“You have achieved it?” she asked. “You have found peace?”
He smiled and placed his hand on hers.
“I’m seeing it.” she said, “I’m seeing it. I too will find peace.”
“You have found it,” Siddhartha spoke in a whisper.
Kamala never stopped looking into his eyes. She thought about her pilgrimage to Gotama, which she wanted to take, in order to see the face of the perfected one, to breathe his peace, and she thought that she had now found him in his place, and that it was good, just as good, as if she had seen the other one. She wanted to tell this to him, but the tongue no longer obeyed her will. Without speaking, she looked at him, and he saw the life fading from Siddhartha: An Open-Source Text
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her eyes. When the final pain filled her eyes and made them grow dim, when the final shiver ran through her limbs, his finger closed her eyelids.
For a long time, he sat and looked at her peacefully dead face. For a long time, he observed her mouth, her old, tired mouth, with those lips, which had become thin, and he remembered, that he used to, in the spring of his years, compare this mouth with a freshly cracked fig. For a long time, he sat, read in the pale face, in the tired wrinkles, filled himself with this sight, saw his own face lying in the same manner, just as white, just as quenched out, and saw at the same time his face and hers being young, with red lips, with fiery eyes, and the feeling of this both being present and at the same time real, the feeling of eternity, completely filled every aspect of his being. Deeply he felt, more deeply than ever before, in this hour, the indestructibility of every life, the eternity of every moment.
When he rose, Vasudeva had prepared rice for him. But Siddhartha did not eat. In the stable, where their goat stood, the two old men prepared beds of straw for themselves, and Vasudeva lay himself down to sleep. But Siddhartha went outside and sat this night before the hut, listening to the river, surrounded by the past, touched and encircled by all times of his life at the same time. But occasionally, he rose, stepped to the door of the hut and listened, whether the boy was sleeping.
Early in the morning, even before the sun could be seen, Vasudeva came out of the stable and walked over to his friend.
“You haven’t slept,” he said.
“No, Vasudeva. I sat here, I was listening to the river. A lot it has told me, deeply it has filled me with the healing thought, with the thought of oneness.”
“You’ve experienced suffering, Siddhartha, but I see no sadness has entered your heart.”
“No, my dear, how should I be sad? I, who have been rich and happy, have become even richer and happier now. My son has been given to me.”
“Your son shall be welcome to me as well. But now, Siddhartha, let’s get to work, there is much to be done. Kamala has died on the same bed, on which my wife had died a long time ago. Let us also build Kamala’s funeral pyre the same hill on which I had then built my wife’s funeral pyre.”
While the boy was still asleep, they built the funeral pyre.
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River Scene, Library of Congress
Topics Worth Investigating
1. Explain sacredness or holiness in terms of “having no obstacles.” Confucius writes in his Doctrine of the Mean, “He rectifies himself, and seeks for nothing from others, so that he has no dissatisfactions.”1 Would the presence of holiness imply that if one has no expectations, one has no hindrances? If this were so, an ordinarily supposed hindrance would simply be an unexpected present event. Is this insight the basis of Turgenev’s observation, “To desire and expect nothing for oneself—and to have profound sympathy for others—is genuine holiness”?2
2. Siddhartha discerns, “. . . I looked at my life, and it was also a river. . . ”
Develop the idea of the river being “everywhere at once” with respect to the idea that what you really are is not what you are now. As W. Somerset Maugham expresses it, “The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening.”3
3. With Kamala’s death, Siddhartha felt the “indestructibility of life.” Can you resolve this apparent paradox? Consider this passage from the Gita: 1.
Confucius. Doctrine of the Mean. 500 BC. Translated by James Legge.
2.
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. Turgenev Letters. Edited by David Lowe. New York: Ardis, 1983.
3.
W. Somerset Maugham. The Summing Up. Garden City, N.Y.: International Collector’s Library, 1938.
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Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never; Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!
Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit for ever; Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems!4
4. Hermann Hesse emphasizes in this chapter that Vasudeva learned to listen from the river. Compare Hess’s description of this process with Shunryu Suzuki’s:
When you listen to someone, you should give up all your preconceived ideas and your subjective opinions; you should just listen to him, just observe what his way is. We put very little emphasis on right and wrong or good and bad. We just see things as they are with him, and accept them. . .
Usually when you listen to some statement, you hear it as a kind of echo of yourself. You are actually listening to your own opinion.5
