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Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse Book Summary and Review Minute Book Report
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This is a quick book summary and analysis of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. • Facebook Page - / 1148331925195691 • This is a story about a man named Siddhartha who wants to find enlightenment as a monk. He leaves his family and travels with his friend, Govinda, to learn from samanas, or wise monks, who are living in the forest. • Over time, Siddhartha dislikes the teachings and teachers and wants to learn more on his own, so he leaves behind Govinda, who stays back to learn from Gautama, the Buddha. • Siddhartha finds his way into a town and meets Kamala, a beautiful woman. He is attracted to her, but she wants a man who is wealthy. Because he knows nothing of business, Siddhartha seeks the help of a local merchant, who trains him. Soon, Siddhartha gains wealth and wins over Kamala. • However, Siddhartha loses his passion to find enlightenment and indulges himself in gambling, possessions, and women. He realizes that he has strayed from his original path towards enlightenment and gives all of his possessions away, leaving Kamala behind with a son. • Siddhartha encounters a ferryman named Vasudeva, who seems to have found peace and enlightenment on the river. Siddhartha stays with him and he learns to find inner peace. • One day, Siddhartha encounters Kamala and her son, Siddhartha, near the river. Kamala gets bitten by a snake and dies, leaving the boy with Siddhartha to raise. However, the boy runs away and Siddhartha doesn’t know what to do. • After Vasudeva leaves, Siddhartha stays as a ferryman and is visited by Govinda. • In the end, Siddhartha has found enlightenment and shares a glimpse of it with Govinda. • As always a lot can be said about this story, but what draws my interest and attention is the idea of the self needing to die to progress growth. And this has nothing to do with suicide, but rather a dying of character within ourselves, which then pushes us to change and become the person we are trying to become. • Siddhartha realizes that in order for him to fully achieve enlightenment, he would need to forget the many lessons he learned as he started as a samanas. And as a way of unlearning those ways, he had to kill his former self and all of the ways of thinking that went with that self. This was accomplished when he became a merchant and discovered greed. • Think of it this way. There’s a caterpillar and then a butterfly. In order for the caterpillar to become a butterfly, it has to kill the part of itself that is a caterpillar and becomes something different, something that is unrecognizable, which is the cocoon or pupa. And when the caterpillar ceases to be a caterpillar, it emerges and is now something totally different, a butterfly. And as a butterfly, it doesn’t think the same as the caterpillar. It is something completely new. • And so in this same way, for a lot of us, we need our former selves to die in order to become something greater, or at least something different. For Siddhartha, it took him his entire life to realize this. That what he was chasing, which was enlightenment, could never be attained in the state that he was in. He could only attain it after he had experienced more of life and ultimately became a different person. • Through Minute Book Reports, hopefully you can get the plot and a few relevant discussion points in just a couple of minutes. • Music: Saturday by Josh Woodward - http://www.joshwoodward.com
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