Siddhartha
Siddhartha is one of the greatest philosophical novels written by German-Swiss novelist, poet and painter Herman Hesse. It is a beautifully written story that begins as Siddhartha, son of an Indian Brahman, leaves his family and begins a lifelong journey towards Enlightenment. On the way he faces the entire range of human experience and emotion: he lives with ascetics, meets Gotama the Buddha, learns the art of love from Kamala the courtesan, and is transformed by the simple philosophy of the ferryman Vasudeva whose wisdom comes not from learned teachings but from observing the River. A major preoccupation of Hesse in writing Siddhartha was to cure his "sickness with life" by immersing himself in Indian philosophy such as that expounded in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. The reason the second half of the book took so long to write was that Hesse "had not experienced that transcendental state of unity to which Siddhartha aspires. In an attempt to do so, Hesse lived as a virtual semi-recluse and became totally immersed in the sacred teachings of both Hindu and Buddhist scriptures. His intention was to attain that 'completeness' which, in the novel, is the Buddha's badge of distinction. Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.
