Awakening

When Siddhartha left the grove where the Buddha, the Perfected One, remained behind, where Govinda remained behind, he felt that in this grove his life until now also remained behind him and parted from him. As he walked slowly along, he pondered this feeling, which filled him entirely. He pondered deeply; as through deep water he let himself sink to the bottom of this feeling, down to where the causes rest, for to recognize causes, so it seemed to him, that is what thinking is, and through that alone do feelings become knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to radiate what is in them.

Walking slowly along, Siddhartha pondered. He saw that he was no longer a youth but had become a man. He saw that something had left him, as a snake is left by its old skin, that something was no longer present in him that had accompanied him all through his youth and been part of him: the wish to have teachers and to hear teachings. The last teacher who had appeared on his way, even him, the highest and wisest teacher, the holiest, the Buddha, he had left, had had to part from him, had not been able to accept his teaching.

More slowly the thinker walked on and asked himself: “But what is it, then, that you wanted to learn from teachings and from teachers, and that they, who taught you much, still could not teach you?” And he found: “It was the self whose meaning and nature I wanted to learn. It was the self I wanted to get free of, wanted to overcome. But I could not overcome it; I could only deceive it, could only flee from it, only hide from it. Truly, nothing in the world has occupied my thoughts as much as this self of mine, this riddle that I live, that I am one and separated and set apart from all others, that I am Siddhartha! And there is nothing in the world I know less about than myself, than Siddhartha!”

The thinker walking slowly along stopped, seized by this thought, and at once another thought sprang out of it, a new thought, which ran: “That I know nothing of myself, that Siddhartha has remained so strange and unknown to me, comes from one cause, a single one: I was afraid of myself, I was in flight from myself! Atman I sought, Brahman I sought; I was willing to cut my self to pieces and peel it apart in order to find in its unknown innermost the kernel of all the husks, Atman, life, the divine, the ultimate. But I myself was lost to me in the process.”

Siddhartha opened his eyes and looked around; a smile filled his face, and a deep feeling of awakening from long dreams streamed through him down to his toes. And at once he walked on again, walked quickly, like a man who knows what he has to do.

“Oh,” he thought, drawing a deep breath of relief, “now I will not let Siddhartha slip away from me again! No longer will I begin my thinking and my life with Atman and with the suffering of the world. I will no longer kill myself and cut myself to pieces to find a secret behind the ruins. Neither the Yoga Veda shall teach me any longer, nor the Atharva Veda, nor the ascetics, nor any teaching at all. From myself I will learn, I will be my own pupil, I will come to know myself, the secret that is Siddhartha.”

He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time. Beautiful was the world, many-colored was the world, strange and mysterious was the world! Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green; sky flowed, and river; forest stood rigid, and mountain; all beautiful, all mysterious and magical, and in the midst of it he, Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the way to himself. All this, all this yellow and blue, river and forest, entered Siddhartha for the first time through the eye; it was no longer the magic of Mara, no longer the veil of Maya, no longer the senseless and accidental multiplicity of the world of appearances, contemptible to the deep-thinking Brahmin who scorns multiplicity, who seeks unity. Blue was blue, river was river, and even if the One and Divine lived hidden in the blue and the river in Siddhartha, it was still the very way and meaning of the divine to be yellow here, blue here, sky there, forest there, and Siddhartha here. Meaning and essence were not somewhere behind things; they were in them, in everything.

“How deaf and dull I have been!” thought the man walking quickly along. “When someone reads a text whose meaning he wants to find, he does not scorn the signs and letters and call them illusion, chance, and worthless husk; he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. But I, who wanted to read the book of the world and the book of my own being, I scorned the signs and letters for the sake of a meaning I had presumed in advance; I called the world of appearances illusion, called my eye and my tongue accidental and worthless appearances. No, that is over; I have awakened, I have in fact awakened and been born only today.”

As Siddhartha thought this thought, he stopped once more, suddenly, as if a snake lay before him on the path.

For suddenly this too had become clear to him: he, who was in fact like one awakened or newborn, had to begin his life anew and completely from the beginning. When he had left the grove of Jetavana that same morning, the grove of that Exalted One, already awakening, already on the way to himself, it had been his intention, and had seemed natural and a matter of course to him, that after his years as an ascetic he would return home and to his father. But now, only at this moment, as he stopped as if a snake lay on his path, he awoke to this insight too: “I am no longer who I was, after all; I am no longer an ascetic, I am no longer a priest, I am no longer a Brahmin. What then am I to do at home with my father? Study? Sacrifice? Practice meditation? All that is over, after all; all that no longer lies on my way.”

Motionless, Siddhartha stood still, and for a moment and a breath his heart froze; he felt it freeze inside his chest like a small animal, a bird or a hare, as he saw how alone he was. For years he had been without a home and had not felt it. Now he felt it. Always, even in the remotest meditation, he had been his father’s son, had been a Brahmin, of high caste, a man of the spirit. Now he was only Siddhartha, the awakened one, nothing else. He drew a deep breath, and for a moment he froze and shuddered. No one was as alone as he. There was no nobleman who did not belong to the nobles, no craftsman who did not belong to the craftsmen and find refuge with them, share their life, speak their language. No Brahmin who was not counted among the Brahmins and did not live with them, no ascetic who did not find his refuge in the order of the Samanas, and even the most forlorn hermit in the forest was not one and alone; he too was surrounded by belonging, he too belonged to an order that was home to him. Govinda had become a monk, and a thousand monks were his brothers, wore his robe, believed his faith, spoke his language. But he, Siddhartha, where did he belong? Whose life would he share? Whose language would he speak?

Out of this moment, when the world melted away from him all around, when he stood alone like a star in the sky, out of this moment of coldness and despondency Siddhartha rose up, more of a self than before, more firmly knit. He felt: this had been the last shudder of awakening, the last spasm of birth. And at once he strode out again, began to walk quickly and impatiently, no longer homeward, no longer to his father, no longer back.