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to put it simply, as a new dad, one of those books I will want my daughter to read when it is time. Sort of like words of enlightenment.
I'll just say I hit the public library a lot and this is one of those books that reminds me of the bible, but in a novel and one that takes a story to tell a message of enlightenment. But it's more than that.
Well, what hasn't been said. After finishing this book I found myself coming back to it over and over within the course of a year to reread certain passages and words of Siddhartha.
It's a story of self discovery, stories really. If you can read into them they are reflective of our everyday lives.
being a Christian, i found this helpful in my everyday battle with self awareness of the spirit and mind. Simply beautiful and a book that left me at peace when i was done and still makes me smile.
Siddhartha, son of a Brahman, is on a quest to find the meaning of life. I believe everyone who reads this book will be touched in some way by the simple and poignant words. Many of Siddhartha's feelings and thoughts are common to us all as we make our way along the road of our own lives.
He is on a spiritual journey to find out for himself who he really is. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. We follow him as he struggles on through his journey, through many different life experiences.
This book reaffirms the fact that in the end we are all the same, and someone who has stayed in the same place all their life can be as wise as someone who has spent his life travelling on a long search for the truth. Along the way he meets rich people, poor people, holy people, and becomes part of their world for a short time. Through his many encounters, he learns much more about himself and the world, but for a long time he is still not satisfied and still feels a deep need to strive for more and to search for something elusive.I think this book is relevant to everyone, because although it is telling the tale of a spiritual and religious man, it is also a tale about life and how our life experiences make us who we are.
Its message appears to be that we are all the same and all of our life experiences whether good or bad, are necessary for us to find ourselves, and even though everyone will go through different things, we are all bonded by the fact that we are on the same journey. I would recommend this to everyone, it's a very enlightening and though-provoking read.
It is interesting to me that all his meditation, thinking, loving Kamala, making money, gambling, only got Siddhartha so far. A lot in going on in this short novel by Hermann Hesse. You have the idea that everything is a grand illusion and that time isn't real.You have Siddhartha following his own path to self knowledge and follow him on the way to discovery. These material gains and objects of desires did nothing to further educate Siddhartha and he didn't really grow as a human being until he met the simple Ferryman and observed him.The Ferryman is uneducated yet he contains more wisdom then Siddhartha and Govinda combined.The Ferryman has a simple life and a simple task and has learned to tune into the river and his surrounding environment to become Siddhartha's greatest teacher and lead him to a greater understanding.It was only when Siddhartha joined the Ferryman and live in his hut that his truly realized spiritual growth occurred. Once Siddhartha meets Kamala and when he teams up with the Ferryman, the book got better and the ending was good and not the let down it could have been. This is perhaps the novel's best plot element.You have Siddhartha's childhood friend, Govinda, who becomes a disciple of Buddha and yet missing the greatest ideal of all when he is older and supposedly more wiser.You have Siddhartha using the river as a teacher to discover greater truths.
My only problem is, even though the book is short, some of the passages in the beginning and towards the middle slow the overall pace down. Within Siddhartha's 153 pages, a volume of big concepts and ideas are illustrated and boiled down for everyone to see and understand. It took the simple and the mundane to kickstart his spiritual journey and river reflections.This is a good book for today's reader with great concepts like learning to love one another. The best part of the book was the fact that Govinda followed Buddha and choose that path. Siddhartha followed self knowledge and went through a period of being in a love relationship with Kamala, making money with a Merchant, and embracing gambling and followed that path with a period of self meditation before and after. In fact, at one point I wasn't sure if I could finish reading because I got so bored during those sections.
I knocked off one star for the numerous slow sections.
Romanticism appeals to the young and inexperienced. Just give me the cash. If I understand the philosophy described here, our sense of individual consciousness is an illusion born out of our ignorance of our true nature. It was time to discard them and head back to the forest. These days, it's hard not to see a character like Siddhartha as a kind of Medieval Flower Child and eastern mysticism in general seems tame and naive compared to the organic mysticism of writers like Goethe, Spengler and Schopenhauer--all Germans like Hesse, but miles above him in intellect.Having said all that, I've got to admit that I've always liked Hinduism, an ancient religion with roots in the Vedic traditions of the Indo-Aryans who migrated into northern India sometime during the Iron Age or Bronze Age, depending on which source you read. The culture of wandering mystics, beggar monks and forest ascetics described in the book formed a leisure class which could only exist in an affluent society with enough disposable income to keep them alive.
He heads back to the forest and meets Guatama, the Buddha, but decides to follow his own path, eventually discovering the secret of the Holy OM as a simple ferryman living on the bank of a river.This is a good story told in a clear, simple style, but searching for enlightenment doesn't really grab me anymore. Seen from this perspective, he was an arrogant social parasite and his detachment from ordinary human life was almost sociopathic. Schopenhauer was heavily influenced by Indian philosophy, particularly the Vedas, and his masterpiece The World As Will And Representation could be called Hinduism translated via Kant into Western metaphysics. He joins a band of forest ascetics who practice a masochistic form of self-denial similar to that of the Medieval Christian Flagellants: fasting, exposing themselves to extremes of weather and meditating in an attempt to kill sensation and rise above the attachments of the flesh. He voluntarily adopted a life of poverty and self-denial in his quest to find Nirvana and the key word here is "voluntary." In a way, he was a typical product of the Brahman elite, a rich kid indulging the very ego he was trying to destroy.It's hard not to see all this in terms of economics.
Later, Siddhartha experiments with the profane world, giving himself over to the pleasures of the senses only to grow jaded after a few years of high living. Siddhartha's a great book and well worth reading, but I think you have to be a certain mental age to take it seriously. These people had served their purpose. I liked the book then and I still like it decades later, but I see it differently now. Siddhartha would have starved to death in a few weeks if not for the farmers, merchants and all the rest of the ordinary people lost in Samsara, the endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth driven by karma and avidya, the ignorance of one's true self that leads to what the rest of us call ordinary consciousness.Siddhartha was a business man at one point, but for most of his life, he was a professional beggar who pitied the very people who kept him alive with their charity. If you gave me the choice between enlightenment and a million dollars, I wouldn't even have to think about it. Siddhartha was following the traditional path of meditation and self-denial in an attempt to "forget himself," so to speak, but it's hard to forget yourself when all your attention is focused on yourself.None of this is fair to the book, of course. On the one hand, he was tapping into a profound, ancient and sophisticated tradition.
The first time I read Siddhartha, the classic by Hermann Hesse about a Sixth Century Brahmin's search for Enlightenment, I was a typical brain-dead hippy--a teenaged Romantic with murky ideas about the way the world actually works, to put it mildly. For example, after his experiment with material pleasures, he simply walked away from his friends, business partner and lover (leaving her pregnant, though he didn't know that at the time) without saying a word to anyone. This wasn't exactly the picture of compassion, but compassion had very little to do with Siddhartha's program of Self-Realization. Ironically, Siddhartha's quest to annihilate the Self was itself a form of self-absorption. On the other hand, his stuff mostly appeals to college freshmen who still think there's something "spiritual" about poverty.Personally, I can't shake this image of Siddhartha as a kind of upper-class hippy. I'm seeing it from a 21st Century American perspective muddled by my own experience and Hesse was describing a way of life that existed over a thousand years ago. When you get older, writers like Hesse start to lose their appeal.The book tells the story of Siddhartha, the son of a wealthy Brahmin, who forsakes the world in a quest for Illumination--the annihilation of the illusory Self and union with the One. Siddhartha is both profound and hopelessly Romantic, but it's still a great novel by a great German writer, a real classic.
If Schopenhauer took Hinduism seriously, that's good enough for me, so I've got mixed feelings when it comes to Hesse. The son of a wealthy aristocrat, he never had to work for a living--except as a kind of game--and he had the nobility's disdain for the lower orders. This veil of illusion--the Hindus called it Maya--keeps us from seeing that we are all one in the finite, impersonal reality called Brahman, locking us into the cycle of karma, reincarnation and endless suffering. If you're interested in Hinduism, you should check it out.Ancient World Review
This book take you out of time.It is like reading your own breathing but from a different body, the body of reality. You should focus on the words that are on the page and the words that are not there. After reading it I felt this:Silence: the breathing of time. and much more or simply that.
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