Siddhartha meets Vasudeva the ferryman. He sees in Vasudeva a quality of peace that he associates with enlightenment. Vasudeva embodies that which Siddhartha has been looking for since he was a boy. His materialistic existence momentarily comes back to haunt him when Kamala approaches Siddhartha with their son. Kamala dies, leaving the son with Siddhartha. The son is a great disappointment who steals Siddhartha's money. Siddhartha has no choice or

What Siddhartha gained from his encounter with the ascetics was, ironically, a lesson about how asceticism is insufficient on its own to aid the quest for enlightenment. Asceticism was for Siddhartha like a drug: a means to escape the world or a promise of inner peace. The author describes Siddhartha's asceticism like an addiction in Chapter Two, describing the intense lifestyle as a predictable, perpetual cycle that leads the

One primary example of the common ground on both sides of Siddhartha's revelation is in his persistence at meditation, which Hesse is able to use accordingly to reflect a time and place where this was considered standard theological training. The already existent nature of this foundation in Hinduism, which Mossman describes as elucidating a status of 'religious prodigy' in Siddhartha, offers a natural passage into the search of inner-truth. In his

Siddhartha a Buddhist? Originally published in 1922 by German writer Hermann Hesse, the classic novel of personal discovery Siddhartha has since become one of the most widely read works of religious fiction ever written. By presenting the tale of a young man named Siddhartha coming of age in ancient India, the European-born and Christian-raised Hesse manages to portray mankind's collective yearning for spiritual satisfaction through a highly readable and relatable

Western civilization has been developing according to a set of coordinates that are entirely separated from the ones of its Eastern counterpart. The focus of this paper is to propose subjective psychologically-minded interpretations to a series of Asian stories and poems extracted from the traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. The storyline of Searching for Buddha begins with the account of a monk's lengthy and arduous journey towards finding Buddha. When

East/West An Analysis of Eastern Influence in Western Art The American/English poet T.S. Eliot references the Upanishad in his most famous poem "The Wasteland," a work that essentially chronicles the break-up of Western civilization and looks to Eastern philosophy for a kind of crutch in the wake of the abandonment of Western philosophy. Since then, Westerners, whether in literature or in film, have continued to look to the East for inspiration and