So, the book on the table today is Hermann Hesse's novella, Siddhartha. This is an incredible book, for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it does actually do a good job of bringing the concepts of samsara and nirvana into very clear view for someone not familiar with them. There's a general sense in Western culture as a whole for what Buddhism is teaching about nirvana, but very few who don't actively practice Eastern religions have a solid idea of what the actual nature of that state is, which does give some good value to this read.
The book itself is about the life of Siddhartha, a member of the Brahmin caste, who decides early on that the religious life that has been set out for him by his father doesn't interest him and that instead, he wants to give up the comfortable life that exists for him and go into the wilderness, to become an ascetic and search for enlightenment in other ways. This leads him to encounter the Gautama Buddha (not-coincidentally also one whose original name was Siddhartha, though the text of the book doesn't mention this), an experience which sends him into a life of learning from everything, trying the lives of a rich merchant and a poor ferryman before finally reaching his own enlightenment and, presumably, escape from the cycle of samsara.
It's a beautifully-written book, and Joachim Neugroschel's translation retains the lyrical quality of the work. The language is almost dream-like at times, flowing like a river and pulling the reader along on Siddhartha's journey to enlightenment. While Siddhartha is really the only character who is fully built out into three dimensions, the supporting cast, drifting in and out of his journey, are all making their own similar journeys, though perhaps not all with as much success as his own spiritual awakening.
So, with the book review part of this post done, let's look a little more at what's actually going on in this work. The overall theme seems to be that you can teach knowledge, but you cannot teach wisdom, and any attempt to do so will just sound foolish. Wisdom must be learned from the self, through experience with the world, and can only be found when you're not looking for it. As long as you actively search, the search itself will keep you from finding enlightenment.
The key concept to be aware of here is, again, samsara. Generally, those of us in the Western world have an understanding of the Eastern religions in question here, Buddhism and Hinduism, that really begins and ends with reincarnation and possibly karma if you look a bit deeper. Coming from a primarily Abrahamic cultural background, these aren't concepts that are easy to really understand properly, simply because that background gives an idea that you get one pass at life, and how you conduct yourself will determine what your afterlife will be. This isn't the understanding of life that Eastern religions have, where everything is instead seen as cyclical, with the eternal return to life and traversal of the world as a core aspect of the soul's existence. The world is seen as illusory, as a source of suffering, and the escape from that world into enlightenment and peace, the nirvana state, is the only way out of the endless cycle. Everything, every action, every encounter, everything around us, is all part of samsara, the constant metempsychosis shaped in each cycle by karma, the return of all good and ill that you created in the world being brought back around to you in the next life, that all are trapped within, for better or worse.
This is where the message of searching being counterproductive comes into play. Nirvana is a state of being free from desire, pain, and guilt; the act of searching for it, therefore, is succumbing to a desire. Siddhartha only reaches his enlightenment when he gives up even the search for it, releases himself from the pain that comes of his life experiences and the path he has taken by understanding that his life has, itself, come in a cycle, and discovers the underlying oneness of everything. He exists in a simple life, in the end, simply ferrying travelers across the river that has become his world, that is the source of his final escape from samsara even as he realizes that water itself is fundamentally caught in its own eternal cycle.
The river is everything, and everything is contained in the river.
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