Siddartha by Hermann Hesse

"It is Nobel Prize-winner Hermann Hesse's most famous and influential work" reads the back cover of the novel; I wonder how Siddartha might have been informed and embedded in discourses of the exotic and spiritual Orient in the West--I remember reading (maybe on Wikipedia) that the novel was brought back into mainstream consciousness in the 60s by the hippies, some 40 years after the initial publication.

The story moves quickly. How to fit a whole lifetime in 150 pages? The story begins "[i]n the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree, Siddartha, the handsome Brahmin's son, grew up with his friend Govinda"--an idyllic childhood passes by in 35 words or so.

Siddartha's "awakening" is probably one of the more memorable novelistic depictions of a revelation. However, what is revealed is not a deeper truth behind the veil of falsehood. Siddartha the intellectual, the Brahmin, despised the external world--he rejected transience in the search of the eternal and absolute Atman--but his contempt is transformed into an affirmation of external reality.

"He looked around him as if seeing the world for the first time. The world was beautiful, strange and mysterious. Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, sky and river, woods and mountains, all beautiful, all mysterious and enchanting... All this, all this yellow and blue, river and wood, passed for the first time across Siddhartha's eyes. It was no longer the magic of Mara, it was no more the veil of Maya, it was no longer meaningless and the chance diversities of the appearances of the world, despised by deep-thinking Brahmins, who scorned diversity, who sought unity. River was river... Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them." And Siddartha the artist is born.

I can't help but wonder how much of Hesse's own Christian and Western cultural categories are written into this awakening, however. Did Indian Brahmin texts also write of Enlightenment as the struggle for the salvation of an eternal soul?

At one point, Siddartha the enlightened becomes Siddartha the vulgar merchant who is trapped back into never-sated cycle of samsara. He reawakens thanks to the guidance of an enlightened river ferryman.

I am reminded here of a book of short stories I read a decade ago by an Indian writer (I cannot remember his name). The only story I remember reading (and it is but a fragment) is of the encounter between an American hippie and an old Indian man in a nameless Indian town. The old Indian man looks curiously upon this rich white foreigner in his strange clothes. The hippie looks upon the old Indian man and wonders about the rich exotic wisdom the old Indian man contains within his depths. 

To repeat the initial question, how has Siddartha been informed by and embedded in discourses of the exotic and spiritual Orient in the West?

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