The Ferryman

I will stay by this river, thought Siddhartha; it is the same one I once crossed on my way to the child people; a friendly ferryman took me across then; I will go to him; from his hut my way once led me into a new life, which has now grown old and is dead—may my present way, my present new life, also take its start there!

Tenderly he looked into the flowing water, into the transparent green, into the crystal lines of its mysterious design. He saw bright pearls rising from the depths, quiet bubbles floating on the mirror of the surface, the blue of the sky pictured in it. With a thousand eyes the river looked at him, with green ones, with white ones, with crystal ones, with sky-blue ones. How he loved this water, how it delighted him, how grateful he was to it! In his heart he heard the voice speaking, which was newly awakened, and it said to him: Love this water! Stay by it! Learn from it! Oh yes, he wanted to learn from it, he wanted to listen to it. Whoever understood this water and its secrets, so it seemed to him, would understand much else besides, many secrets, all secrets.

But of the river’s secrets he saw only one today, and it gripped his soul. He saw: this water ran and ran, ran on and on, and yet was always there, was always and at all times the same and yet new at every moment! Oh, whoever grasped this, understood this! He did not understand and grasp it; he only felt an intimation stirring, a distant memory, divine voices.

Siddhartha rose; the gnawing of hunger in his body was becoming unbearable. Absorbed, he wandered on, up the path along the bank, against the current, listened to the current, listened to the growling hunger in his body.

When he reached the ferry, the boat was just lying ready, and the same ferryman who had once taken the young Samana across the river was standing in the boat; Siddhartha recognized him; he too had aged greatly.

“Will you take me across?” he asked.

The ferryman, astonished to see so distinguished a man walking alone and on foot, took him into the boat and pushed off.

“You have chosen a beautiful life for yourself,” said the passenger. “It must be beautiful to live by this water every day and to travel on it.”

Smiling, the oarsman swayed: “It is beautiful, sir; it is as you say. But is not every life, is not every work beautiful?”

“That may well be. But I envy you yours.”

“Ah, you would soon lose your taste for it. It is nothing for people in fine clothes.”

Siddhartha laughed. “Once already today I have been looked at because of my clothes, looked at with distrust. Ferryman, won’t you take these clothes, which are a burden to me, off my hands? For you must know that I have no money to pay you a fare.”

“The gentleman is joking,” laughed the ferryman.

“I am not joking, friend. Look, once before you took me across this water in your boat for nothing, for the gods’ sake. So do it today too, and take my clothes for it.”

“And does the gentleman mean to travel on without clothes?”

“Ah, what I would like best is not to travel on at all. What I would like best, ferryman, is for you to give me an old apron and keep me with you as your helper, or rather as your apprentice, for first I must learn to handle the boat.”

For a long time the ferryman looked at the stranger, searching.

“Now I recognize you,” he said at last. “Once you slept in my hut; it is long ago, more than twenty years ago, it may well be; and I took you across the river, and we parted like good friends. Weren’t you a Samana? I can no longer remember your name.”

“My name is Siddhartha, and I was a Samana when you saw me last.”

“Then be welcome, Siddhartha. My name is Vasudeva. You will, I hope, be my guest today too and sleep in my hut, and tell me where you come from and why your fine clothes are such a burden to you.”

They had reached the middle of the river, and Vasudeva leaned harder into the oar to make headway against the current. He worked calmly, his gaze on the bow of the boat, with powerful arms. Siddhartha sat and watched him, and remembered how once before, on that last day of his time as a Samana, love for this man had stirred in his heart. Gratefully he accepted Vasudeva’s invitation. When they landed at the bank, he helped him tie the boat to the stakes; then the ferryman asked him into the hut, offered him bread and water, and Siddhartha ate with relish, and ate with relish too of the mangoes Vasudeva offered him.

Afterward, toward sunset, they sat down on a tree trunk by the bank, and Siddhartha told the ferryman his origins and his life, as he had seen it before his eyes today, in that hour of despair. His telling lasted deep into the night.

Vasudeva listened with great attention. Listening, he took everything into himself, origins and childhood, all the learning, all the seeking, all the joy, all the distress. This was one of the greatest of the ferryman’s virtues: he knew how to listen as few people do. Though Vasudeva spoke not a word, the speaker felt how he let his words into himself, quietly, openly, waiting, how he lost none of them, awaited none with impatience, set neither praise nor blame beside them, only listened. Siddhartha felt what happiness it is to confess oneself to such a listener, to sink into his heart one’s own life, one’s own seeking, one’s own suffering.

But toward the end of Siddhartha’s story, when he spoke of the tree by the river, and of his deep fall, of the holy Om, and of how after his sleep he had felt such love for the river, the ferryman listened with doubled attention, completely and wholly given over to it, with his eyes closed.

But when Siddhartha fell silent, and there had been a long stillness, Vasudeva said: “It is as I thought. The river has spoken to you. It is your friend too; it speaks to you too. That is good, that is very good. Stay with me, Siddhartha, my friend. I once had a wife; her bed was beside mine, but she died long ago; I have lived alone for a long time. Now live with me; there is room and food enough for both.”

“I thank you,” said Siddhartha, “I thank you and accept. And I thank you for this too, Vasudeva, that you have listened to me so well! Rare are the people who know how to listen. And I have met no one who knew it as you do. In this too I will learn from you.”

“You will learn it,” said Vasudeva, “but not from me. The river taught me to listen; you too will learn it from the river. It knows everything, the river; everything can be learned from it. Look, you have already learned this too from the water: that it is good to strive downward, to sink, to seek the depths. The rich and distinguished Siddhartha becomes a hired oarsman, the learned Brahmin Siddhartha becomes a ferryman: this too you have been told by the river. You will learn the other thing from it as well.”

Siddhartha spoke, after a long pause: “What other thing, Vasudeva?”

Vasudeva rose. “It has grown late,” he said; “let us go to sleep. I cannot tell you the other thing, O friend. You will learn it; perhaps you already know it. Look, I am not a learned man; I do not know how to speak, nor do I know how to think. I only know how to listen and to be devout; I have learned nothing else. If I could say it and teach it, I might be a wise man, but as it is, I am only a ferryman, and my task is to take people across this river. I have taken many across, thousands, and to all of them my river has been nothing but an obstacle on their journeys. They traveled for money and business, and to weddings, and on pilgrimages, and the river was in their way, and the ferryman was there to get them quickly over the obstacle. But for some among the thousands, a very few, four or five, the river has ceased to be an obstacle; they have heard its voice, they have listened to it, and the river has become holy to them, as it has become to me. Now let us go to rest, Siddhartha.”

Siddhartha stayed with the ferryman and learned to work the boat, and when there was nothing to do at the ferry, he worked with Vasudeva in the rice field, gathered wood, picked the fruit of the banana trees. He learned to make an oar, and learned to mend the boat, and to weave baskets, and was glad about everything he learned, and the days and months ran swiftly away. But more than Vasudeva could teach him, the river taught him. From it he learned unceasingly. Above all he learned from it to listen, to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without wishing, without judgment, without opinion.

He lived in friendship beside Vasudeva, and now and then they exchanged words, few and long-considered words. Vasudeva was no friend of words; Siddhartha seldom succeeded in moving him to speak.

“Have you,” he asked him once, “have you too learned that secret from the river: that there is no time?”

Vasudeva’s face was suffused with a bright smile.

“Yes, Siddhartha,” he said. “This is what you mean, isn’t it: that the river is everywhere at once, at its source and at its mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that for it there is only the present, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future?”

“That is it,” said Siddhartha. “And when I had learned it, I looked at my life, and it too was a river, and the boy Siddhartha was separated from the man Siddhartha and from the old man Siddhartha only by shadows, not by anything real. Siddhartha’s former births, too, were no past, and his death and his return to Brahma no future. Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has being and presence.”

Siddhartha spoke with delight; this enlightenment had made him deeply happy. Oh, was not all suffering time, was not all self-tormenting and self-fearing time, was not everything hard, everything hostile in the world gone and overcome as soon as one had overcome time, as soon as one could think time away? He had spoken with delight, but Vasudeva only smiled at him radiantly and nodded his assent; silently he nodded, passed his hand over Siddhartha’s shoulder, turned back to his work.

And once again, when the river had swollen in the rainy season and was roaring mightily, Siddhartha said: “Isn’t it true, O friend, that the river has many voices, very many voices? Does it not have the voice of a king, and of a warrior, and of a bull, and of a night bird, and of a woman giving birth, and of a man sighing, and a thousand other voices besides?”

“It is so,” Vasudeva nodded; “all the voices of creatures are in its voice.”

“And do you know,” Siddhartha went on, “what word it speaks when you succeed in hearing all its ten thousand voices at once?”

Vasudeva’s face laughed with happiness; he bent toward Siddhartha and spoke the holy Om into his ear. And this was exactly what Siddhartha too had heard.

And as time went on, his smile grew more and more like the ferryman’s, grew almost as radiant, almost as suffused with happiness, shining just as much from a thousand little wrinkles, just as childlike, just as old. Many travelers, when they saw the two ferrymen, took them for brothers. Often in the evening they sat together on the tree trunk by the bank, were silent, and both listened to the water, which for them was not water but the voice of life, the voice of what is, of what is eternally becoming. And it happened at times that both of them, listening to the river, thought of the same things, of a conversation from the day before yesterday, of one of their travelers whose face and fate occupied them, of death, of their childhood, and that both of them, at the same moment, when the river had said something good to them, looked at each other, both thinking exactly the same thing, both made happy by the same answer to the same question.

Something went out from the ferry and from the two ferrymen that many of the travelers sensed. It happened at times that a traveler, after looking into the face of one of the ferrymen, began to tell his life, told of sorrow, confessed evil, asked for comfort and advice. It happened at times that someone asked permission to spend an evening with them to listen to the river. It also happened that curious people came who had been told that two wise men lived at this ferry, or magicians, or holy men. The curious asked many questions, but they got no answers, and they found neither magicians nor wise men; they found only two friendly little old men who seemed to be mute and somewhat odd and simple-minded. And the curious laughed, and talked among themselves about how foolish and credulous the common people were to spread such empty rumors.

The years went by and no one counted them. Then one day monks came on pilgrimage, followers of Gotama, the Buddha, who asked to be taken across the river, and from them the ferrymen learned that they were hurrying back to their great teacher, for the news had spread that the Exalted One was mortally ill and would soon die his last human death, to enter into deliverance. Not long afterward a new band of monks came on pilgrimage, and then another, and the monks as well as most of the other travelers and wanderers spoke of nothing but Gotama and his approaching death. And as people stream from everywhere and from all sides to a military campaign or to the coronation of a king, and gather in swarms like ants, so they streamed, as if drawn by a spell, to the place where the great Buddha was awaiting his death, where the tremendous thing was to happen and the great Perfected One of a world age was to enter into glory.

Siddhartha thought much in this time of the dying sage, the great teacher, whose voice had admonished nations and awakened hundreds of thousands, whose voice he too had once heard, whose holy face he too had once beheld with reverence. He thought of him kindly, saw his way to perfection before his eyes, and remembered with a smile the words he had once, as a young man, addressed to him, the Exalted One. They had been proud and precocious words, so it seemed to him; he remembered them with a smile. For a long time now he had known that he was no longer separated from Gotama, whose teaching he had nevertheless been unable to accept. No, no teaching could be accepted by one who truly sought, one who truly wanted to find. But he who has found could approve of any teaching, any at all, any way, any goal; nothing separated him any longer from all the thousands of others who lived in the eternal, who breathed the divine.

On one of these days, when so many were making the pilgrimage to the dying Buddha, Kamala too made the pilgrimage to him, once the most beautiful of courtesans. Long ago she had withdrawn from her former life, had given her garden to Gotama’s monks, had taken her refuge in the teaching, was among the women friends and benefactors of the pilgrims. Together with the boy Siddhartha, her son, she had set out on the news of Gotama’s approaching death, in simple clothes, on foot. She was on her way along the river with her little son; but the boy soon grew tired, wanted to go back home, wanted to rest, wanted to eat, became defiant and tearful.

Kamala often had to rest with him; he was used to asserting his will against hers; she had to feed him, had to comfort him, had to scold him. He did not understand why he had had to set out with his mother on this toilsome and sad pilgrimage, to an unknown place, to a strange man who was holy and who was dying. Let him die; what did that matter to the boy?

The pilgrims were not far now from Vasudeva’s ferry when little Siddhartha once again forced his mother to stop and rest. She herself, Kamala, was tired too, and while the boy chewed on a banana, she crouched down on the ground, closed her eyes a little, and rested. But suddenly she let out a wailing cry; the boy looked at her in fright and saw her face blanched with horror, and from under her dress a small black snake slipped away, by which Kamala had been bitten.

Now they both ran hurriedly along the road to reach people, and got as far as the neighborhood of the ferry; there Kamala collapsed and could go no farther. But the boy set up a pitiful wailing, kissing and hugging his mother in between, and she too joined in his loud cries for help, until the sounds reached the ear of Vasudeva, who was standing by the ferry. He came quickly, took the woman in his arms, carried her into the boat; the boy ran along; and soon they all arrived at the hut, where Siddhartha stood at the hearth, just lighting a fire. He looked up and saw first the face of the boy, which strangely reminded him of something, recalled something forgotten. Then he saw Kamala, whom he recognized at once, though she lay unconscious in the ferryman’s arms, and now he knew that it was his own son whose face had so reminded him, and his heart stirred in his breast.

Kamala’s wound was washed, but it was already black and her body swollen; a healing potion was poured into her mouth. Her consciousness returned; she lay on Siddhartha’s bed in the hut, and bending over her stood Siddhartha, who had once loved her so much. It seemed to her a dream; smiling, she looked into her friend’s face; only slowly did she grasp her situation, remember the bite, call anxiously for the boy.

“He is with you; do not worry,” said Siddhartha.

Kamala looked into his eyes. She spoke with a heavy tongue, paralyzed by the poison. “You have grown old, my dear,” she said; “you have turned gray. But you are like the young Samana who once came to me in the garden without clothes, with dusty feet. You are much more like him than you were back then, when you left me and Kamaswami. In your eyes you are like him, Siddhartha. Ah, I have grown old too, old—did you still know me?”

Siddhartha smiled: “I knew you at once, Kamala, my dear.”

Kamala pointed to her boy and said: “Did you know him too? He is your son.”

Her eyes wandered and fell shut. The boy wept; Siddhartha took him on his knees, let him weep, stroked his hair, and at the sight of the child’s face a Brahmin prayer came to his mind, which he had learned long ago when he himself was a little boy. Slowly, in a singing voice, he began to speak it; the words came flowing to him out of the past and his childhood. And under his singsong the boy grew calm, still sobbed now and then, and fell asleep. Siddhartha laid him on Vasudeva’s bed. Vasudeva stood at the hearth cooking rice. Siddhartha cast him a glance, which he returned with a smile.

“She will die,” Siddhartha said softly.

Vasudeva nodded; the firelight from the hearth ran over his friendly face.

Once more Kamala returned to consciousness. Pain distorted her face; Siddhartha’s eye read the suffering on her mouth, on her pallid cheeks. Quietly he read it, attentively, waiting, absorbed in her suffering. Kamala felt it; her gaze sought his eye.

Looking at him, she said: “Now I see that your eyes have changed too. They have become quite different. By what, then, do I still know that you are Siddhartha? It is you, and it is not you.”

Siddhartha did not speak; his eyes looked quietly into hers.

“You have reached it?” she asked. “You have found peace?”

He smiled and laid his hand on hers.

“I see it,” she said, “I see it. I too will find peace.”

“You have found it,” Siddhartha said in a whisper.

Kamala looked steadily into his eyes. She thought of how she had wanted to make the pilgrimage to Gotama, to see the face of a Perfected One, to breathe his peace, and how instead of him she had now found this man, and how it was good, just as good as if she had seen the other. She wanted to tell him this, but her tongue no longer obeyed her will. Silently she looked at him, and he saw the life go out in her eyes. When the last pain filled her eye and broke it, when the last shudder ran over her limbs, his finger closed her lids.

For a long time he sat and looked at her face, gone to its rest. For a long time he gazed at her mouth, her old, tired mouth with the lips grown thin, and remembered that once, in the springtime of his years, he had likened this mouth to a freshly opened fig. For a long time he sat, read in the pale face, in the tired wrinkles, filled himself with the sight, saw his own face lying just so, just as white, just as extinguished, and at the same time saw his face and hers young, with the red lips, with the burning eye, and the feeling of presence and simultaneity pervaded him completely, the feeling of eternity. 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 shed where their goat stood, the two old men made up a bed of straw, and Vasudeva lay down to sleep. But Siddhartha went outside and sat the night in front of the hut, listening to the river, washed around by the past, touched and embraced by all the times of his life at once. Now and then, though, he rose, went to the door of the hut, and listened to hear whether the boy was sleeping.

Early in the morning, even before the sun was visible, Vasudeva came out of the shed and stepped up to his friend.

“You have not slept,” he said.

“No, Vasudeva. I sat here; I listened to the river. It has told me much; it has filled me deeply with the healing thought, with the thought of unity.”

“You have known sorrow, Siddhartha, but I see that no sadness has come into your heart.”

“No, my dear, how should I be sad? I, who was rich and happy, have now become still richer and happier. My son has been given to me.”

“Your son is welcome to me too. But now, Siddhartha, let us get to work; there is much to do. Kamala has died on the same bed on which my wife once died. On the same hill, too, we will build Kamala’s funeral pyre, on which I once built my wife’s funeral pyre.”

While the boy was still asleep, they built the funeral pyre.