The book, though, was not a track written by a devout Buddhist, but by German national Herman Hesse, who had taken the intellectual world of the young by storm in the late 1960's. Writing from the period between the world wars from the mess of the Wiemar Republic, his works were meditations on the meaning of the individual in this earthly span. No believer in the Super Man and the master race, he sought to find a reason for living in the dull and hopeless world of a fallen nation. In his book "Siddhartha," he sought to find solace in the wisdom of the Orient, seen by Europeans then as a perpetual motion machine of timeless traditions.
His Siddhartha was not the classic Buddha. As a young man, he was raised in the Buddhist tradition, before he left the monastery school for a life in the "world," in which he seemed to have little direction except to do. And do he did - in not caring for his own material success, he took such risks which such calm detachment that he became a very wealthy and influential man. He even had a courtesan, with whom he had a child, before he reached middle age and left the world for a quiet life as a river ferry man, where he lived simply and for the moment. At one point, the courtesan died and the child was sent to him for his care. There, the restless boy, always in search of excitement and external fulfillment, was patiently treated to the living teaching of his guru- like father.
I read the book sometime in my late teens, and so do not recall what happened to the boy - it seems to me that he, too, left to live in the world, thus repeating the cycle of training and experience before the (expectant) rejection of social status. It is a dream-like story and my mother was right - I was deeply affected by it. However, like most in the real world, I never came to live out its cycle. For Hesse, before the rejection of worldly things, the individual must fulfill the greatest goals of the world by obtaining all or most of what it desires - wealth, power, and sensual pleasure. It is only then that the mature rejection of that life can be complete, for until then there will be the nagging need for social and sensual fulfillment. The book, as with the circumstances of the Buddha's real life, call for a princely background of indulgence before such indulgence can be truly rejected. The Hindu caste system recognizes this, as only those of the upper castes are seemed fit for final realization. Karma is the cosmic law that backs such apparent unfairness.
The Middle Eastern religions have a different take on this - for weren't the Jews an oppressed people? Wasn't Jesus a carpenter? Wasn't Mohammed a mid-level merchant? But both traditions leave us wanting, I believe, for how many people do we know of any class who have rejected status and wealth - the fulfillment of desire - to live contently as a hermit? For Jesus, it was the rich who were cursed, but how many of the poor lived and live as saints, content with what they have and willing to let it all go?
I know what my mother's question really was - get moving, son! Give up this pseudo-mystic lifestyle and act! Be all that you can be! And while I can answer like Siddhartha that it is all worthless, and like Jesus that concern for earthly success is the antithesis of the good and holy life, I cannot pretend that I am ever content for long. The laid-back lifestyle has often been my excuse to simply be lazy, and in that there is no movement towards Truth, but rather an aimless rumbling around in a world of vague discontent. Mountains that I wanted to climb have never been climbed, things that I wanted to do will be left undone, and if I am honest, these undone things grate like a slight rubbing of a shoe on the heal. In time they raise blisters.
The greater truth remains, however - unlike Siddhartha, things of the world are seldom done with disinterest, and no matter the degree of a person's success, there is almost always a hill left to climb, a rubbing pebble in the shoe for all of us, rich or poor. The life of Hesse's Siddhartha is then more an allegory than anything else - a tale of truth given to the young, the partial turning away from that truth, and then a final embrace of that truth late in life - perhaps so late that it is not embraced until near death. Until then, we - most of us, anyway - continue to sigh for what we don't have. It is, as the Buddha said, a condition of our universe and our greatest reason for discontent. To slough it off is to open the door to real Truth. Perhaps it can only be done when we finally realize that death is for real, and that life is a passing gift meant for wonder, not transient success. Someday, I have read, we will all come to this realization, rich or poor. FK