Books & Reasons

‘Lost eternally in the forest is a musk deer in search of the sweet scent of life.’ The timeless, tormenting, beautiful anxiety the musk deer suffers from serves as an elegant analogy for Siddhartha by Herman Hesse as he bellies underneath it, a 21st-century commoner lost in his banal, modern, convenient life. It is in this conflict of perfumery that one should try to approach Hesse’s Siddhartha.

With truth comes a certain vanity. Mankind is condemned to find it, to embrace it, to revel in it. Maybe because we arrive at certain truths, and not just acquire them. The question of ‘the question’ bears enormous consequences here; after all, it is by understanding what a person chooses to suffer for, one can understand the person herself. It should therefore be a joyous occasion to declare that a woman’s arrival at the musky inquiry of ‘existence’ marks a time in her life when she truly comes of age. There is a long lineage of thinkers who have practically devoted their lives to understanding what it means to exist. It is indeed a huge undertaking that demands observation, reflection, and sophistication of language to weave intricacies of life in premises; premises that I don’t even fully understand. Yet, this knowledge is least discouraging to interfere with my unstructured, fuzzy, argumentative thinking. On the contrary, I believe this is one questions that everyone should dare to attempt within their scope of intellect. Atheism is my one overbearing truth. My vanity lies in the indiscreet denial of religion, metaphysics, or spirituality as ‘the’ answer. I went for Siddhartha as a self-righteous, critical reader to see if, as an atheist, I can still mock it or if this immensely popular, spiritual classic can shake me off. I needed to know if Siddhartha is yet another spiritual self-help book or some genuine, well-deserved attempt at philosophy by yet another German philosopher, Herman Hesse, counteracting the conventional image of enlightenment. In any case, the reader must understand that between reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and closing it, some speculations of purely existential nature should exist.

The story of Siddhartha is the story of a profound instinct borne by mankind. Philosophers identify this stubborn, nagging instinct as an elementary inquiry of existence. Thinkers and intellectuals label it as ‘the’ quest. An atheist deals with it as an absurd phenomenon. Herman Hesse understands it as Siddhartha, a man in search of wholesome truth. It isn’t clear, tangible, or objectively drawn by Hesse as to what he means exactly by ‘truth’. Perhaps, because he doesn’t have to. Eastern philosophy is endowed with folklore dedicated to such pursuits, and its followers are conditioned with the word and its connotations. Moreover, its vague, unintelligible quality not only lends Siddhartha a character the modern commoner can relate to, but also allows the reader to personate and internalize the protagonist while being fixated and attached to his world. I find it safe to say that Siddhartha is any man and every man. On grounds of similarities between Siddhartha, who has abandoned the comforts and pleasures of life, and the one who finds himself mentally in the same space, unable to find joy in life, the reader is well placed. It is, however, in their differences that the charming propositions of the book lie. The most prominent difference between the literal Siddhartha and the other one (the reader) is mobility. The conjecture of mobility presents an interesting opportunity for the author to compartmentalize Siddhartha from the circumstantial reality. In conventional understanding, it is easy to brand it as a possible precautionary measure against attachment; what is deadly subtle and thus easy to miss about mobility as a phenomenon is that it is essentially what validates Siddhartha’s journey. The detachment, the literal movement, the ever-increasing physical distance between a man and the world he builds—mobility acts as a powerful instrument and perhaps the only one to externalize a certain truth, and likewise, legitimizing man’s quest to find it.

One should think about how sustainable this divine mobility is. If eternal, the hypothetical placement of a man devoted to mobility only renders Siddhartha unable to experience the human conflict in its glory. Would it then not be impeccably hard to resist drawing a parallel between an ordinary Samana and Siddhartha since they navigate through a strikingly similar environment, defeating the very purpose itself? I don’t know if it is exciting or exhausting to assume that in such an acute absence of the world, how and exactly on what Siddhartha’s agencies operate and process. Being a staunch existentialist, it is beyond me to imagine Siddhartha in such a possibility, and much more reasonable and convenient to imagine his mobility being put on hold as the book delivers. For how long can a man deny the urge to give in to the world he creates by being in it? It is imperative to understand why Siddhartha, after all the efforts, is still not elusive to Sansara? Now is when our inquiry becomes relevant and serviceable. Sansara eventually catches up with the wiser but ultimately humane Siddhartha; through Kamala, representing a man’s surrender to the biological impulse of sex; through Kamaswami, portraying a man’s yielding to the intellectual impulse of learning; through his son, representing a man’s resignation to the parental impulse of control. By identifying with these three basal instincts, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha narrates the story of a man suffering irrespectively, rooted or mobile. He can be the legendary samana or a 21st-century confused, geeky commoner exhibiting the same symptoms of existential crisis. One would benefit immensely from reading acumen to date ask what is so fascinating about these three instincts that Hesse chose to tell a tale of finding tranquility in turbulence. For it is on the account of three-faced inquiry that one can understand the underlying pattern behind Siddhartha’s troubles. It is in the pitfall of existential crisis that one becomes miserable and willful enough to acknowledge the biological genesis of his impulses, as these instincts are nothing but the philosophical-infrastructural elements of human life. Siddhartha understands that to exist is to keep manifesting thyself.

What would you do with a revelatory truth that doesn’t deliver to your vanity? What service can a fragile, empty, unsustainable truth found in the vacuum of human experience deliver? Is it possible to find enlightenment between the extremities of ‘stationary’ and ‘mobile’? Such is the quality of conflict that Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha brews inside the reader. The rest is for the reader to arrive at! If it’s any hint, Herman Hesse begins this story with a Samana called Siddhartha, and he ends it with the enlightened one called Siddhartha. Siddhartha, not Buddha!

A great deal of Siddhartha book review revolves around my interpretation of human existence to be practically meaningless. It is also why I believe that the question of existence can not be studied in the vacuum of existential crisis. It might be interesting for the reader to pay attention to how meaninglessness occurs as a leveler in Siddhartha, the book; how he equates a rock with the flesh of human life; how this term resonates with the ever-persisting time. I am forced to imagine if there was, by any virtue, an objective meaning behind man’s existence, would it not create hierarchies, classes, and ranks and trifle with the larger aspirational, creative constitution of mankind itself? Reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse only reasserted my reasoning behind finding human existence to be absurd. Siddhartha can be seen as an alive inquiry (and with a good chance) witnessing a pursuit about life becoming larger than life itself. But thanks to Hesse’s wise, tactical acumen, it doesn’t.