Siddhartha works, eats, and sleeps alongside Vasudeva, while Vasudeva instructs Siddhartha in the practical aspects of being a ferryman. During this period, Siddhartha gently plies Vasudeva about the connection between his seeming enlightened detachment and his life at the river.
Vasudeva replies that the river has many secrets to tell and lessons to offer, and that he will help Siddhartha learn these secrets and lessons. The first lesson Siddhartha learns from the river is that time does not exist. When he asks Vasudeva if he has learned this secret as well, Vasudeva smiles broadly and says yes. Siddhartha is excited with the discovery and realizes that all suffering, self-torment, anxieties, difficulties, and hostilities are anchored in time, and all will disappear when people overcome the idea of time.
Some time later Vasudeva smiles even more broadly when Siddhartha notices that the river has many voices, that it sounds like all things and all people, and that when the voices are all heard in unison the sound Om appears.
News that the Buddha is dying sweeps through the land, and pilgrims by the hundreds begin flocking to pay him homage. Among them are Kamala and her son, an unwilling traveler who longs for the comforts of his home. A short distance from the river, she stops to rest, and a poisonous snake bites her. Siddhartha immediately recognizes her, and he thinks her son looks familiar. Then he realizes that the boy must be his son. Kamala lives long enough to speak to Siddhartha. In this last conversation, she knows she need not see the Buddha to fulfill her wish of seeing an enlightened one—Siddhartha is no different from the Buddha.
Siddhartha himself feels blessed, for now he has a son. However, in Vasudeva, Siddhartha finds the ideal teacher—in a sense, a teacher who does not teach. Vasudeva listens to Siddhartha and encourages him to listen to the river. Siddhartha surrenders to Vasudeva his entire self, even his clothes, in order to follow his example in leading a life of calm fulfillment and wisdom.
Vasudeva gives Siddhartha food and shelter, but he does not impose on him his own wisdom and experiences. Vasudeva is a guide, both literally and figuratively.
Vasudeva is poised between the ordinary world and the world of enlightenment. He acts as an intermediary for seekers such as Siddhartha, who venture to the river and hope to pass from one world to the other.
One of the most important lessons the river teaches Siddhartha is that time does not exist, and that the present is all that matters.
Siddhartha can now see that all life is unified, just as the river is in all places at one time. By evoking the symbol of the river to suggest the unity of life, Hesse refers to the philosophy and religion of Taoism, which maintains that a force, called Tao , flows through and connects all living things and the universe, and that balancing the Tao results in complete happiness. The primary symbol of Taoism is the Yin Yang, a circular shape with one black section and one white section fitting perfectly together.
The Yin Yang suggests the balance of opposites, an idea that the final portion of Siddhartha explores. The river, with its constant movement and presence, reveals the existence of opposites such as flux and permanence and time and timelessness. Siddhartha has attempted to find enlightenment in many different ways, but only when he accepts that opposites can co-exist does he reach enlightenment.
The river can be all places at once, and its essence never changes. In this way Siddhartha resembles the river. Despite the changing aspects of his experience, his essential self has always remained the same. He actually calls his life a river and uses this comparison to determine that time does not exist.
Siddhartha, with the help of the river and Vasudeva, is finally able to learn the last elements necessary to achieve enlightenment. Vasudeva reveals the true importance of the river to Siddhartha: the river can teach Siddhartha everything he needs to know, beginning with how to listen.
This doctrine suggests that knowledge resides in the present time and place, and that Siddhartha, from his position in the here and now, can discover all there is to know. Siddhartha understands that time does not really exist, since everything can be learned from the present moment. Without a fear of time, worry about the fleetingness of life, or the weight of boredom, Siddhartha can achieve enlightenment. Siddhartha cannot convince him that fine clothes, a soft bed, and servants have little meaning.
Siddhartha believes he should raise his son himself, and Vasudeva at first agrees. Though he tries as hard as he can to make his son happy and to show him how to live a good life, Siddhartha finds his son filled with rage. His son steals from Vasudeva and Siddhartha and berates them, making their lives unpleasant.
He believes that in time his son will come to follow the same path he and Vasudeva have followed. Vasudeva, however, eventually tells Siddhartha that the son should be allowed to leave if he wants to. Even though old men may be fully satisfied ferrying people across a river, a young boy may be unhappy in such conditions, he says. Vasudeva also reminds Siddhartha that his own father had not been able to prevent him from joining the Samanas or from learning the lessons of worldliness in the city.
The boy should follow his own path, even if that makes Siddhartha unhappy. Siddhartha disagrees, feeling that the bond between father and son is important and, as his own flesh and blood, his son will likewise be driven to search for enlightenment. The river, where true enlightenment and learning can be found, should be an ideal spot for the boy to spend his days.
One night the son yells that Siddhartha has neither the authority nor the will to discipline him. The son screams that a ferryman living by a river is the last thing he would ever want to become, that he would rather be a murderer than a man like Siddhartha. Siddhartha has no reply. Vasudeva believes that Siddhartha should let the son go, but Siddhartha feels he must follow his son, if only out of concern for his safety.
Siddhartha gives chase but soon realizes his task is futile. He knows his son will hide if he sees Siddhartha. Still, Siddhartha keeps going until he has reached the city. As he looks at the city, memories of his life there come rushing back. He remembers the time he spent with Kamaswami and, especially, with Kamala.
In a flash, Siddhartha acknowledges he must let his son go. He understands that no amount of reasoning will convince him to stay. Although the son may grow into a spiritual pilgrim like Siddhartha, the quest must be undertaken on his own. Siddhartha falls to the ground, exhausted, and is awakened by Vasudeva, who has secretly followed him. Together, they return to the river. Siddhartha does not realize he is trying to make his son in his own image, but his son realizes it and resents Siddhartha for doing so.
Siddhartha is, after all, little more than a stranger to the son. Siddhartha recognizes that this love is Samsara and will ultimately distract and sadden him as his gambling and eating and love-making had done before. Despite this, he feels an importance to his existence he had not felt before. And as this feeling seems to spring from the deepest recesses of his being, Siddhartha feels he must listen to it and follows its lead.
Siddhartha's encounter with love, then, is significant because it represents Siddhartha's last hurdle to the imperturbable peace of Nirvana. The boy's flight across the river and to the town also brings out his similarity with his father who made the same journey to the world before. Siddhartha's flashbacks on the outskirts of town also emphasize this point, and underscore Siddhartha's impotence in saving his son from his own experiences. It is in this chapter that Siddhartha finally attains Nirvana.
The way in which he does this suggests a subtle inversion of the path Siddhartha had hitherto followed. Siddhartha discovers that he is not as different from other people as he had once imagined. As Hesse says, "He did not understand or share their thoughts and views, but he shared with them life's urges and desires," most importantly, the desire to love and be love Ironically, it was the frustration of this desire that made him so aware of its power.
In other words, Siddhartha learned to identify with other people through identifying with their suffering. By suffering, he was able to include himself in the unity of human beings.
Suffering stems from too narrow a focus on personal desires and can be abolished only by expanding our consciousness past the point of desire; to be unified with everything, to find peace, means no longer identifying yourself with suffering.
Rather than following this logic, Siddhartha's path to unification and peace proceeds by recognizing that he is the kind of being that suffers, that he is the kind of being that experiences joys. All of these various aspects of him are part of the great unity of nature. Being one with everything means identifying with everything rather than not identifying with anything and subsequently identifying with nothing. This becomes the answer to Siddhartha's unanswered question as to whether the consciousness of unity has great value.
The answer is a resounding yes, but this consciousness must come from a life of concrete experience and not an abstract awareness of metaphysical objectivity. It arises from within life and not outside of it. This is why Siddhartha realizes that wisdom is "a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life" Wisdom is engagement with life rather than withdrawal. It is a way of living, of accepting and appreciating all aspects of life as valid and important.
The river laughed at Siddhartha because he still rebelled against his suffering. He did not yet accept suffering as part of the unity of life. This, then, is what Vasuveda showed him at the river. The torrents of pain and suffering were everywhere in the river, but with them were the babbling streamlets of simple joy and cascades of personal fulfillment.
This is a very complex proposal, as one might expect any prescription for salvation to be. Accordingly, there are any number of possible responses. In any case, it is hard to know what to make of this chapter in which a talking river leads Siddhartha to Nirvana and Vasuveda enters forest enshrouded in a dazzling light in order to go "into the unity of all things" This episode seems to belong to realm of the mythic perhaps more than any other.
If this is so, though, what lessons are we supposed to take from it? In particular, how are we supposed to interpret the central notion of unification. Obviously, Siddhartha's consciousness remains in some sense separate; he is still a locus of thoughts and intentions. These are questions which Siddhartha proposes to address in the final chapter. As this is the last chapter of his allegory, Hesse not surprisingly takes the opportunity to offer a final presentation of the lessons his protagonist has learned.
In this regard, it is not surprising that Govinda asks Siddhartha to express his doctrine of life. Govinda, present the end of every previous period of Siddhartha's life, is here as the reader's surrogate, bidding Siddhartha to offer the novel's moral.
Besides this, Govinda's return at the end of the novel helps emphasize the change Siddhartha has gone through since he left his friend at the end of part I. And the contrast between Govinda and Siddhartha's spiritual progress validates Siddhartha's contention that one must follow one's own path to enlightenment.
Siddhartha offers five lessons in this chapter. The first lesson is that seeking a goal can distract one from finding that goal. This is another way to express Siddhartha's belief that relying too much on thought distracts one from one's goal.
Wisdom, the goal for which Govinda seeks, is a manner of living, a capacity, and not an object which one can isolate and capture in thoughts. This is Siddhartha's second lesson: while knowledge is communicable, but wisdom is not. No one can tell you where to find wisdom; it simply comes when you are ready to receive it.
Siddhartha's third lesson is that words are deceptive, which he expresses in the paradoxical phrase that "in every truth the opposite is equally true" Words divide; they point to things by saying it is this or that and it not anything else.
This, though, violates Siddhartha's belief in the fundamental unity of all things. The reason we give words such power is that we live under the illusion that time is real. Everything exists in all things at every moment. This leads Siddhartha to his fourth lesson, everything that exists is good since it is all part of the perfect unity of Brahman. Siddhartha's fifth lesson is ethical and stems from his belief that all that exists is good: love everything.
As Siddhartha puts it, " I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration, and respect" After hearing all of Siddhartha's lessons, Govinda remarks on the similarity between the Buddha and Siddhartha, and we are clearly meant to see the two as near identical at this time.
There is another similarity, though, that elevates Siddhartha even more than his similarity with the Buddha. This is his similarity to the river, a more powerful similarity because the Buddha is still a man while the river is nature and life itself.
When Govinda kisses the Siddhartha, he has an experience akin to that Siddhartha had at the river. What Siddhartha heard from the river, Govinda now sees in Siddhartha's face: the diversity of the world represented as a great unity.
As in the previous chapter, it is difficult to know what to make of these lessons. They distill much of what happened in previous chapters, but they do not succeed in explaining central concepts of the novel very well. Many of them rely on paradoxes, such as finding requires not seeking, which seem to violate ordinary language use.
But if our words and the concepts they convey are applied to new and unfamiliar contexts, how could we possibly understand these applications? Perhaps Siddhartha's view that language cannot track reality excuses Hesse from trying to clarify the ideas he shrouds in a mystical garb throughout the book. Or perhaps it is a final reiteration of the point that the unity of being and the illusion of time must be experienced rather than communicated.
If this is true, though, the novel, constituted as it is by words, does not seem an effective means to edify the reader. And if this is so, why write it? Siddhartha says of the Buddha, "Not is speech or thought do I regard him as a great man, but in his deeds and life," deeds and life which Siddhartha experienced firsthand As readers, though, we do not experience Siddhartha's life firsthand.
Our contact with him is mediated through Hesse's words and Hesse's thoughts. Are we condemned, then, to never truly appreciate the book's lessons? To understand only part of what Siddhartha says or does, and if so, is this is enough for us to take an practical lessons from the book?
Hesse certainly intends for us to do so, but the seeds of doubt are planted by him. In the end, though, the lingering question one is left with is how intertwined Siddhartha's metaphysical and the ethical proposals are. Need we accept reincarnation, the unity of all Being, and the fiction of time in order to accept Siddhartha's ethics of self-determination and love?
As Hesse wrote this for a Western audience, the answer is presumably no. This is an allegory, a moral tale, and not a philosophical treatise. If we accept this suggestion wholeheartedly, which Hesse gives us many reasons to do, then his invocation of Indian metaphysics serves primarily to create an exotic and mystical context to seduce Western readers. This, though, seems to overlook the Hesse's detail in weaving his narrative from strands of uniquely Indian thoughts.
It seems extreme to dismiss this as merely stylization. The Question and Answer section for Siddhartha is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.
How do you think the Buddha would view the Mahabodhi site? I have heard of the temple but really do not know what the Buddha would think of it. I don't think anybody would really know. How do you believe Siddhartha would feel about the way that Buddhism has developed over time? Do you think he would approve of or disapprove of the practices today? Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on Buddhism today.
We certainly are in a different era today and, as in the noble truths of Buddhism, things change. Would Siddhartha be happy with the changes. I suspect happiness would not be an issue with Why is severe asceticism not an answer for Siddhartha. Siddhartha study guide contains a biography of Hermann Hesse, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Siddhartha literature essays are academic essays for citation.
These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Siddhartha. Remember me. Forgot your password? In despair, Siddhartha recalls his life. He tries to remember the moments when he felt true joy and a sense of direction. He concludes that nothing in his life is of value to him. Everything has been a game to him. He leaves his home and his riches. Kamaswami sends people out to look for Siddhartha, thinking that he has been captured by robbers.
Kamala does not search for him. Definition Siddhartha calls people children because their problems are meaningless and silly. He thinks people are immature and do not understand true self-denial or suffering. Term What changes does Siddhartha make to make Kamala happy? Definition He stops being a Samana. He oils his hair, shaves his beard, gets a job, buys nice clothes and shoes and accumulates a lot of money.
Term How are Lakshmi and Kamala similar? Term How are Siddhartha and Vishnu related? Definition Buddha is the 9th incarnation of Vishnu. Siddhartha is on a path to enlightennment.
Another name for Lakshmi is Kamla. Kamala is Siddhartha's partner. Term In Chapter 7 "Samsara", what happens to Siddhartha over the years?
Definition His senses have deadened and he has become rich. Definition His face took on expressions of discontent, sickliness, displeasure, idleness doing nothing , and lovelessness. He had the sickness of the rich. Definition Property and possessions has trapped him. They put him in a cage. Definition He is in his forties. Definition Siddhartha gets a feeling of excitement from playing dice or gambling.
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