And so it isn’t surprising that Hermann Hesse-who clearly is an armchair mystic-should seemingly know nothing of the monotheistic sects which form the real living core of Hindu philosophy and it’s also not surprising that God the Person barely gets a nod in Hesse’s book. Max Muller, and even going back before him, the prejudices and arrogances of the narrowly scholastic community have filtered out the devotional aspects of Vedic culture in bringing the Sacred texts of India to the West. Other than the sublime impersonal, the scholars see only a bewildering pantheon of “many gods,” which seems to be such an annoyance to them that they’ve never bothered to look into that “pantheon” very seriously or open-mindedly.īeginning with F. The scholars have taken Sankaracharya as the greatest thinker in Vedic history, and they have developed and lauded his theories regarding the impersonal, immutable, undifferentiated nature of the Absolute with such fervor, that the people of the West-who are, after all, at the mercy of the scholarly sect-have come to believe that Sri Sankara’s teaching is THE Hindu philosophy. This is no small omission, for we must understand that Vaishnavism-the Devotional Service of God-has always been and remains even today the mainstream of Vedic thought.Įxcept for scholars. There is never a trace of Vaishnavism in SIDDHARTHA the book, nor the least tendency toward worship of one Supreme Being within the heart of Siddhartha the character.

There are, it would seem, two streams of religious or philosophical thought through which Siddhartha wades during his lifetime: one is the polytheism of his family and the established Brahminical order the other is the impersonal “merging” into the Absolute, dear to the ascetics. To begin with, Hermann Hesse’s conception of the Hindu era in which his characters live is straight from an encyclopedia. C., and the characters are all Indians and, in fact, even though the Message and Meaning of the book are supposed to be timeless and without designation-every line and page seems to crackle with European Heaven, European Hell, European misconceptions about both Vedic doctrine and Hindu everyday life, and above all, European cynicism regarding “reality.” SIDDHARTHA could only have been written by a European scholar, and even though the setting is India, circa the start of the 5th Century B. SIDDHARTHA, a novel by Hermann Hesse 153 pps New Directions Books, $1.15. To Rupamanjari, Who Knows the Heart of Lord Chaitanya.SIDDHARTHA, a novel by Hermann Hesse - Book Review.Rioting at Columbia University 1968 - Editorials.

Siddhartha hermann hesse review