Pleasures In Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha

As people, we all have pleasures that we enjoy doing or having. For example, eating your favorite food or playing your sport may give you satisfaction. In Chapter 7, Samsara, Siddhartha goes through a time of finding self-actualization through pleasures. Kamaswami, a business man, teaches Siddhartha how to earn money. Instead of continuing to follow the Samana teachings, he began to eat, buy clothes, and drink alcohol. Siddhartha turned materialistic, for example, he had his own servants with a house, a garden, and he became a gambler. He had money, wealth, and luxurious pleasures that began to fade away the previous Siddhartha. As a gambler, “he played the game as a result of a heartfelt need” (79). When Siddhartha would play dice, he would

feel a sense of excitement or a thrill that he has lost. He became addicted and found pleasure in rolling the dice by winning and gambling his money. The game gave him anxiety that he enjoyed and it showed people he doesn’t need money. “The world had caught him” (78) by overcoming all of his spiritual thoughts that he had in the past. Hermann Hesse described his spiritual wisdom as vanishing "Slowly, like moisture entering the dying tree trunk, slowly filling and rotting it, so did the world and inertia creep into Siddhartha's soul; it slowly filled his soul, made it heavy, made it tired, sent it to sleep" (p.

76). All of the spiritual aspects Siddhartha gained as being a Brahmin’s son and a Samana was turning into a memory because of his new pleasures. Siddhartha was not a man like he used to be. He went down a path that caused him to lose his kindness and became arrogant. Even though Siddhartha felt superior compared to the people around him, he had a feeling of becoming more like them. Also, he became extremely unhappy and hated himself for how he was. The teachings he learned from Kamaswami only lead to negative effects on Siddhartha. He did not gain a sense of enlightenment from having pleasure of being rich and gambling money. Siddhartha realized he needed to continue down a different path if he wanted to discover enlightenment. He felt this in his heart that made him reach for a new goal: “A path lies before you which you are called to follow. The gods await you” (83). Siddhartha went through a life of pleasures that only decreased his hope of reaching full

happiness.