There are no difficulties. Everything was difficult, laborious, and in the end hopeless when I was still a Samana" (Hesse 52). Siddhartha now forgets that there was a reason for his laborious endeavors as a Samana. He would now rather live an easy life and achieve very little than work hard and achieve enlightenment. He had previously scoffed at all people of the city, and gagged at lavish clothes and perfumes, but now he embraces it with open arms after his search for knowledge has been proven inconsequential. He spends many years living with the worldly, but stays a Samana at the core for a long time. Only slowly, and over the course of many years did his touch with spirituality ebb and fade away. He becomes a rich man, but without need he grows sorrowful, and colors lose their vivacity, life loses its allure. "The world had captured him: voluptuousness, lust, lethargy, and in the end even greed, the vice he'd always thought the most foolish and had despised and scorned above all others. Property, ownership, and riches had captured him in the end. No longer were they just games to him, trifles; they  had become chains and burdens" (Hesse 67). He is a child person now, and what he had looked down on and had just entered to gain more knowledge has become him. Knowing that there is in fact more to life, though, Siddhartha grows to disdain his life as a child person. He has learned the games of business and lavish living and now it is plain and unfulfilling. This leads to his abyss and hatred for himself, which is finally the exemplification of Siddhartha's maturation. This suffering is a necessary step along his journey and such is life. Life is full of hardships and suffering, but it all has a purpose, even if that purpose is not apparent yet. Siddhartha is passing through another threshold, and getting back on his path to enlightenment.

An extremely effective method of showing how the active search for knowledge does not succeed in finding enlightenment is by showing how enlightenment is actually achieved. Siddhartha does gain this level of spirituality in the end, and shows in itself the folly of his early practices. The first stepping stone to his achievement is in the very bottom of his abyss, wanting to throw himself into the river and die. This sets him on the right path, though, and makes him all the better for it. "Feeling profound weariness, he released his arm from around the tree trunk and rotated his body a little so as to let himself fall vertically, sink at last into the depths. With closed eyes, he sank toward death" (Hesse 74). This is Siddhartha's first step toward enlightenment because it is the first time he is letting himself be at the whims of nature. He is no longer trying to use it for knowledge, or riches, he is letting himself go. So it is no surprise that he is immediately rewarded for this. He hears Om, and then he had knowledge of Brahman, had knowledge of the indestructibility of life, had knowledge of all things divine that he had forgotten (Hesse 75). Once Siddhartha meets Vasudeva and becomes a ferryman alongside him, he is a completely new person, yet again. He reaches ever closer to Enlightenment and a big part of that is being passive. He does not search for knowledge, he simply listens. "But even more than Vasudeva could teach him, he learned from the river, which taught him unceasingly. Above all, it taught him how to listen -- how to listen with a quiet heart and a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgement, without opinion" (Hesse 90). His soul is waiting and open, in stark contrast to his previous outlook of gaining knowledge. He is open to all things, open to the doctrine of the water, the teachings of Vasudeva. Nothing is holding him back now from Enlightenment. All he has to do is wait. Siddhartha does indeed achieve Enlightenment shortly after Vasudeva does and leaves the river behind. His last act is to pass his gift onto Govinda, his kindred spirit, his soulmate. "Time is not real Govinda... No, in this sinner the future Buddha already exists-- now, today--all his future is already there" (Hesse 119-120). Siddhartha is saying that there is no time that is left waiting in between two stations of life. They are there in the present and always. Applying this to learning, it would be folly to seek knowledge actively, as Siddhartha once did, for the knowledge is already inside everybody. The enlightenment is just waiting to emerge. Siddhartha learned from the river to wait, and let the Buddha come out from within, not in from without. Everything is internal. The quote from David Foster Wallace's Laughing with Kafka immediately comes to mind: "You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door, that we approach and pound on this door, seeking admission desperate to enter, we pound and pound…finally, the door opens...and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along." Humans externalize everything when it really should be the opposite.

It takes Siddhartha a lifetime to realize that seeking information is not the right approach to gain Eternal wisdom, but all of this may well have been necessary. The process of maturation that Siddhartha endures was crucial to the learning process. Even Siddhartha says, "...I sorely needed sin, needed concupiscence, needed greed, vanity, and the most shameful despair to learn to stop resisting..." (Hesse 120). He needed to gain experience before all else. This suffering and deviation from his central goal only made him mature and wise. Wisdom is impossible to teach. It can only be gained through experience, just as Siddhartha was explaining to Govinda at the end of the novel. This maturation of Siddhartha shows that one cannot actively seek out Enlightenment and achieve it too. Siddhartha spent his entire youth seeking, and that set his journey back many decades, but Enlightenment is worth it. It is worth a lifetime of disappointment, sorrow, pain, and suffering. It is a goal that everybody, not just Buddhist, or Indians, has probably thought of at some point. But only a very select few can even come close to comprehending on this level, and thus its allure is so great.