Siddhartha...from the Internet

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thought this will be interesting to those who have not read this for a long

time...

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From Siddhartha, A New Translation, by Sherab Chodzin Kohn, Shambala, 2000

 

Now he looked at people differently than he had before--less cleverly,

with less pride, yet more warmly, with more curiosity and caring. When he

took travelers of the usual kind across the river, child people--traders,

warriors, women--these people no longer seemed alien to him, as they once

had. He understood them, he shared their life, a life guided not by ideas

and insights but only by impulses and desires. He felt as they did. Although

he was nearer to perfection and bore his last wound, it nevertheless seemed

to him that these people were his brothers. Their vanities, appetites, and

absurd traits had lost their absurdity for him. These traits had become

comprehensible, lovable; he even experienced them as worthy of respect. The

blind love of a mother for her child, the ignorant, blind pride of a

conceited father over his only little son, the raw hunger of vain, young

women for jewelry and the admiring looks of men--all these impulses,! all

these childish qualities, all these simple and foolish but incredibly

powerful, intensely vivid, forcefully dominant impulses and cravings were no

longer childishness for Siddhartha. He saw that people lived for them,

achieve an endless amount for them, travel, wage war, suffer, and persevere

unendingly for them. And he could love them for that. He saw life, that

which is living, the indestructible essence, Brahman, in all of their

passions, in each of their deeds. These people were worthy of love and

admiration in their blind loyalty, in their blind strength and tenacity.

There was nothing they lacked. The wise man and thinker had nothing over

them except one trifle, one little tiny thing: the awareness, the conscious

idea, of the unity of all life.

 

And Siddhartha even doubted many a time that this knowledge, this idea, was

so very valuable--was it not perhaps an example of the childishness of the

think people, the intellectual version of the child people? The people of !

the world were the equals of the sages in all else, were often far superior

to them, just as animals are often superior to human beings in their tough,

unerring

accomplishment of the necessary.

There slowly bloomed and ripened in Siddhartha the realization and

knowledge of what wisdom, the object of his long quest, really was. It

was nothing more than a readiness of the soul, a mysterious knack: the

ability at every moment in the midst of life to think the thought of

unity, to feel and breathe unity.

 

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