Siddhartha and Govinda find the Samanas and join their fellowship.
They live a life of deprivation.
They ate once a day, in which they must beg and be dependent on the generosity of villagers, and they wore only loin cloths and cloaks.
Soon Siddhartha became thin and ravaging with hunger.
Nothing stimulated him any more. Everything he encountered seemed fake and worthless.
Everything was unworthy in his eyes, everything lied, everything stank, everything stank of lies, everything shammed meaning and happiness and beauty, and everything was unacknowledged decay. The world tasted bitter. Life was torture.
Siddhartha's one goal is to become empty. To have no desire, no dreams, no sorry, but also no joy. To be completely free of all feeling and emotion. He wanted to "find peace with an emptier heart, to be open to miracles in unselfed thinking."
His reasoning: When every drive and every mania in the heart had fallen silent, then the ultimate was bound to awaken.
The ultimate? I am guessing that the ultimate is the ultimate God. The one true deity that is present in all life. And Siddhartha is solely focused on finding a way to be present/aware/encounter the ultimate. He tried to find paths that led away from his ego.
So Siddhartha slowly learns to master pain, master desire, master fatigue and exhaustion, master hunger,. He meditates for hours until he is free of all thinking and his mind is empty of all notions of feeling. But no matter how much he tried, and how much he mastered, he was always led back to his ego. He always ended thinking of something in the current, something he was experiencing.
Siddhartha begins to question what all of his meditating and fasting did. What was its purpose? Feeling no pain and no desire for a brief time is just like being drunk, numb for a period of time. It is easier to be free of all feelings by being a drunk than to escape pain the hard way, through meditation and deprivation, like Siddhartha did. His exercises only gave him brief numbing and he was non the wiser.
Siddhartha questions if being a Samana will really lead him to the goal he wants to achieve, "Now tell me Govinda," Siddhartha says, "are we really on the right path? Are we really approaching knowledge? - Or are we not perhaps going in a circle- we who thought we were escaping the cycle?"
"I suffer from thirst, O Govinda, and my thirst has not lessened on this long samana path." Siddhartha suffers from thirst for knowledge. He is constantly trying to understand, grasp, achieve something new, but the way of the samanas did not appease his need at all.
After three years (3 YEARS!) of being with the samanas, Govinda and Siddhartha decide to leave after hearing about a Gautama, the Buddha who was rumored to have supreme knowledge, that he remembered his earlier lives, that he had reached Nirvana, and most importantly, that he would never return to the cycle. This news obviously perked Siddhartha's interest, but he ventured toward the place of Buddha with some skepticism, "I have become weary and distrustful of teaching and learning, and that Ihave little faith in words that come to, us from teachers." Siddhartha is scared that all that there is to life, are experiences he has already discovered. "I believe we have already tasted the finest fruit of this Teaching.'
When it comes time to say goodbye to the samanas, Siddhartha makes a lead samana spell bound with just a look. The old man is powerless under Siddhartha's gaze and wished Siddhartha a good journey.
When Govinda realizes the power that Siddhartha developed while in the care of the samanas, he says that Siddhartha could have soon learned to walk on water, in which Siddhartha replied, "Let old samanas content themselves with such tricks."
Siddhartha is not interested in tricks or making shows or getting attention. He wants true knowledge for himself which makes his quest so much more real for onlookers. He wants to reach Nirvana, not for the title or to brag about it, but for his own understanding, which makes his journey selfless in a way.
While reading this book, I keep being reminded of "Candide" in how simple the structure is. "Candide" is written in a way that children can read it, which makes the concepts so obvious and makes readers feel like idiots for not implementing the message of the story earlier in their lives.
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