Hermann Hesse died in Montagnola, Switzerland, in August 1962, at eighty-five, of a cerebral hemorrhage in his sleep. He had won the Nobel Prize fourteen years earlier. He had outlived his three marriages and two of his wives. He had outlived his best friend Thomas Mann by seven years and his worst critic by most of the German literary establishment’s disregard for him during the middle decades of his career. He had been, during his lifetime, a fitful bestseller in German, a neglected figure in English, and — in a turn nobody could have predicted — the most-read German novelist of the American counterculture after 1965, when Siddhartha went viral in paperback and sold thirty million copies in English over the following three decades.
I do not write the obituary for the man. I write the obituary for Siddhartha itself — a novel Hesse published in 1922, at forty-five, having written the first two-thirds of it in 1919 and 1920 and then, unable to continue, having stopped for eighteen months to study Buddhism and Hindu texts in the original before finishing the final third in 1922. The eighteen-month pause is the book’s secret. Most readers do not know about it. The pause is why the book is better than its imitators. Hesse waited until he had something to finish with, and what he finished with is different in kind from what he began with.
The novel is short — a hundred and fifty pages — and it is the life story of Siddhartha, a young Brahmin in the time of the historical Buddha, who leaves his family to seek enlightenment, first among the ascetics of the forest, then among the followers of the Buddha himself, then — and here the novel becomes interesting — by walking away from the Buddha’s teaching, because he concludes that enlightenment cannot be received from a teacher, no matter how great, but must be lived through. Siddhartha spends the middle decades of his life as a merchant and a lover and a father — he becomes the wealthy lover of a courtesan named Kamala, he fathers a son he cannot keep, he grows rich and bored and disgusted with himself — and finally, late, he returns to the river where he began, and becomes a ferryman’s apprentice, and learns, from the river itself, the unity of time and the simultaneity of all moments, which is the enlightenment the Buddha had offered him as a young man and that he had refused because it could not be taken on credit.
This is the structure. It is deliberately heretical within the Buddhist tradition Hesse was drawing on. The Buddha, in the novel, is presented sympathetically and then refused. The refusal is not a rejection of the dharma. It is Hesse’s argument — derived as much from his Pietist Lutheran German childhood as from his Buddhist reading — that spiritual authority cannot, in principle, be delegated. What another person has understood, another person has understood. You still have to live your way to your own understanding, and nobody can do it for you, and this is the book’s non-negotiable.
The American 1960s read Hesse as a guru. This was a misreading. Siddhartha is the opposite of a guru text. It is the most anti-guru novel written by a European intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century. Hesse’s argument is that no one — not the Buddha himself, not Hesse, not the translator, not the English-language paperback edition on the shelf of your freshman dorm — can hand you the understanding. The handing is what the novel refuses. The American readers who treated the book as a handing did not, in general, read it carefully. They read the blissed-out surface — the river, the ferryman, the unity of all things — and missed the structural point, which is that Siddhartha arrived at the bliss only after he refused every teacher, including the historically highest teacher available to him.
Where the book has aged well: the structural argument. A century later, in a spiritual marketplace that has proliferated past anything Hesse could have imagined — the wellness industry, the meditation apps, the LARPed Buddhism, the ayahuasca retreats, the spiritual influencer economy — the novel’s refusal of authority is more useful, not less. Hesse predicted, more accurately than he could have known, that the twentieth century would develop a spiritual consumer economy, and that the economy would attempt to sell exactly the thing the novel insists cannot be sold. The book is now read against the economy it was written decades before, and the book wins, because it was always the correct argument.
Where the book has aged badly: the women. Kamala, the courtesan who teaches Siddhartha love, exists entirely to serve his spiritual trajectory. She teaches him. She bears his son. She dies. She has no inner life independent of his. Hesse was writing in 1922, and the convention of the woman-as-instrument-of-male-development was the dominant convention of the European novel of his generation, and Hesse did not innovate against it. A reader now has to acknowledge that Kamala is, by any modern standard, an underwritten character, and has to make a decision about what to do with a book whose central argument is structurally sound but whose female characters are structurally weightless. My decision: the book is worth reading, with Kamala’s underwriting acknowledged, because the structural argument survives the structural failure of the gender politics. Not every reader will make the same decision. That is fair.
Rest easy, Hermann. Your best short novel is still being read. It is being read, now, against the spiritual economy you foresaw and warned against. It is still doing the work you wrote it to do. The American counterculture that first popularized you has been replaced by a spiritual consumer economy three generations more sophisticated, and the book is still working against it, because the structural argument is correct and the river is still there and the teacher is still not the point. You would not have been surprised. You would have been vindicated. The vindication is the book’s quiet afterlife, and will be its continuing one.
A related vagobond.com piece: On Translation and Survival.
The philosophy I have been drawing out from this kind of reading I call Baoism. Bao Ji — Bring Your Own. Your teacher is not the point. The walk is the point.
Readers and fans of Siddhartha will really enjoy Keys to the Riad — my novel about a man walking through a house in Morocco and discovering, room by room, what Siddhartha discovered at the river. Different water. Different country. Same refusal. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
