Recent Reads

Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse (a new translation, ca. 2000, by Sherab Chodzin Kohn)
This is supposed to be one of those books that is beloved of college philosophy students. I found it rather disappointing. The first half of the book describes the life and experiences of a Gautama-like young man who seeks spiritual enlightenment and eventually arrives, with his friend, before the Buddha himself. However, our young man rejects the proffered discipleship, noting that to be with his friend as a follower of Buddha would itself be a form of attachment to the world, and goes off to seek his own kind of enlightenment. Like Titus Groan in the last of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, Siddhartha seeks something diligently, only to renounce it once he finds it. This is where part one ends, and according to the introduction, Hesse found himself stuck for a good long while before he was able to continue the story.

Siddhartha seems to reverse his course in the second part. What he initially renounced in search of enlightenment -- wealth, women, worldly involvement -- he now seeks and acquires to excess, before once again encountering his boyhood friend whom he left standing before the Buddha, taking up life beside a river ferry, and meeting and acknowledging the son whom he fathered upon a female companion. The ending suggests that he attains some kind of spiritual enlightenment.

Is there any more to this than an extended parable of disengagement and reengagement with the world? Or transcendence and re-entry, as Walker Percy might describe it?