The Making of a Buddha #277 (P)

Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha

Dear friends and supporters of Daily Philosophy,

Today I’d like to tell you about a book that I’ve read and loved all my life. I discovered it maybe at 15 or 16, on my mother’s bookshelf in a now far-away, two-room flat outside of Athens, Greece. I borrowed it right there and never returned it. It is here with me now, forty years later, and it has been all this time. When I moved to Germany to study, when I moved to Hong Kong to work — this little volume has never been out of my arm’s reach. When I went for a holiday back to Greece this past month, it was the only physical book I had with me in my hand-luggage, as it always is — just in case the power runs out on my reading tablet or I’m stuck on a desert island after a plane crash with nothing else to read. I must have read this book hundreds of times over the years — in full and in excerpts, reading a page or two before sleep, or going through the whole tale once again, from beginning to end, on a conference trip or a holiday. And still, it’s the only book I can imagine reading over and over again. If I was stranded somewhere with only one book, it wouldn’t be the Bible or Plato’s works, it wouldn’t be Neruda’s poems or the Dao, and it wouldn’t even be the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It would certainly be this one small volume, barely a hundred pages long, but a book that contains the whole world of what it means to be human within it.

Come with me for a short while, and let’s have a look at it together!

The Son of the Brahman

In the shade of the house, in the sunshine of the riverbank near the boats, in the shade of the Sal-wood forest, in the shade of the fig tree is where Siddhartha grew up, the handsome son of the Brahman, the young falcon, together with his friend Govinda, son of a Brahman. The sun tanned his light shoulders by the banks of the river when bathing, performing the sacred ablutions, the sacred offerings. In the mango grove, shade poured into his black eyes, when playing as a boy, when his mother sang, when the sacred offerings were made, when his father, the scholar, taught him, when the wise men talked.