Om

For a long time the wound went on burning. Siddhartha had to take many a traveler across the river who had a son or a daughter along, and he saw none of them without envying him, without thinking: “So many, so many thousands possess this loveliest happiness—why not I? Even wicked people, even thieves and robbers have children, and love them, and are loved by them, all but me.” So simply, so without understanding he thought now; so like the child people had he become.

He looked at people differently now than before, less cleverly, less proudly, but more warmly, more curiously, more involved. When he took travelers of the ordinary kind across, child people, businessmen, warriors, womenfolk, these people did not seem foreign to him as they once had: he understood them, he understood and shared their life, which was guided not by thoughts and insights but solely by urges and wishes; he felt as they did. Though he was near perfection and bore his last wound, it still seemed to him that these child people were his brothers; their vanities, cravings, and absurdities lost their absurdity for him, became understandable, became lovable, became even worthy of reverence to him. The blind love of a mother for her child, the stupid, blind pride of a conceited father in his only little son, the blind, wild striving of a young, vain woman for jewelry and for the admiring eyes of men, all these urges, all these childish things, all these simple, foolish, but enormously strong, strongly living, strongly prevailing urges and cravings were no longer childish things for Siddhartha now; he saw people living for their sake, saw them achieving infinite things for their sake, making journeys, waging wars, suffering infinitely, enduring infinitely, and he could love them for it; he saw life, the living, the indestructible, Brahman, in each of their passions, each of their deeds. Lovable and admirable were these people in their blind loyalty, their blind strength and tenacity. They lacked nothing; the knowing one and thinker had nothing over them but one single trifle, one single tiny little thing: consciousness, the conscious thought of the unity of all life. And at many an hour Siddhartha even doubted whether this knowledge, this thought, was to be valued so very highly, whether it might not perhaps also be a childish thing of the thinking people, the thinking child people. In everything else the people of the world were the equals of the sage, were often far superior to him, just as animals too, in their tenacious, unswerving doing of what is necessary, can at some moments seem superior to human beings.

Slowly there blossomed, slowly there ripened in Siddhartha the insight, the knowledge of what wisdom actually was, of what the goal of his long seeking was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of being able, at every moment, in the midst of life, to think the thought of unity, to feel unity and breathe it in. Slowly this blossomed in him, shone back at him from Vasudeva’s old child’s face: harmony, knowledge of the eternal perfection of the world, smiling, unity.

But the wound still burned; longingly and bitterly Siddhartha thought of his son, nursed his love and tenderness in his heart, let the pain gnaw at him, committed all the follies of love. This flame did not go out of itself.

And one day, when the wound was burning fiercely, Siddhartha crossed the river, driven by longing, got out, and was resolved to go to the town and look for his son. The river flowed gently and softly; it was the dry season; but its voice sounded strange: it was laughing! It was laughing clearly. The river laughed; it laughed brightly and clearly at the old ferryman. Siddhartha stopped; he bent over the water to hear still better, and in the quietly moving water he saw his face mirrored, and in this mirrored face there was something that reminded him, something forgotten, and as he thought about it, he found it: this face resembled another, which he had once known and loved and also feared. It resembled the face of his father, the Brahmin. And he remembered how, long ago, as a young man, he had forced his father to let him go to the penitents, how he had taken leave of him, how he had gone and never come back. Had his father not suffered the same sorrow over him that he now suffered over his son? Had his father not died long ago, alone, without having seen his son again? Must he himself not expect this same fate? Was it not a comedy, a strange and stupid thing, this repetition, this running in a fateful circle?

The river laughed. Yes, so it was: everything came back that was not suffered and resolved to the end; the same sufferings were suffered over and over again. But Siddhartha got back into the boat and rowed back to the hut, thinking of his father, thinking of his son, laughed at by the river, at odds with himself, inclined to despair, and no less inclined to laugh aloud with it at himself and the whole world. Ah, the wound did not yet blossom; his heart still struggled against fate; serenity and victory did not yet shine from his sorrow. Yet he felt hope, and when he had returned to the hut, he felt an invincible longing to open himself to Vasudeva, to show him everything, to tell everything to him, the master of listening.

Vasudeva sat in the hut weaving a basket. He no longer went out with the ferryboat; his eyes were beginning to grow weak, and not only his eyes, his arms and hands too. Unchanged and flourishing were only the joy and the cheerful goodwill of his face.

Siddhartha sat down beside the old man; slowly he began to speak. What they had never spoken of he now told him: of his walk to the town that time, of the burning wound, of his envy at the sight of happy fathers, of his knowledge of the folly of such wishes, of his vain struggle against them. He reported everything; he could say everything, even the most painful; everything could be said, everything shown, he could tell it all. He showed his wound, told also of his flight today, how he had crossed the water, a childish runaway, resolved to walk to the town, how the river had laughed.

While he spoke, spoke for a long time, while Vasudeva listened with a quiet face, Siddhartha felt this listening of Vasudeva’s more strongly than he had ever felt it; he sensed how his pains, his anxieties flowed over to him, how his secret hope flowed over and came back to him from the other side. To show his wound to this listener was the same as bathing it in the river until it grew cool and became one with the river. While he was still speaking, still confessing and admitting, Siddhartha felt more and more that this was no longer Vasudeva, no longer a human being listening to him, that this motionless listener was taking his confession into himself as a tree takes in the rain, that this motionless one was the river itself, was God himself, was the eternal itself. And as Siddhartha stopped thinking of himself and his wound, this recognition of Vasudeva’s changed being took possession of him, and the more he felt it and entered into it, the less strange it became, the more he saw that everything was in order and natural, that Vasudeva had been like this for a long time, almost always, that only he himself had not fully recognized it, indeed that he himself was hardly different from him any longer. He felt that he now saw old Vasudeva as the people see the gods, and that this could not last; in his heart he began to take leave of Vasudeva. And all the while he went on speaking.

When he had finished speaking, Vasudeva turned his friendly gaze, grown somewhat weak, upon him, did not speak, silently radiated love and serenity toward him, understanding and knowledge. He took Siddhartha’s hand, led him to the seat on the bank, sat down with him, smiled at the river.

“You have heard it laugh,” he said. “But you have not heard everything. Let us listen; you will hear more.”

They listened. Softly sounded the many-voiced song of the river. Siddhartha looked into the water, and in the moving water images appeared to him: his father appeared, lonely, mourning for his son; he himself appeared, lonely, he too bound by the bonds of longing to his distant son; his son appeared, he too lonely, the boy, storming greedily along the burning course of his young wishes, each directed toward his goal, each possessed by the goal, each suffering. The river sang with a voice of suffering; longingly it sang, longingly it flowed toward its goal; plaintive sounded its voice.

“Do you hear?” asked Vasudeva’s mute gaze. Siddhartha nodded.

“Listen better!” whispered Vasudeva.

Siddhartha made an effort to listen better. The image of his father, his own image, the image of his son flowed into one another; Kamala’s image too appeared and dissolved, and the image of Govinda, and other images, and they flowed over into one another, all became the river, all strove as river toward the goal, longing, desiring, suffering, and the river’s voice sounded full of longing, full of burning woe, full of unquenchable desire. The river strove toward the goal; Siddhartha saw it hurrying, the river made of him and his own and of all the people he had ever seen; all the waves and waters hurried, suffering, toward goals, many goals, the waterfall, the lake, the rapids, the sea, and all the goals were reached, and each was followed by a new one, and the water turned to vapor and rose into the sky, turned to rain and poured down from the sky, became spring, became brook, became river, strove anew, flowed anew. But the longing voice had changed. It still sounded, full of suffering, seeking, but other voices joined it, voices of joy and of sorrow, good and evil voices, laughing and mourning ones, a hundred voices, a thousand voices.

Siddhartha listened. He was now all listener, wholly absorbed in listening, wholly empty, wholly taking in; he felt that he had now learned listening to the end. Often before he had heard all this, these many voices in the river; today it sounded new. Already he could no longer tell the many voices apart, not the glad from the weeping, not the childlike from the manly; they all belonged together, the lament of longing and the laughter of the knowing one, the cry of anger and the groaning of the dying, everything was one, everything was woven and knotted into everything else, entwined a thousandfold. And all of it together, all the voices, all the goals, all the yearning, all the sufferings, all the pleasure, all good and evil, all of it together was the world. All of it together was the river of what happens, was the music of life. And when Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this thousand-voiced song, when he listened neither to the sorrow nor to the laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one voice and enter into it with his self, but heard them all, heard the whole, the unity, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: perfection.

“Do you hear,” Vasudeva’s gaze asked again.

Brightly shone Vasudeva’s smile; it hovered radiant over all the wrinkles of his old face, as the Om hovered over all the voices of the river. Brightly shone his smile as he looked at his friend, and brightly now the same smile shone out on Siddhartha’s face too. His wound blossomed, his sorrow shone, his self had flowed into the unity.

In this hour Siddhartha stopped fighting with fate, stopped suffering. On his face blossomed the serenity of knowledge, which no will opposes any longer, which knows perfection, which is in accord with the river of what happens, with the stream of life, full of compassion, full of fellow joy, given over to the flowing, belonging to the unity.

When Vasudeva rose from the seat on the bank, when he looked into Siddhartha’s eyes and saw the serenity of knowledge shining in them, he touched Siddhartha’s shoulder lightly with his hand, in his careful and tender way, and said: “I have waited for this hour, my dear. Now that it has come, let me go. I have waited a long time for this hour; I have been Vasudeva the ferryman a long time. Now it is enough. Farewell, hut; farewell, river; farewell, Siddhartha!”

Siddhartha bowed deeply before the one taking his leave.

“I knew it,” he said softly. “You will go into the forests?”

“I am going into the forests, I am going into the unity,” said Vasudeva, radiant.

Radiant he went away; Siddhartha watched him go. With deep joy, with deep solemnity he watched him go, saw his steps full of peace, saw his head full of luster, saw his form full of light.