Like any text, the novel Siddhartha has meant many things to me over time and re-readings. I first read Siddhartha during my high school or early university days. As a coming-of-age story, it resonated deeply with me at the time and fascinated me. Its author, Herman Hesse, soon became my favorite as I devoured one Hesse work after another. I also made my pilgrimage to hisfairy-tale-like hometown of Calw, with its gingerbread houses, located in the Black Forest in Germany. His writings, preoccupied with existential themes of disillusionment, alienation, and spiritual seeking have long attracted late adolescents and teens as they move into early adulthood. Years later, during my life as a high school literature teacher, I came back to Siddhartha when I added it to my perpetually changing and evolving syllabus.
Siddhartha is a 20th Century, German-existentialist retelling of the historical Buddha’s awakening to human suffering, his disillusionment with the trappings of wealth and desire, and his path to enlightenment. I taught it twice. As a teacher, I typically focused more on exploring the reading and interpretive processes with my students as opposed to presenting the expert, authoritative meanings of the work that often dominate high school curriculums. Much of the expert literature overwhelmingly identifies the moment where Siddhartha reaches nirvana as he loses himself in an imagistic immersion into the flow of the river as the climax of the novel. In this moment, Siddhartha’s understanding of the interconnectedness and transitoriness of all things unfolds. This is where the central wisdom and meaning of the novel is said to be found. First in late adolescence and then as a high school literature teacher teaching it for the first time, this interpretation was obvious. Unfortunately, to my philosopher turned forty-year-old-ish teacher self, this reading was uninspiring. Nothing new or exciting had been added to my understanding and experience. Still, I gave it another shot and placed Siddhartha on my syllabus again the following year.
Third time’s a charm! Reading through the last chapter of the novel at that moment in my life transformed my understanding of its meaning. I had my own experience of revelation – my own moment of not quite enlightenment – a foreshadowing, perhaps, of my change from teacher to therapist. I was convinced that the pivotal moment in the text, the key to understanding the existential import of Siddhartha, lies not in its climactic river scene, but rather in the following and final chapter when Siddhartha picks up and professes his love of a stone. Excited by my discovery, I rushed to share my excitement with a couple of colleagues who seemed more humored by the intensity of my excitement than interested in my unorthodox reading. In this scene, Govinda, Siddhartha’s former disciple, visits him seeking the wisdom of his teachings, his knowledge, and significantly, those “certain thoughts and certain insights” that “help you to live.” Knowledge, Siddhartha laments, though sometimes difficult, can be conveyed. Wisdom, however, he insists cannot be passed on; it is not the type of thing that can be taught with words, but is manifested in lived experience. Siddhartha’s point is that if knowledge is reduced to conceptual doctrine (just another high school lit course), its just another teaching, sterile and without transformative power. Siddhartha’s river reveries, though beautifully crafted, are mere poeticized depictions of abstract philosophy. They represent the thinking of “metaphysicians” and “ontologists,” addressing only questions of reality, how the world is. Motivated by existential concerns, not surprisingly, Govinda does not understand.
Siddhartha bends down and picks up a stone. He professes his love of the stone. Like the river, the stone too can be a source of philosophical inspiration, an example par excellence of the impermanence and interconnectedness of things as the seeming solidity of the stone gradually decays into soil that passes into the growth of living things. In contrast, it is the beauty of the stone as a stone – with its particularities, its unique veins and cavities, its feel and sounds when touched and tapped – that inspires Siddhartha and fills him with love and veneration and gives him his peace. Siddhartha’s wisdom has more to do with this moment of communion with the stone and less to do with his doctrinal insights. This wisdom is passed on to Govinda in the next and final moment of the novel when Siddhartha, with love, admiration, and respect for his friend and for all beings, whispers to Govinda to bend down and to kiss his forehead. Prompted by the other’s touch, Govinda experiences his own moment of enlightenment.
In this encounter, the text of Siddhartha moves from mere theory to transformative therapeutics, concerned not so much with questions of what is, but embodied in the awakening of how to live, to love, to find one’s peace. I believe in some ways, the therapy room is not very different. It is an alchemical place where two human beings encounter each other face to face, where words sometimes matter less and meaning is found in the profound communion with the other, in all their particularities, with respect and concern for all who enter. This is my therapist reading.
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