Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

We will discuss Siddhartha and its extraordinary spiritual journey that helped Herman Hesse win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.

We will discuss his leaving home, experimenting with asceticism, encountering the Buddha, life with Kamala, renunciation and despair, and finding wisdom from the river.

We will ask how Siddhartha's journey compares to that of Siddhartha Gautama -the Buddha himself. Siddhartha is not purely Buddhist but instead offers a unique perspective with many East-meets-West aspects, such as the 19th-century European idea of Nature herself as a teacher.

Some see Siddhartha as mainly following the kind of hero's journey that Joseph Campbell wrote about. However, a difference between his journey and that of others is that Siddhartha never comes home. We may touch on that and the other things mentioned or whatever else we would like to talk about.

Editions of Siddhartha are available at Barnes and Noble and other outlets; audiobook versions run for about five hours. ( I like the audiobook versions myself.)