I In the shade of the house, in the sunshine of the riverbank near the boats, in the shade of the Sal-wood forest, in the shade of the fig tree is where Siddhartha grew up, the handsome son of the Brahman, the young falcon, together with his friend Govinda, son of a Brahman.

He has been given everything: the holy verses, a wise father, a mother who sings, a friend who would follow him anywhere. Everyone loves him. And he is not happy.

… they had already filled his expecting vessel with their richness, and the vessel was not full, the spirit was not content, the soul was not calm, the heart was not satisfied.

The wise men around him know the truth by heart. They can recite it, explain it, argue about it. Not one of them, not even his father, seems to live in it. So Siddhartha decides to leave, and join the samanas, the ascetics who live in the forest.

There is no one in the picture: only a wall, a window, the leaves, and later a lamp. Move the light across the wall while it is day.

One evening he asks his father for permission. His father says no, and goes to bed. Siddhartha does not argue. He stays where he is, standing, with his arms folded, and waits.

And he came back after an hour, he came back after two hours, looked through the small window, saw Siddhartha standing, in the moon light, by the light of the stars, in the darkness.

Nothing more is said that night. The whole argument is made of a son who stands, and a lamp that comes to the door each hour and goes away again.

The first light of day shone into the room. … Then his father realized that even now Siddhartha no longer dwelt with him in his home, that he had already left him.

The Father touched Siddhartha’s shoulder.

A A goal stood before Siddhartha, a single goal: to become empty, empty of thirst, empty of wishing, empty of dreams, empty of joy and sorrow.

The samanas teach him everything they know. He fasts for twenty-eight days. He stands in the noon sun until he no longer feels the heat, and in the rain until he no longer feels the cold. He learns to slow his heart and his breath until they almost stop.

A heron flew over the bamboo forest—and Siddhartha accepted the heron into his soul, flew over forest and mountains, was a heron, ate fish, felt the pangs of a heron’s hunger, spoke the heron’s croak, died a heron’s death.

The picture is a negative: bamboo, a heron, the sand. Hold it, and the shadows empty into white, the way he empties himself. Let go, and they come back.

Because they always come back. After every fast, every trance, every death of the self, he wakes up and is Siddhartha again. He says it plainly to Govinda: what the samanas learn in years, a carter learns in one evening at the inn, with a few bowls of rice-wine. To forget himself for a while, and then to wake.

Though Siddhartha fled from the self a thousand times, stayed in nothingness, stayed in the animal, in the stone, the return was inevitable, inescapable was the hour, when he found himself back in the sunshine or in the moonlight, in the shade or in the rain, and was once again his self and Siddhartha …

S

Siddhartha saw him, and he instantly recognised him, as if a god had pointed him out to him. He saw him, a simple man in a yellow robe, bearing the alms-dish in his hand, walking silently.

In a grove near the city of Savathi the two friends hear him teach. Govinda asks to be taken in among his monks, and is. Siddhartha believes every word as well. Then he goes to Gotama alone, and tells him why he cannot stay.

What you found, he says, you did not find through a teaching. You found it on your own way, in your own hour. So no teaching, not even yours, can give it to me. I have to go on alone.

The monks’ shadows cross the grove. Hold, to follow them, and you take Govinda’s road. Do nothing, and the book stays with the one who is left behind.

He has deprived me of my friend, the one who had believed in me and now believes in him, who had been my shadow and is now Gotama’s shadow. But he has given me Siddhartha, myself.

H

He looked around, as if he was seeing the world for the first time. Beautiful was the world, colourful was the world, strange and mysterious was the world! … Blue was blue, river was river …

Walking away from the grove, he understands something. All his life he has tried to reach the self by getting rid of things: the body, the senses, the world, which the wise men called a veil and an illusion. Not once has he simply looked.

The picture is an eye, opening for the first time. Look around in it; tap, and it blinks.

Then the cold comes. He cannot go back to his father, nor to the samanas, nor to Gotama. He is no one’s son any more, and no one’s pupil. He belongs nowhere.

S

Siddhartha learned something new on every step of his path, for the world was transformed, and his heart was enchanted.

This too, I have learned from the river: everything is coming back! You too, Samana, will come back.

At the gate of a pleasure-garden outside the city a woman is carried past him in a sedan-chair: Kamala, the most famous courtesan of the city. He decides to stay. He has his beard shaved and his hair oiled, and comes to her with dust still on his feet, and asks her to be his teacher. She laughs at him.

Clothes are what he must have, pretty clothes, and shoes, pretty shoes, and lots of money in his pouch, and gifts for Kamala.

What can you do? a merchant will soon ask him. He has three things to offer, the whole wealth of the forest:

I can think. I can wait. I can fast.

Two shadows on a lamp-lit cloth: hers, and his, which is huge and blurred while he is far from her, and sharp only when he is near. Come closer. Slowly; if you rush, she draws back.

… love can be obtained by begging, buying, receiving it as a gift, finding it in the street, but it cannot be stolen.

S

Siddhartha went to Kamaswami the merchant, he was directed into a rich house, servants led him between precious carpets into a chamber, where he awaited the master of the house.

Kamaswami asks whether he can write, and gives him a sheet of paper. This is what he writes:

Writing is good, thinking is better. Being smart is good, being patient is better.

As a ball-player plays with his balls, he played with his business-deals, with the people around him, watched them, found amusement in them; with his heart, with the source of his being, he was not with them.

Long evening shadows of people passing on the steps above the river. Walk among them. The more he has, the brighter it grows, until nothing at all can be seen.

Only Kamala understands him, because she is the same. One evening she says it aloud.

S

Siddhartha had learned to trade, to use his power over people, to enjoy himself with a woman, he had learned to wear beautiful clothes, to give orders to servants, to bathe in perfumed waters.

Year by year he becomes what he once smiled at. He worries about money, is hard on his debtors, gambles for high stakes, drinks, grows bored. And the voice that once called him on, from his father’s house to the forest, from the forest to the Buddha, grows quiet.

He only noticed that this bright and reliable voice inside of him, which had awoken in him at that time and had ever guided him in his best times, had become silent.

One night, after wine and dancing girls, he dreams of the small songbird Kamala keeps in a golden cage.

… this bird had become mute, who at other times always used to sing in the morning … there the small bird was dead and lay stiff on the ground. He took it out, weighed it for a moment in his hand, and then threw it away, out in the street …

The cage, in a lattice of light. Tap it, and the door opens. Or hold it shut, and a loose page falls out of the book: what became of Kamala.

In the morning he walks out of his garden and never comes back. He leaves the house, the money, the servants and Kamala the way he once left the forest: without a word.

When she received the first news of Siddhartha’s disappearance, she went to the window, where she held a rare singing bird captive in a golden cage. She opened the door of the cage, took the bird out and let it fly. For a long time, she gazed after it, the flying bird.

D

Dead was the singing bird he had dreamt of. Dead was the bird in his heart.

He walks until he comes to a river, the same river he crossed on his way to the city twenty years ago. A coconut tree leans over the water. He puts one arm around its trunk and looks down, and wants nothing any more except to let go.

We are under the water now, looking up at the light. Read on, and he sinks; or drag downward.

Then, from somewhere far back in his life, a sound comes up: a word he spoke ten thousand times as a boy, without ever hearing it.

… the holy “Om”, which roughly means “that what is perfect” or “the completion”. And in the moment when the sound of “Om” touched Siddhartha’s ear, his dormant spirit suddenly woke up and realized the foolishness of his actions.

Everything he had is gone: the learning, the money, the woman, the pride. He will have to begin again, like a child. And this makes him laugh.

B

By this river I want to stay, thought Siddhartha, it is the same which I have crossed a long time ago on my way to the childlike people, a friendly ferryman had guided me then, he is the one I want to go to …

The ferryman is still there. His name is Vasudeva. Siddhartha asks to stay and learn the work, and that evening, on the bank, he tells him his whole life from the beginning.

This is the hardest thing in the book, and the easiest to read past: to listen without waiting for your turn. Most of us, while the other is still talking, are already preparing what we will say. Vasudeva never does. He is the last of Siddhartha’s teachers, and he never teaches him anything. He listens, and points at the river.

… that the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future?

This picture shows itself only if you leave it alone. Move, and the water clouds over. Be still, as Vasudeva is still, and it clears.

T

Timid and weeping, the boy had attended his mother’s funeral; gloomy and shy, he had listened to Siddhartha, who greeted him as his son and welcomed him at his place in Vasudeva’s hut.

Kamala had come to the river with the boy, on her way to see the dying Buddha. A snake bit her near the ferry, and she died in Siddhartha’s hut. She left him their son: eleven years old, spoiled, proud, a stranger.

Siddhartha loves the boy as he has never loved anyone: foolishly, completely, the way the childlike people love. The boy despises him for it. Vasudeva tells him to let the boy go back to the city, to his own life.

Siddhartha cannot do it. One morning the boy runs away, and his father runs after him, through the forest, all the way to the city, to the gate of the garden where he first saw Kamala.

Nobody is drawn here, only what their feet leave in the dust: the boy’s, his father’s, and later an old man’s. Hold, to follow him.

He does not go in. He stands at the gate a long time, looking into the garden, at his own life in it. Then he sits down in the dust and stays there, until Vasudeva comes, touches his shoulder, and they walk home together.

F

For a long time, the wound continued to burn.

One day he sets out for the city to find his son, and as he crosses, the river laughs at him. He bends over the water and sees a face in it, and the face is his father’s: his father, who also lost a son, and waited, and never saw him again.

He tells Vasudeva everything, at last, and Vasudeva says only: listen better.

… when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: the perfection.

This is not giving up. He still feels the pain, his own and other people’s, and he still acts. He only stops waiting for the world to be different before he can love it. He lets every voice be, the glad and the grieving, the good and the bad, and listens to all of them at once.

Then Vasudeva gets up from the bank. He has been waiting for this hour, he says, and now it has come.

“I’m going into the forests, I’m going into the oneness,” spoke Vasudeva with a bright smile.

Rain on the moon in the river. Touch the water. Hold, and the night turns over.

T

Together with other monks, Govinda used to spend the time of rest between pilgrimages in the pleasure-grove, which the courtesan Kamala had given to the followers of Gotama for a gift.

He is old now, and still searching. He hears of a wise ferryman and comes to the river, and does not know Siddhartha until he speaks. He asks him, as he has asked everyone all his life, for a teaching.

Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.

Siddhartha has no teaching to give. He has had many teachers, he says: a courtesan, a merchant, some gamblers with dice, a monk who once sat beside him while he slept. Most of all the river, and the ferryman.

Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and taught.

He picks up a stone and says that he loves it: not because it might one day become something higher, but because it is a stone. Words cut the world in two, holy and sinful, true and false. The world itself is never cut in two.

Govinda does not understand, and still he cannot leave. He asks for one more word, something he can hold on to.

“Bend down to me!” he whispered quietly in Govinda’s ear. “Bend down to me! Like this, even closer! Very close! Kiss my forehead, Govinda!”

Sunlight through leaves gathers into faces and lets them go again: Kamala, the son, Vasudeva, Govinda, and one that smiles. Tap to gather them, tap to scatter.