Siddhartha, and the four people who paid

A man is chasing his son. The boy has run away from home, and to go after him the man has to cross a river. He looks down at the water, and the face looking back at him is his own father's.

Many years earlier, that man left his father to follow a dream. Now, after waking up again and again, he finally understands how much he wronged the old man by leaving him alone. That is Siddhartha at the river, and it is the moment all of his history comes full circle.

I finished Siddhartha almost a month before filming, which gave me a lot of time to think about him. This is where I landed: most people read it as a book about enlightenment, and I read a man who walked away from every person who loved him and called it a journey.

Why it read like a mirror

I turned 28 two months before this film. Looking at the 30-year milestone, I felt I had to become better in my thirties, so I gave myself two years: learn new skills like playing the guitar, read a lot of books, work out, and turn 30 proud of what I did with the time. I had also started this channel two months before, then stopped and procrastinated for two months. This film is me continuing from where I left off.

I feel like Siddhartha is very close to who I was early in life. So reading this book was like looking in a mirror.

I lost my father at 25, and I am trying to follow my dreams and find meaning in life, so I could relate to Siddhartha at many points, and honestly it was disturbing. Again and again he made a decision I was sure was leading in the wrong direction, and every time, the same thought crossed my mind: that I might be doing something wrong too.

The priest's son who wanted more than the texts

In the first chapter Siddhartha is a priest's son who already knows the Vedas. He does not want to wake up every morning, bathe, pray, and repeat that cycle until he dies. He feels there is something more to life and he wants to know the truth of it.

The texts already said the atman is everywhere and can be found in one's own heart. Siddhartha felt that knowledge from books was incomplete, and that real knowledge could only come from his own experience.

Up to this point I agreed with him completely. He was not satisfied with the way life was going and he wanted to know what existence actually meant.

Then he decides to leave home and become a Samana. He goes to his father and tells him he will live in the jungle, meditate, and eat only what he can beg. It is a life of real hardship, and not everyone could choose it.

His father refuses at first, because no father wants to let his son go knowing he will suffer. Siddhartha insists until his father gives in, and the answer his father gives him is the part I found heartbreaking: he says he does not know where the truth is, so go and find out. If you find the true meaning of life, come back and I will follow your teachings. And if you cannot find it, please do not hesitate to come back, and we will carry on our prayers the way we always have.

He never comes back.

His best friend Govinda goes with him, and I watched Govinda with real empathy. Govinda does not really know what he wants. All that matters to him is that Siddhartha finds the truth, because he believes that if he follows Siddhartha he will eventually find it too.

The Buddha, and the friend left behind

As Samanas they beg, meditate for hours, and walk on thorns until the blood dries on their skin and they no longer feel the pain. After a while Siddhartha decides this is not the meaning of life either. You cannot shield yourself from experience at the cost of even more pain.

Then they hear about the Buddha and go to listen to Gautama Buddha himself. Govinda is convinced at once that this is the man to follow, and that they should stay and become his followers.

Siddhartha tells him to stay if that is what he really wants. But he himself has realised that it is impossible to learn wisdom from someone else. The Buddha can teach you how to live. To become enlightened yourself, you have to walk the path yourself.

So he leaves Govinda there to become a monk and carries on alone. Walking the road alone, for the first time he thinks he has woken up.

That is the second person he walks away from.

Kamala, Kamaswami and the childish people

Now he decides the purpose of life is to experience everything, and the first thing he wants to learn is love. For that he finds Kamala.

Kamala tells him he has no nice clothes and no nice shoes, and if he wants to be her friend he needs money and a reputation. So she introduces him to Kamaswami, who teaches him how to do business.

In my opinion Siddhartha stays arrogant through all of this. To him the people around him are childish and do not know the true meaning of life. He trades without attachment, gets cheated, and laughs about it.

But gradually samsara, the world, corrupts him. After many years as a merchant with Kamala, he is addicted to wine. He wants to gamble. He feels empty. For years he thought he was better than these childish people, and now he realises he is the one who will never be able to love, while every naive person around him can, which is exactly why they are happier than he is.

When he meets Kamala for the last time she tells him she loves him. He answers that people like the two of them can never love anyone, because they are different. Even here he still thinks he is above everyone else. And this is the part that broke my heart: Kamala was pregnant with his son, and he did not know. She did not want him involved, because the world had already corrupted him.

He is rich now, with a large house, many servants and his own garden of fruit trees. He goes out, looks up at the stars, and thinks: "I am so lonely."

He leaves all of it, goes back to the river, sits under a coconut tree and, filled with guilt, thinks about ending his life right there. It is the lowest point of the story, and it felt worse to me because Kamala truly loved him, Kamaswami was a good business partner, and he could have found happiness in any of those moments if he had wanted it. He decided not to accept it.

The river, the ferryman and a son who would not listen

He stops, and he wakes up again. This time he listens to the river, which is the same at its source, in the middle and near the sea, and always flowing. Life is the same. You cannot change its course. You can only go with the flow and feel it.

There he meets Vasudeva for the second time, and the two of them work the river as ferrymen. Siddhartha now sees other people as equals and can love everyone.

When news spreads that Gautama Buddha is dying, Kamala goes on the pilgrimage too. On the way she is bitten by a snake. Vasudeva and Siddhartha find her, and though she dies, she leaves Siddhartha their son.

This is the most interesting moment in the book to me. Until now Siddhartha has lived completely free: he left his father, became a Samana, left the Samanas, became a merchant and then a ferryman, all by his own choice. Now, for the first time, he has a responsibility. He is a father, and even enlightened, he cannot ignore his son or step back from loving him.

He wants to teach the boy, who does not care what suffering or happiness is, and to him Siddhartha is the man who abandoned him and his mother. He says openly that he will become a robber or a murderer just to oppose him.

Then the boy runs away, Siddhartha goes after him, and we are back at the river and the father's face in the water. There Siddhartha accepts that you cannot change someone's fate. Whatever you learned from your own experience, you cannot hand that wisdom to your son just because you love him. He has to live his own life, make his own mistakes and suffer for himself. Siddhartha lets him go, and that is when he truly becomes awakened.

In the last chapter Govinda finds him once more and asks for advice. Siddhartha tells him that information can be passed on and wisdom cannot. He asks Govinda to kiss his forehead, Govinda sees the Vishwaroop of Vishnu, and then Govinda leaves.

My actual problem with this book

Reading it, I realised how easily we get caught up in our own thoughts.

Sometimes we think that something is so valuable to us that we forget about the lives of other people who are also connected to us.

If Siddhartha had not chosen the path of enlightenment, he would have lived happily with his father, because they were wealthy priests. Govinda would still be part of his family. Kamala would not have suffered. Kamaswami would have carried on with his business.

One decision, and four people paid for it.

His father suffered terribly from grief over losing his son. Govinda, who only followed him because he believed Siddhartha would find enlightenment, still wanders the cities looking for a meaning he cannot even name. Siddhartha ruined Govinda's life. Kamala truly loved him and he never understood real love, so he ruined hers as well. And his son was so rebellious because Siddhartha could never be the father he should have been.

And in the end, having learned everything and found everything, he remains only a ferryman with a little more knowledge. That he can't even pass on to his own son.

Do not get me wrong. I see him as an arrogant man who became wiser and recognised his mistakes at the end, and who knew by then who he had hurt. But people suffered because of his decisions.

In real life we sometimes get so caught up in our own dreams that we forget we also have a family, and that our loved ones need looking after before we drop everything to chase some big goal.

Life is not about dropping everything and following an idea that you don't even know is real and achievable.

That is my view, and it is nothing personal against anyone. It is what I felt while reading.

What I was testing by reading it

I know how this sounds coming from someone who quit his job to chase something. That is exactly why the book was hard to read.

The circumstances matter, so here they are, as I said them in the film about quitting: I did the calculation on how many months my savings would last, my family had already built a house, and a village in Nepal is cheap to live in. I have engineering to go back to if this goes nowhere. I moved back to my village, where I live with my mum and my grandmum.

The reading is part of the two years. The Alchemist came before this book, and the Bhagavad Gita is next. Alongside the films I post a short after every few chapters with my reaction to them.

So the thing actually under test is whether you can chase something without the people around you paying for it. Siddhartha could not. Whether I can, I do not know yet. This film was made at the start of the two years, and the answer is at the other end of them.