Among the Child People

Siddhartha went to the merchant Kamaswami; he was directed to a rich house; servants led him over precious carpets into a room, where he waited for the master of the house.

Kamaswami came in, a quick, supple man with hair turning heavily gray, with very clever, cautious eyes, with a greedy mouth. Host and guest greeted each other in friendly fashion.

“I have been told,” the merchant began, “that you are a Brahmin, a scholar, but that you are seeking service with a merchant. Have you fallen into need, Brahmin, that you are seeking service?”

“No,” said Siddhartha, “I have not fallen into need, and I have never been in need. Know that I come from the Samanas, with whom I lived for a long time.”

“If you come from the Samanas, how could you not be in need? Are the Samanas not entirely without possessions?”

“I am without possessions,” said Siddhartha, “if that is what you mean. Certainly I am without possessions. But I am so of my own free will, and so I am not in need.”

“But what do you intend to live on, if you have no possessions?”

“I have never yet thought about that, sir. I have been without possessions for more than three years and have never once thought about what I should live on.”

“So you have lived on the possessions of others.”

“Presumably that is so. The merchant, too, lives on the goods of others, after all.”

“Well said. But he does not take what belongs to others for nothing; he gives them his wares in return.”

“So it does indeed seem to be. Everyone takes, everyone gives; such is life.”

“But allow me: if you have no possessions, what do you intend to give?”

“Everyone gives what he has. The warrior gives strength, the merchant gives wares, the teacher teaching, the farmer rice, the fisherman fish.”

“Very good. And what is it, then, that you have to give? What is it that you have learned, that you can do?”

“I can think. I can wait. I can fast.”

“That is all?”

“I believe that is all!”

“And what use is it? Fasting, for example—what is it good for?”

“It is very good, sir. When a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the very cleverest thing he can do. If, for example, Siddhartha had not learned to fast, he would have to take some kind of service this very day, whether with you or wherever it might be, for hunger would force him to. But as it is, Siddhartha can wait calmly; he knows no impatience, he knows no emergency; he can let hunger besiege him for a long time and laugh at it. That, sir, is what fasting is good for.”

“You are right, Samana. Wait a moment.”

Kamaswami went out and came back with a scroll, which he handed to his guest, asking: “Can you read this?”

Siddhartha looked at the scroll, on which a contract of sale was written down, and began to read its contents aloud.

“Excellent,” said Kamaswami. “And will you write something for me on this sheet?”

He gave him a sheet and a stylus, and Siddhartha wrote and gave the sheet back.

Kamaswami read: “Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.”

“You write admirably,” the merchant said in praise. “We shall have many things to talk over together. For today I ask you to be my guest and take up lodging in this house.”

Siddhartha thanked him and accepted, and now lived in the merchant’s house. Clothes were brought to him, and shoes, and a servant prepared his bath every day. Twice a day an abundant meal was served, but Siddhartha ate only once a day, and he neither ate meat nor drank wine. Kamaswami told him about his trade, showed him goods and storerooms, showed him accounts. Siddhartha came to know many new things; he listened much and spoke little. And mindful of Kamala’s words, he never subordinated himself to the merchant; he made him treat him as an equal, indeed as more than an equal. Kamaswami conducted his business with care and often with passion, but Siddhartha regarded all this as a game whose rules he took pains to learn exactly, but whose substance did not touch his heart.

He had not been long in Kamaswami’s house before he was already taking part in his host’s trade. But every day, at the hour she named, he visited the beautiful Kamala, in handsome clothes, in fine shoes, and soon he was bringing her gifts as well. Much did her red, clever mouth teach him. Much did her tender, supple hand teach him. He was still a boy in love, inclined to plunge blindly and insatiably into pleasure as into a bottomless pit, and she taught him from the ground up the lesson that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every smallest place on the body has its secret, and to awaken it brings happiness to the one who knows how. She taught him that lovers, after a celebration of love, must not part from each other without each admiring the other, without being as much conquered as having conquered, so that neither of them is left with surfeit and desolation and the bad feeling of having misused or been misused. He spent wonderful hours with the beautiful and clever artist, became her pupil, her lover, her friend. Here with Kamala lay the worth and meaning of his present life, not in Kamaswami’s trade.

The merchant entrusted him with the writing of important letters and contracts, and grew used to consulting him on all important matters. He soon saw that Siddhartha understood little about rice and wool, about shipping and trade, but that he had a lucky hand, and that Siddhartha surpassed him, the merchant, in calm and equanimity, and in the art of listening and of seeing into other people. “This Brahmin,” he said to a friend, “is no real merchant and will never become one; his soul is never passionately in his business. But he has the secret of those people to whom success comes of itself, whether it is a good star he was born under, or magic, or something he learned with the Samanas. He always seems only to be playing with business; it never wholly enters into him, it never masters him; he never fears failure, a loss never troubles him.”

The friend advised the merchant: “Give him a third of the profit from the business he conducts for you, but let him also bear the same share of the loss when there is a loss. That will make him more zealous.”

Kamaswami followed the advice. But Siddhartha cared little about it. If profit came to him, he accepted it with equanimity; if loss came to him, he laughed and said: “Well, look at that, so this one went badly!”

It did indeed seem as though business were a matter of indifference to him. Once he traveled to a village to buy up a large rice harvest there. But when he arrived, the rice had already been sold to another trader. Nevertheless Siddhartha stayed on in that village for a good many days, entertained the farmers, gave their children copper coins, joined in celebrating a wedding, and came back from the journey extremely contented. Kamaswami reproached him for not turning back at once, for having wasted time and money. Siddhartha answered: “Stop scolding, dear friend! Nothing has ever yet been achieved by scolding. If there has been a loss, let me bear the loss. I am very contented with this journey. I have come to know all sorts of people, a Brahmin has become my friend, children have ridden on my knees, farmers have shown me their fields, no one took me for a trader.”

“That is all very pretty,” cried Kamaswami crossly, “but you are in fact a trader, I should think! Or did you travel only for your pleasure?”

“Certainly,” laughed Siddhartha, “certainly I traveled for my pleasure. What else for? I have come to know people and regions, I have enjoyed kindness and trust, I have found friendship. Look, my dear, if I had been Kamaswami, then as soon as I saw my purchase thwarted, I would have traveled straight back full of annoyance and in a hurry, and time and money would indeed have been lost. But as it is, I have had good days, have learned, have enjoyed joy, have harmed neither myself nor others through annoyance and haste. And if I ever go there again, perhaps to buy a later harvest, or for whatever purpose it may be, friendly people will receive me in a friendly and cheerful way, and I will praise myself for not having shown haste and ill humor that time. So let it be, friend, and do not harm yourself by scolding! When the day comes when you see: this Siddhartha is doing me harm, then say one word, and Siddhartha will go his way. But until then let us be satisfied with each other.”

In vain, too, were the merchant’s attempts to convince Siddhartha that he was eating his, Kamaswami’s, bread. Siddhartha ate his own bread; or rather, they both ate the bread of others, the bread of all. Siddhartha never had an ear for Kamaswami’s worries, and Kamaswami had many worries. If a deal was under way that was threatened with failure, if a shipment of goods seemed lost, if a debtor seemed unable to pay, Kamaswami could never convince his associate that it was useful to waste words of grief or anger, to have furrows on one’s brow, to sleep badly. When Kamaswami once reproached him that he had learned everything he knew from him, he gave this answer: “Do not try to make a fool of me with such jokes! From you I have learned how much a basket of fish costs and how much interest one can demand for money lent. Those are your sciences. I did not learn to think from you, dear Kamaswami; you would do better to try to learn it from me.”

Indeed his soul was not in the trade. Business was good for bringing him money for Kamala, and it brought in far more than he needed. Beyond that, Siddhartha’s interest and curiosity were only with people, whose dealings, crafts, worries, amusements, and follies had formerly been as strange and far from him as the moon. However easily he succeeded in talking with everyone, living with everyone, learning from everyone, he was nevertheless keenly aware that there was something that separated him from them, and this separating thing was the Samana in him. He saw people living along in a childlike or animal way, which he loved and at the same time also despised. He saw them toil, saw them suffer and turn gray over things that seemed to him wholly unworthy of such a price, over money, over small pleasures, over small honors; he saw them scold and insult one another, he saw them wail over pains at which a Samana smiles, and suffer from deprivations a Samana does not feel.

He was open to everything these people brought him. Welcome to him was the trader who offered him linen for sale, welcome the debtor who sought a loan, welcome the beggar who told him for an hour the story of his poverty and who was not half as poor as any Samana. He treated the rich foreign merchant no differently from the servant who shaved him and the street vendor by whom he let himself be cheated of small change when he bought bananas. When Kamaswami came to him to complain of his worries or to reproach him over some deal, he listened curiously and cheerfully, wondered at him, tried to understand him, let him be a little in the right, just as much as seemed indispensable to him, and turned away from him to the next person who wanted him. And many came to him, many to trade with him, many to cheat him, many to sound him out, many to appeal to his pity, many to hear his advice. He gave advice, he pitied, he gave gifts, he let himself be cheated a little, and this whole game, and the passion with which all people played this game, occupied his thoughts just as much as the gods and Brahman had once occupied them.

At times he sensed, deep in his breast, a dying, quiet voice that quietly admonished, quietly lamented, so that he barely heard it. Then for an hour he would become aware that he was leading a strange life, that he was doing nothing but things that were merely a game, that he was cheerful, to be sure, and sometimes felt joy, but that real life was nevertheless flowing past him and not touching him. As a ball player plays with his balls, so he played with his business, with the people around him, watched them, found his amusement in them; with his heart, with the source of his being, he was not in it. The source ran somewhere, as if far away from him, ran and ran invisibly, had nothing more to do with his life. And a few times he was frightened by such thoughts and wished that it might be granted to him, too, to take part in all the childlike doings of the day with passion and with his heart, to live really, to act really, to enjoy and to live really, instead of only standing to one side like this as a spectator. But again and again he came back to the beautiful Kamala, learned the art of love, practiced the cult of pleasure, in which more than anywhere else giving and taking become one, chatted with her, learned from her, gave her advice, received advice. She understood him better than Govinda had once understood him; she was more like him.

Once he said to her: “You are like me; you are different from most people. You are Kamala, nothing else, and within you there is a stillness and refuge into which you can go at any hour and be at home with yourself, just as I can. Few people have that, and yet all could have it.”

“Not all people are clever,” said Kamala.

“No,” said Siddhartha, “that is not what it depends on. Kamaswami is just as clever as I am and yet has no refuge in himself. Others have it who in understanding are little children. Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf that blows and turns through the air, and sways, and tumbles to the ground. But others, a few, are like stars; they go a fixed course, no wind reaches them; they have their law and their course within themselves. Among all the scholars and Samanas, of whom I knew many, there was one of this kind, a perfect one; I can never forget him. It is that Gotama, the Exalted One, the proclaimer of that teaching. A thousand disciples hear his teaching every day, follow his precepts every hour, but they are all falling leaves; they do not have teaching and law within themselves.”

Kamala looked at him with a smile. “Again you are talking about him,” she said; “again you are having Samana thoughts.”

Siddhartha was silent, and they played the game of love, one of the thirty or forty different games Kamala knew. Her body was pliant as a jaguar’s, and as a hunter’s bow; whoever had learned love from her was versed in many pleasures, many secrets. For a long time she played with Siddhartha, lured him, pushed him away, forced him, held him in her embrace, rejoiced in his mastery, until he was conquered and rested exhausted at her side.

The courtesan bent over him, looked long into his face, into his eyes, which had grown tired.

“You are the best lover,” she said thoughtfully, “that I have seen. You are stronger than others, more pliant, more willing. You have learned my art well, Siddhartha. Someday, when I am older, I want to have a child by you. And yet, my dear, you have remained a Samana; and yet you do not love me, you love no one. Isn’t that so?”

“It may well be so,” said Siddhartha wearily. “I am like you. You do not love either—how else could you practice love as an art? People of our kind perhaps cannot love. The child people can; that is their secret.”