Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse
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Book Summary Information
Author: Hermann HesseEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-08-05
ISBN: 1934648035
Number of pages: 120
Publisher: Norilana Books
Book Reviews of Siddhartha
Book Review: Being Siddhartha
Summary: 5 Stars
"Very well, and what can you give?" What have you learned that you can give?"
"I can think, I can wait, I can fast."
--Hesse, from Siddhartha
There are a precious few in our society who are blessed to give what they love most, and be paid for it. They are also the most productive members of society, since they are putting native ability and a natural passion into their work. These lives probably represent what the founding fathers intended by "the pursuit of happiness."
The rest of us become insurance claims examiners or middle managers in a gray, shadowless land of fluorescent sun, making someone else's money along with a "living" for ourselves. Over the years, we learn to hide the gnawing, widening hole within us, until its ulcerous edges finally burst amid a time of awakening that often appears as a cataclysm of loss and displacement -- a moment, in fact, like the one we're in right now.
At the centerpoint of Hermann Hesse's classic allegorical novel Siddhartha, that first step is made by a man overtaken by what we would today call a "midlife crisis." He has discovered the joys of friendship, learning, meditation, retreat, sex, and money; but not their personal meaning. It has all been, so far, a game of acquisition rather than lived experience for him. Then, after a night of hard drinking and troubled sleep, the dying songbird of his unconscious calls him into the darkness; the path back to the river of presence opens before him, and the first light of his natural destiny -- the indissoluble union of the person and the professional -- dawns.
The way back to the river of your self may involve a falling, which calls you to a directed effort. The direction is provided by awareness.
For Siddhartha, the fall arrives in the dream of the dead songbird; this draws him into the work of self-examination that is described in one of the most beautiful and moving passages of world literature.
All across America today, songbirds are dying. The great dream, once uniquely identified with our nation, is now a ruffled dark corpse, cast to the roadside. Jobs and homes are being lost in the millions, so many that it is nearly impossible to perceive the story, the teaching allegory in such a chaotic mass of the statistics of suffering. But if we miss that story, if we let slip the chance to learn from this great gravitational collapse -- if we insist on checking out Aniston's nude GQ cover or wondering at Blagojevich's shocking corruption instead -- then we miss the moment of transformational opportunity, the quantum transition from potential to kinetic energy.
Siddhartha did not miss his chance. He drained the chalice of his crisis, followed his suffering where it led him. But note that he was always unable to join the Buddha (identified in the story as Gotama), the one who taught that "life is suffering." Perhaps Siddhartha recognized another truth about suffering -- that it is, like everything else in life, a source of learning; but not the sine qua non of being.
Hesse's classic is a book for our moment, now. Perhaps it should be recalled that it was written between two world wars, in a Europe that was a sea of economic and human desolation. I have read this treasure through some dozen times in my life, and it is richer with meaning and more moving each time.
Summary of Siddhartha
Siddhartha (1922) by Hermann Hesse is a deceptively simple, intense, and lyrical allegorical tale of a man in ancient India striving for enlightenment at the time of Buddha. Siddhartha is a man whose life journey runs in parallel and who may or may not be another version of Buddha himself.Spiritual enlightenment may not be taught, only experienced, and each individual must tread their own personal path toward truth, in this unforgettable novel by the author who won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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