discovering individuality

A journey is something that must be done in everyone‘s life. The journey starts when the person is born and ends when they die. People are all searching for their own things. Some search for things like: money, power, fame, knowledge, peace, understanding, and a sense of who they are. Some people do just for the thrill of adventure. Siddhartha wants to find his individual place in society through personal experience and follow no one else’s ideas but his own.

Siddhartha’s journey takes him through different worlds which are represented geographically through the three different parts of the story. In the first part of the book he travels through the world of the spirit and intellect during his time with the Brahmins, Samanas, and the meeting with the Buddha. He journeys through the land with his friend Govinda in search of peace through the intellect. He learns all about a religion and after experiencing all that it has to offer; feels unsatisfied and moves on to find something new in hopes of finding peace. His meeting with the Buddha is where he truly begins to find his way. When he was listening to the Buddha he realized, "...you have reached the highest goal which so many thousands of Brahmins and Brahmins’ sons are striving to reach. You have done so by your own seeking, in your own way, through thought, through meditation, through knowledge, through enlightenment. You have learned nothing through teachings, and so I think, O Illustrious One, that nobody finds salvation through teachings." (Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse 33-34). Siddhartha realizes that the Buddha found enlightenment in his own way, and so Siddhartha realizes that he too must find his own way to true peace. After departing from Govinda and the Buddha he crosses the river, which is the symbolic separator between the world of the intellect and the world of the physical, to see what a life in the city has to offer him.

While there Siddhartha thoroughly indulges himself in all that the city has to offer. He becomes fat and wealthy and enjoys his time in the company of Kamala. Over the course of the twenty years he spent there he came to realize that the life of the senses brought him no closer to the peace that he had been seeking. Hesse shows that it is time for Siddhartha to move on through one of his favorite stylistic techniques, the dream (Understanding Hermann Hesse 102). After...

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...nd Siddhartha ends up getting another teacher in spite of the fact that he promised himself that he would not have anymore teachers since the Buddha’s teachings had not attracted him.

Part of what made Siddhartha such a good book was the fact that it was taken from personal experiences that Hermann Hesse had experienced, and his personal set of beliefs. Hesse went through a phase where he doubted the belief in religion in general and he follows no set code of religious beliefs. Hesse found a Christ in everyone and, is Siddhartha, he finds a Buddha in everyone (Understanding Hermann Hesse 101). He used this part of his life to write the first part of Siddhartha. However, the second part proved to be quite a bit more challenging than the first. Hesse took time off from writing Siddhartha and began to study Lao Tse which was described as "the liberating experience that permitted him to finish the book" (102). For the second part he wrote about his experiences in the world around him. He described things that he had witnessed and experienced while living in the big city. Both of those parts came to him easily because they were things he had seen and experienced for himself.