Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

First published in the U.S. in 1951, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse follows a Brahmin’s son named Siddhartha in ancient India. The story begins in Siddhartha’s hometown where he is the pride of the village and is admired by all its inhabitants, and especially by a close companion of his named Govinda. However, Siddhartha becomes restless when he feels that the wise Brahmins in his town can no longer satisfy his thirst for knowledge and aid him on the path to enlightenment, so he leaves them to join a group of Samanas, who are basically wandering, homeless monks without any possessions other than a loincloth and an unstitched cloak. From there, Siddhartha’s journey further unfolds as he meets the Buddha, referred to as Gotama, and the lovely Kamala, a courtesan who pulls him into the world of materialistic desire, which ironically he had once despised as a Samana. The story concludes when Siddhartha comes to a satisfying conclusion at the end of the novel as he finally attains enlightenment.  

Personally, I enjoyed reading Siddhartha. It falls under a religious genre, and since I’ve never really read any book in that genre before, I found it interesting simply because it was something new to me. Another reason I enjoyed the book is because of its connection with Buddhism, and with many references to Samsara and Nirvana, it seemed like the story was like a description of the path someone could take on the way to Buddhist enlightenment. 

Throughout the novel, Siddhartha always comes back to the same reason why he left the village in the first place, he could not be taught anything that would help him reach spiritual enlightenment. He ends up doing the same thing with the Buddha, where he acknowledges his teachings but doesn’t follow them, because he knows that unless he forms his own experiences—as the Buddha once did himself—he cannot reach the same level of enlightenment. This idea is reinforced when Siddhartha contemplates his experiences near the end of the novel. At this time, he realizes that all of the events prior in the novel are part of a process to enlightenment, and that there’s not one single step that led him there, but that it was the culmination of all his experiences. At this point, he recognizes that he can’t just denounce certain things because he’s told they are bad, and through Siddhartha’s story, the book is essentially arguing that we must experience the bad and the good until we reach enlightenment. Personally, I liked the emphasis on personal experience compared to just contemplating everything in your head. If something makes sense to you perfectly logically, you can’t really ever know if that’s the decision you’d be most happy with unless you actually make that decision. Likewise, if you just experience without weighing your options, you’re basically doing yourself a disservice and would probably end up unhappy with your life. In my opinion, I think that some combination of the two methods in the right scenarios will result in the greatest desired outcome. 

Finally, I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in Eastern culture or philosophy, and especially to anyone who enjoyed our discussions on Buddhism interesting from World History. If you didn’t like those discussions or were bored the whole time, then you probably won’t find this book as interesting. And as a note for anyone that still wants to read this novel, the version I read was translated by Hilda Rosner, which is the original 1951 translation, since it was first published in German. There are other newer versions with changes, but the story itself should remain the same.