Often we search for inner peace, and when this search begins, we
look eastward. This is different than an Eastwood glance, which
seems to involve a lot of squinting. As a teenager, I dabbled in
the martial arts, learning that there is more to
karate than just
violence, and I thought I had found inner peace when I won the All
Valley Karate Championship. Just a short while later, my mentor and
I traveled eastward to see his dying father, where his old rival
waited in the shadows, and where I made an enemy of my own. The
crane technique would fail me this time.
But this metaphoric search for inner peace propels a literal
journey, which leads me to this:
Modern Library just published a
wonderful new translation of Hermann Hesse's
Siddhartha.
At 160 pages, this small book is perhaps the greatest text on a
man's journey to enlightenment. As a young man, Siddhartha leaves
his parents and lives a life on the long and winding road. All such
journeys, I believe, require a woman's touch. Siddhartha's woman is
Kamala, a pleasant, saucy lady: "Yes, I kiss well, and therefore I
am not lacking in clothes, shoes, bracelets, or any other beautiful
things," she says. Oh, Kamala, won't you be my wife?
Of course, there are other pleasures that pull our hero from his
route to enlightenment: "A curious and slippery path had led
Siddhartha to his latest and vilest form of dependency: dice
playing." I, like Siddhartha, fell to games of chance, and when the
neighborhood wives and I played Bunko, and I didn't get sixes,
well, Helen's red, white, and blueberry trifle just wasn't as
sweet. Nevertheless, this "curious and slippery path" takes
Siddhartha to his first job, as a ferryman. And it is there, after
years of searching, that Siddhartha, the aquatic cabby, senses a
tingling in his stomach, and it's not just the decades of
undernourishment - it, perchance, is his enlightenment.