Samsara

For a long time Siddhartha had lived the life of the world and its pleasures without belonging to it. His senses, which he had killed in the hot Samana years, had awakened again; he had tasted wealth, tasted lust, tasted power; yet for a long time he had still remained a Samana in his heart, and Kamala, the clever one, had seen this rightly. It was still the art of thinking, of waiting, of fasting that guided his life; the people of the world, the child people, had still remained strangers to him, as he was a stranger to them.

The years ran on; wrapped in well-being, Siddhartha hardly felt them dwindling. He had become rich; he had long owned a house of his own and servants of his own, and a garden outside the town by the river. People liked him; they came to him when they needed money or advice; but no one was close to him except Kamala.

That high, bright wakefulness which he had once experienced at the height of his youth, in the days after Gotama’s sermon, after the parting from Govinda, that tense expectation, that proud standing alone without teachings and without teachers, that supple readiness to hear the divine voice in his own heart, had gradually become a memory, had been transient; far off and faint the holy spring murmured, which had once been near, which had once murmured within himself. Much, it is true, that he had learned from the Samanas, that he had learned from Gotama, that he had learned from his father, the Brahmin, had remained in him for a long time: moderate living, joy in thinking, hours of meditation, secret knowledge of the self, of the eternal I that is neither body nor consciousness. Some of it had remained in him, but one thing after another had sunk down and become covered with dust. As the potter’s wheel, once set in motion, goes on turning for a long time and only slowly tires and comes to rest, so in Siddhartha’s soul the wheel of asceticism, the wheel of thinking, the wheel of discernment had gone on turning for a long time, was turning still, but it turned slowly and hesitantly and was close to a standstill. Slowly, as moisture seeps into the dying stump of a tree, slowly fills it and makes it rot, the world and sloth had seeped into Siddhartha’s soul; slowly it filled his soul, made it heavy, made it tired, lulled it to sleep. In return his senses had come alive; they had learned much, experienced much.

Siddhartha had learned to trade, to wield power over people, to amuse himself with women; he had learned to wear beautiful clothes, to command servants, to bathe in scented waters. He had learned to eat delicately and carefully prepared dishes, fish too, meat and fowl too, spices and sweets, and to drink the wine that makes one sluggish and forgetful. He had learned to play at dice and on the chessboard, to watch dancing girls, to have himself carried in a sedan chair, to sleep on a soft bed. But he had still felt himself different from the others and superior to them; he had always watched them with a little mockery, with a little mocking contempt, with that very contempt a Samana always feels for people of the world. When Kamaswami was ailing, when he was annoyed, when he felt insulted, when he was plagued by his merchant’s worries, Siddhartha had always looked on with mockery. Only slowly and imperceptibly, as the harvest seasons and rainy seasons went by, had his mockery grown more tired, had his superiority grown quieter. Only slowly, amid his growing riches, had Siddhartha himself taken on something of the ways of the child people, something of their childishness and of their anxiety. And yet he envied them, envied them all the more the more like them he became. He envied them the one thing he lacked and they had: the importance they were able to attach to their lives, the passion of their joys and fears, the anxious but sweet happiness of their eternal state of being in love. With themselves, with women, with their children, with honor or money, with plans or hopes, these people were always in love. But he did not learn this from them, precisely this, this child’s joy and child’s folly; he learned from them precisely the unpleasant things he himself despised. It happened more and more often that after an evening in company he lay in bed late in the morning and felt dull and tired. It happened that he grew annoyed and impatient when Kamaswami bored him with his worries. It happened that he laughed too loudly when he lost at dice. His face was still cleverer and more spiritual than others’, but it seldom laughed, and one after another it took on those features so often found in the faces of rich people, those features of discontent, of sickliness, of ill humor, of sloth, of lovelessness. Slowly the soul sickness of the rich took hold of him.

Like a veil, like a thin mist, weariness settled over Siddhartha, slowly, a little thicker every day, a little murkier every month, a little heavier every year. As a new garment grows old with time, with time loses its beautiful color, gets stains, gets creases, is frayed at the hems and here and there begins to show worn, threadbare places, so Siddhartha’s new life, which he had begun after his parting from Govinda, had grown old; so it lost color and luster as the years ran by; so creases and stains gathered on it; and hidden at the bottom, already peering out here and there in ugliness, disappointment and disgust lay waiting. Siddhartha did not notice. He noticed only that the bright and sure voice of his inner self, which had once awakened in him and had guided him again and again in his radiant times, had fallen silent.

The world had caught him, pleasure, covetousness, sloth, and finally even the vice he had always most despised and mocked as the most foolish: greed. Property too, possessions and wealth, had finally caught him; they were no longer a game and a trinket to him; they had become a chain and a burden. By a strange and cunning way Siddhartha had fallen into this last and most contemptible dependence: through dice. For from the time when he had ceased in his heart to be a Samana, Siddhartha began to play the game for money and valuables, which he had once joined in, smiling and offhand, as a custom of the child people, with growing fury and passion. He was a feared player; few dared to play against him, so high and brazen were his stakes. He played from the need of his heart; gambling away and squandering the wretched money gave him an angry joy; in no other way could he show his contempt for wealth, the merchants’ idol, more clearly and more scornfully. So he played high and without mercy, hating himself, mocking himself, raked in thousands, threw away thousands, gambled away money, gambled away jewelry, gambled away a country house, won again, gambled away again. That fear, that terrible and oppressive fear he felt while throwing the dice, while trembling over high stakes, that fear he loved and sought again and again to renew, again and again to heighten, again and again to tickle higher, for in this feeling alone did he still feel something like happiness, something like intoxication, something like heightened life in the midst of his sated, lukewarm, insipid life.

And after every great loss he thought of new wealth, pursued trade more eagerly, forced his debtors more strictly to pay, for he wanted to go on playing, he wanted to go on squandering, to go on showing his contempt for wealth. Siddhartha lost his composure in the face of losses, he lost his patience with late payers, lost his good nature toward beggars, lost his pleasure in giving away money and lending it to those who asked. He who gambled away ten thousand on one throw and laughed at it became stricter and pettier in trade, sometimes dreamed of money at night! And as often as he awoke from this ugly enchantment, as often as he saw his face in the mirror on the bedroom wall grown older and uglier, as often as shame and disgust overcame him, he fled further, fled into new gambling, fled into the numbing of lust, of wine, and from there back into the urge to pile up and acquire. In this senseless cycle he ran himself tired, ran himself old, ran himself sick.

Then once a dream warned him. He had spent the evening hours with Kamala, in her beautiful pleasure garden. They had sat under the trees, talking, and Kamala had spoken thoughtful words, words behind which a sadness and weariness lay hidden. She had asked him to tell her about Gotama, and could not hear enough of him, how pure his eye had been, how still and beautiful his mouth, how kind his smile, how peaceful his walk. For a long time he had had to tell her about the exalted Buddha, and Kamala had sighed and had said: “One day, perhaps soon, I too will follow this Buddha. I will give him my pleasure garden and take my refuge in his teaching.” But after that she had aroused him and bound him to her in the game of love with painful ardor, with bites and with tears, as if she wanted to press the last sweet drop once more from this vain, transient pleasure. Never had it become so strangely clear to Siddhartha how closely lust is akin to death. Then he had lain at her side, and Kamala’s face had been close to him, and under her eyes and beside the corners of her mouth he had read, more clearly than ever before, an anxious script, a script of fine lines, of faint furrows, a script that called to mind autumn and old age, just as Siddhartha himself, who was only in his forties, had already noticed gray hairs here and there among his black ones. Weariness was written on Kamala’s beautiful face, the weariness of walking a long road that has no happy goal, weariness and the beginning of wilting, and a hidden anxiety, not yet spoken, perhaps not even known yet: fear of old age, fear of autumn, fear of having to die. Sighing, he had taken leave of her, his soul full of displeasure and full of hidden anxiety.

Then Siddhartha had spent the night in his house with dancing girls and wine, had played the superior man before his peers, which he no longer was, had drunk much wine and sought his bed late after midnight, tired and yet excited, close to weeping and despair, and had long sought sleep in vain, his heart full of a misery he thought he could no longer bear, full of a disgust with which he felt himself saturated as with the lukewarm, repulsive taste of the wine, the too sweet, dreary music, the too soft smiles of the dancing girls, the too sweet scent of their hair and breasts. But more than by anything else he was disgusted by himself, by his scented hair, by the smell of wine on his mouth, by the slack weariness and listlessness of his skin. As when someone who has eaten or drunk far too much vomits it up again in torment and is still glad of the relief, so the sleepless man wished he could rid himself, in an enormous surge of disgust, of these pleasures, these habits, this whole senseless life, and of himself. Only at the light of morning and the waking of the first bustle in the street in front of his town house had he dozed off, had found for a few moments a half stupor, a hint of sleep. In those moments he had a dream:

Kamala kept a small, rare songbird in a golden cage. He dreamed of this bird. He dreamed: this bird, which always sang in the morning hour, had fallen silent, and as he noticed this, he stepped up to the cage and looked in; there the little bird was dead and lay stiff on the floor. He took it out, weighed it in his hand for a moment, and then threw it away, out into the lane, and at the same moment he was terribly frightened, and his heart ached, as if with this dead bird he had thrown away from himself all that was of value and all that was good.

Starting up out of this dream, he felt himself enveloped in deep sadness. Worthless, so it seemed to him, worthless and senseless was the way he had led his life; nothing living, nothing in any way precious or worth keeping had remained in his hands. He stood alone and empty, like a shipwrecked man on the shore.

Gloomily Siddhartha went to a pleasure garden that belonged to him, locked the gate, sat down under a mango tree, felt death in his heart and horror in his breast, sat and sensed how something in him was dying, wilting, coming to an end. Gradually he collected his thoughts, and in his mind he walked once more the whole way of his life, from the first days he could remember. When had he ever experienced happiness, felt true bliss? Oh yes, several times he had experienced such a thing. In his boyhood years he had tasted it, when he had won praise from the Brahmins, when he had distinguished himself in reciting the holy verses, in disputation with the learned, as an assistant at the sacrifice. Then he had felt it in his heart: “A way lies before you, to which you are called; the gods are waiting for you.” And again as a young man, when the ever higher-fleeing goal of all reflection had torn him out of the crowd of those striving like him and drawn him upward, when he wrestled in pain for the meaning of Brahman, when every piece of knowledge he attained only kindled new thirst in him, then again, in the midst of the thirst, in the midst of the pain, he had felt this same thing: “Onward! Onward! You are called!” He had heard this voice when he left his home and chose the life of a Samana, and again when he went away from the Samanas to that Perfected One, and away from him too into the unknown. How long it was since he had heard this voice, how long since he had reached any height; how flat and dreary his road had run, many long years, without a high goal, without thirst, without elevation, content with small pleasures and yet never satisfied! All these years, without knowing it himself, he had striven and longed to become a person like these many, like these children, and all the while his life had been far more wretched and poorer than theirs, for their goals were not his, nor their worries; this whole world of Kamaswami people had only been a game to him, after all, a dance one watches, a comedy. Kamala alone had been dear to him, had been precious to him—but was she still? Did he still need her, or she him? Were they not playing a game without end? Was it necessary to live for that? No, it was not necessary! This game was called Samsara, a game for children, a game perhaps lovely to play, once, twice, ten times—but over and over and over again?

Then Siddhartha knew that the game was over, that he could play it no longer. A shudder ran over his body; inside him, so he felt, something had died.

That whole day he sat under the mango tree, thinking of his father, thinking of Govinda, thinking of Gotama. Had he had to leave them in order to become a Kamaswami? He was still sitting there when night had fallen. When he looked up and saw the stars, he thought: “Here I sit under my mango tree, in my pleasure garden.” He smiled a little—was it necessary, then, was it right, was it not a foolish game, that he owned a mango tree, that he owned a garden?

He was done with this too; this too died in him. He rose, took leave of the mango tree, took leave of the pleasure garden. Since he had gone without food all day, he felt a violent hunger, and thought of his house in the town, of his room and bed, of the table with its dishes. He smiled wearily, shook himself, and took leave of these things.

In that same hour of the night Siddhartha left his garden, left the town, and never came back. For a long time Kamaswami, who believed he had fallen into the hands of robbers, had a search made for him. Kamala had no search made for him. When she learned that Siddhartha had disappeared, she was not surprised. Had she not always expected it? Was he not a Samana, a man without a home, a pilgrim? And she had felt this most of all at their last meeting, and in the midst of the pain of her loss she was glad that she had drawn him so close to her heart this last time, had felt herself so wholly possessed and pervaded by him once more.

When she received the first news of Siddhartha’s disappearance, she went to the window where she kept a rare songbird captive in a golden cage. She opened the door of the cage, took out the bird, and let it fly. For a long time she gazed after it, the flying bird. From that day on she received no more visitors and kept her house closed. But after some time she became aware that she was pregnant from her last time with Siddhartha.