Hermann Hesse was born in 1877 and raised in a missionary household on the edge of the Black Forest, Germany. Destined to study for the ministry, Hesse experienced a religious crisis, often recorded in his novels. A failed suicide attempt led him to travel to the East, where in 1922 he published Siddhartha, a novel about the Buddha.

In this novel, Siddhartha, as a young man, left the comforts of his family in search of a contemplative life. Restless and bored, he discarded the life of contemplation for the pleasures of flesh and comfort. Sickened by lust and greed, he moved on once again to meditate on the bank of a river as he contemplated enlightenment and a life journey marked by suffering, rejection, accumulation of knowledge, attainment of peace, and eventually, wisdom.

The essence of the book and the two pillars of Buddhism are: 

The cause of all suffering is attachment, and that to which we are most attached is our life.  

Time is an illusion. There is no past nor future. As he meditated by the river, hearing the sound of the water’s past, present, and future, the Buddha came to the realization the water in the river runs from its fountainhead to the sea, evaporates, rains down again and is part of a continuous cycle.

Unlike Sir Issac Newton, who discovered gravity by sitting under a tree, the Buddah, while sitting in the shade of a mango tree, observed the continuity of the river, and thereby learned that everything is connected, that the nature of the universe is cyclical. What goes around, comes around.

I originally read this book in college; on a recent trip down the Colorado River, I re-read the book and was amazed by how much of what I had underlined way back then as a potential life strategy had seeped into my life in the forty-plus years since. 

Talking about “bookending” one’s life, literally!

— Sina.