Siddhartha

Hesse's 1922 novel follows Siddhartha, a Brahmin's son in ancient India, through successive attempts to reach understanding. He leaves home to become an ascetic, meets the Buddha and declines to become his follower on the grounds that enlightenment cannot be transmitted through teaching, enters the commercial and sensual world as a merchant and lover, becomes wealthy and disgusted, contemplates suicide, and finally lives as a ferryman beside a river where he reaches the understanding he sought.

The argument is stated explicitly in Siddhartha's refusal of the Buddha. He accepts that the Buddha has attained what he claims, and argues precisely from that acceptance that the attainment came from personal experience which no doctrine can transfer. Wisdom, in Hesse's formulation, cannot be communicated, and knowledge can.

The commercial section is the part business readers respond to. Siddhartha succeeds at trade because he is indifferent to its outcomes, which makes him better at it than people who need the results, and then is gradually captured by the habits of wealth until he cannot distinguish himself from the people he had considered children. The river functions as the book's central image and Hesse works it hard, particularly the idea that time is not real and that everything exists simultaneously.

The novel is short and the prose in translation is spare. Hesse was writing from a European reading of Indian religion during a period of Western interest in Eastern thought, and scholars note that it reflects that reading rather than the traditions themselves. The claim that wisdom cannot be taught is the argument readers take from it, and it applies directly to anyone who expects instruction to substitute for experience.