Siddhartha is the son of a brahmin priest- a promising, intelligent young pupil. He excels at the chanting of the mantras, recitation of the scriptures and scholarly debates on religious matters. His proud father believes that Siddhartha is destined to become the greatest amongst the priests.
But Siddhartha is also a spiritual seeker. Despite having 'learned' so much, Siddhartha feels that he has made inadequate progress on the spiritual path. He seeks to understand the highest of mysteries, the nature of the Self. Having realized that such realization he will not arrive at living the life of a brahmin priest, he decides to give up his worldly attachments and joins a group of wandering ascetics to learn about the Self.
Siddhartha is the story of one man's seeking, his teachers, his lessons and his teachings. At every step, Siddhartha learns something new about the world, about himself, about God. Yet at every step, he feels something missing. Until he meets the man who is to be his last, and best teacher, the illiterate ferryman.
Siddhartha is a novel written by the German Nobel-prize winner in literature, Hermann Hesse. Published in 1922, Siddhartha is considered Hesse's finest book, along with Der Steppenwolf.
Hesse had a keen interest in Eastern philosophy, particularly the Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads and the Buddhist canon. The skill with which the often abstract concepts of Hindu/Buddhist spirituality have been woven into a story that is supposed to be somewhat autobiographical, by a German author who hadnt been to India previously, is quite simply amazing. (Hesse had travelled to Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand and so had been exposed directly to Buddhism)
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