ABSTRACT
Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha portrays a heroic spiritual seeker who reaches enlightenment by being an independent thinker and living life on his own terms. Hesse’s 5th century bce hero is also portrayed as living in that part of north India where the historical Buddha is preaching, sharing the Buddha’s given name, Siddhartha, and after a spiritual journey lasting much of his life, attaining the same deep level of enlightenment as the historical Buddha. However, Hesse’s hero is really an anti-Buddha in that he espouses ideas that are specifically antithetical to several foundational Buddhist teachings. Demonstrating the wide divergence between the ideas of Hesse’s Siddhartha and classical Buddhist thought, this essay compares particular teachings of the Buddha about the nature of reality with passages in the novel describing the wisdom gained by the novel’s hero. The author concludes that using Hesse’s novel Siddhartha as a literary introduction to Buddhist concepts is particularly problematic because Hesse’s hero expresses ideas that do not reflect Buddhist thinking, but are placed within a loose biographical narrative similar to that of the historical Buddha. Basing one’s understanding of Buddhism on Hesse’s Siddhartha may make it even more difficult to grasp the truly challenging and often counter-intuitive teachings of the Buddhist tradition.
