are questing,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. “The wanderers of Hesse always find something satisfying—holiness, wisdom, hope.” And the London Times Literary Supplement concluded, “The Hesse we read today is in fact no longer the bittersweet elegist of Wilhelmine Germany, the anguished intellectual entre deux guerres, the serene hermit of Montagnola après Nobel. The cult has adjusted the kaleidoscope of Hesse’s works in such a way as to bring into focus a Hesse for the 1970s: environmentalist, war opponent, enemy of a computerized technocracy, who seeks heightened awareness… and who is prepared to sacrifice anything but his integrity for the sake of his freedom.”

CONTENTS

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

INTRODUCTION by Tom Robbins

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

SIDDHARTHA

PART ONE

THE SON OF THE BRAHMIN

AMONG THE SAMANAS

GAUTAMA

AWAKENING

PART TWO

KAMALA

AMONG THE CHILD PEOPLE

SANSARA

BESIDE THE RIVER

THE FERRYMAN

THE SON

OM

GOVINDA

GLOSSARY OF SANSKRIT TERMS, DEITIES, PERSONS, PLACES, AND THINGS

READING GROUP GUIDE

INTRODUCTION

Tom Robbins

Dostoevsky is credited with having invented the psychological novel—although considering the millions of pages of tediously internalized, angst-ridden prose that have fluttered in on the Russian’s long, dark coattails (fiction that has been both a crime and a punishment), maybe “accused of” rather than “credited with” is the more appropriate phrase.

The problem, for writers and readers alike, with all this inward gazing is how few of us ever gaze in far enough to justify the strain. To reap lasting rewards, to escape the briar patch of perpetuated trauma, the gazer must delve beneath the ego level, the personality level, the level of genetic predisposition and environmental conditioning, must penetrate more deeply even than the archetypal underworld. One of the very rare Western authors not only to plumb those arcane depths but to do so in a narratively entertaining, stylistically engaging fashion (thereby making Dostoevsky’s overheated lemons into cool and refreshing, though highly potent, lemonade), was Hermann Hesse.

Steeped in German mysticism and Asian philosophy (he traveled twice to the Far East), and having expanded his awareness by ingesting on several occasions hallucinogenic mescaline, Hesse (1877-1962) was perhaps ideally qualified to invent a new kind of psychological novel. Gradually he had come to recognize that very often despair, misery, and degeneration are simply the price we’re charged for our bad attitudes and myopic vision. Once he became convinced that we humans can alter reality by altering our perceptions of it, the lid was off the pitcher. Hesse went to his writing desk and poured the nectar.

Having shifted his focus from the concerns that had traditionally occupied serious novelists (socio-economic conflicts, physical challenges, romantic entanglements); from familiar territory to regions outside the zone of normal expectations, Hesse was now in a position to compose startling new novels-of-ideas, novels containing such ideas, in fact, as had seldom if ever been expressed in modern literature.

Like the existentialists, Hesse seemed to view the mass of humanity as one big twitchy, squealy, many-headed beast caught in a trap of its own making. Unlike Camus and Sartre, however, he suspected the trap might be sprung through a kind of alchemical transformation and/or spiritual transcendence.

Alchemical transformation he explored brilliantly in his 1927 masterpiece, Steppenwolf, destined to become, for obvious reasons, a favorite of the psychedelic counterculture. As far out as it was, however, Steppenwolf was pungent with the musk of Old Europe. Five years earlier, exhaling a sandal-wood effluvium of borrowed spirituality, he penned a shorter, though no less courageous, novel that follows the corkscrew path of a well-born East Indian who is fervently, if somewhat erratically, searching for ultimate meaning in life: an ambitious “golden child” whose goals do not lie at the top of any ordinary ladder, a restless traveler whose destination could not be found on any map.

In the parlance of cinema, Siddhartha would qualify as a “road movie.” But because the protagonist’s personal motto throughout his various and sometimes contradictory stages of development remains “Thinking, waiting, fasting,” and because he wanders barefoot in an age (circa 500 B.C.) when there was nary a pedal to push to the metal, he logs in a tiny fraction of the mileage accumulated by, say, the characters in On the Road.

Siddhartha nonetheless does bear a superficial resemblance to Kerouac’s novel, in which, despite their relentless pursuit of kicks, the beatniks maintain a fascination with Eastern philosophy, and, however crudely, demonstrate a hunger for spiritual illumination. For his part, Siddhartha also takes a detour through the pleasurelands of flesh and fermentation before moving on to more refined ground.

Judeo-Christian-Islamic ethos to the contrary, there is an extremely blurry line between an appetite for life and a yearning for God, and both Kerouac and Hesse intuited this sensual/spiritual interface,