Siddhartha

I am reading Siddhartha for my outside reading book and it is, as most stories are, about a man’s journey to enlightenment. The difference between Siddhartha and many might lie in the fact that Siddhartha actively seeks enlightenment.

Siddhartha is the son of a Brahman, which is the Indian caste of spiritual royalty. The Brahmans are the priests and the holy men who devote their lives to learning scripture and worshipping the gods. Sid is a naturally gifted Brahman who learns the scriptures quickly and who all the adults praise and all the children admire. And maybe because of his easy way with scripture and the doting words of his peers and elders, Sid becomes bored with his life and unsatisfied with his teachers. He says he has a thirst to learn that cannot be quenched. Given his natural abilities and the magic-like power he holds over others, it seems like Sid only wants to be made inferior for once in his life. He wants a quest that is not easy. He wants a teacher that does not love him. He wants to be challenged. But no matter what he does, beginning with the Brahman duties, transitioning to the life of the shramana, then to the follower of the Buddha, and then to the life of a child-person, everything comes far too quickly and easily to the man. After mastering each life and rejecting the Buddha, there was only one thing left for Sid to do in order to reach his goal of having a challenge: he must destroy everything he has learned and begin again. 

That is why Sid indulges in the life of the materialistic, simple child people. He subconsciously seeks to destroy his learnings and unmaster his masterings. He must experience self-hatred and depression and sex and sin in order to putrefy his seemingly clean body with the muddy waters of cleansing. He must become ugly and dirty and impatient so that he can reach rock bottom. Because when he is as low as possible, that is when he can begin to learn for real. All his life he has been sat upon a pedestal, he has been praised as genius, he had been loved. There is nowhere to go for someone who is as highly esteemed as Siddhartha. Since he only sought to rise, Sid was put in an unfortunate predicament. And so he had to fall before he could rise. That is why he strayed from the path of the shramana and forgot his spiritual voice. That is why he left home and rejected the Buddha and abandoned Govinda, his greatest worshipper. He had to fall.