Siddhartha (Annotated)
- ISBN-10
- 1500990434
- ISBN-13
- 9781500990435
- Pages
- 66
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2014-08-31
- Authors
- Herman Hesse, Acino Acinonyx
Description
This is greatly disheartening that most of the publishers have published the image of Buddha on front cover of 'Siddhartha' which may mislead the readers. This book is not on Buddhism or on life and works of Gautam Buddha. The book starts and concludes with the basic Hindu Philosophy. Preface with a brief account of contemporary Indian social structure with principal aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism, in addition to an introduction to the Book and life of its author, are added to this edition.Siddhartha is the conscious living of each event of life with absolute immersion and understanding of their sequence of occurrences, their cycles and their consequential effects. The absolute feeling of each moment of the joy and sorrow with intense attachment and acceptance of all gifts of nature is essential to gain an approach to understanding of truth and attaining of enlightenment. The story tells that the intellectual methods and the carnal pleasures with the accompanying pain of world do not lead to the objective of ultimate salvation. It is only the completeness of all the experiences of joy and pain that allow one to attain understanding the purpose and meaning of his life. An individual event seems meaningless when considered by itself without taking all events as a whole. Siddhartha's stay with the ascetics who leave the routine life and renounce all pleasures of life to attain salvation, and his immersion in the worlds of love and business do not lead to nirvana (freedom from the cycle of birth and death and permanent merger in the light of God). All events in one's life are purposeful since every event, action and the consequence gives an experience which leads to understanding the purpose and meaning of life. The life is essential to sense and feel the creator and its creations and death is the end of all desires including that of achieving the enlightenment or salvation.When Hesse found himself troubled of his life without a direction and a purpose, he turned to the Indian philosophy in the ancient texts such as Upanishads (Up- sub or following, Nishad- the ferryman who takes across the river) and the Bhagavad Gita (simply Gita, pronounced as Geeta as in reed). The second half of this book took so long to write was for the reason that Hesse had not experienced that transcendental state of unity to which Siddhartha aspires. In an attempt to do so, Hesse lived as a virtual semi-recluse and became totally immersed in the sacred teachings of both Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. His intention was to attain that 'completeness' of Buddha. The novel is structured on three of the traditional stages of life for Hindu males (student (brahmacharin), householder (grihastha) and recluse/re-enunciate (vanaprastha) as well as the Buddha's four noble truths in Part One and eight-fold path in Part Two, divided in twelve chapters. Ralph Freedman mentions how Hesse commented in a letter "Siddhartha does not, in the end, learn true wisdom from any teacher, but from a river that roars in a funny way and from a kindly old fool who always smiles and is secretly a saint." In a lecture about Siddhartha, Hesse claimed "Buddha's way to salvation has often been criticized and doubted, because it is thought to be wholly grounded in cognition. True, but it's not just intellectual cognition, not just learning and knowing, but spiritual experience that can be earned only through strict discipline in a selfless life". Freedman also points out how Siddhartha described Hesse's interior dialectic: "All of the contrasting poles of his life were sharply etched: the restless departures and the search for stillness at home; the diversity of experience and the harmony of a unifying spirit; the security of religious dogma and the anxiety of freedom." Eberhard Ostermann has shown how Hesse, while mixing the religious genre of the legend with that of the modern novel, seeks to reconcile with the double-edged effects of modernization
