Digital Refraction: Hesse, the Buddhist Guru?

Scholarship both confirms and refutes this contention, and it is worth surveying in some detail to interrogate this community’s claims and to evaluate the benefits and shortcomings of engaging with Hesse in digital spaces. On the one hand, there is ample evidence of Hesse’s enthusiasm for Chinese and Indian literature. Siddhartha’s subtitle is, after all, Eine Indische Dichtung (An Indian Tale). On the other hand, reading alone cannot engender intimate familiarity with a foreign culture. The scholar Chunhua Zhan investigates this in a thorough examination of Hesse’s engagement with Chinese literature, noting that Hesse might have misinterpreted certain characteristics of Chinese literary genres. Zhan points out that “believing in the existence of ghosts was an element of the spiritual life of Chinese folk” and was therefore an important component of Chinese realist literature.3Chunhua Zhan, “Hermann Hesse’s Concept of World Literature and His Critique on Chinese Literature,” Neohelicon 45 (2018): 290. Hesse, however, “saw it as a momentous source of ‘fairy tales,’ and this was no doubt a sort of ‘fusion of perspective’ or misreading of Chinese literature.”4Zhan, “Chinese Literature,” 290. Furthermore, Zhan states, “in these [Chinese] stories the ghost world is seldom separated from that of the human, and a universal ‘sympathy’ view of the unification between the object and the subject deeply rooted in the folk belief.”5Zhan, “Chinese Literature,” 289. While Hesse saw this as a fusion of the natural and the magical, according to Zhan, there is no actual distinction between the two in Chinese folk stories; they are equal components of the “natural” and real.

But the offense might not be as grave as it first seems. Hesse rightfully identified in Chinese literature a correspondence between realism and romanticism, which features in his own novels; he thus adopted from his readings what he viewed as a literary technique. Zhan argues, for instance, that many of his novels exemplify his application of Chinese literary traditions that enable him to transform those of German Romanticism. The surrealism of Der Steppenwolf, the hazy boundary between real time and narrative time in Die Morgenlandfahrt (The Journey to the East, 1932), and the general utopian vision of Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game, 1943), are all “the bipolar fusion of the reality and the magic.”6Zhan, “Chinese Literature,” 289–90. For Zhan, Hesse thus understood the “twin wings of Chinese literature—realism and romanticism.”7Zhan, “Chinese Literature,” 291. And one can detect this influence in novels such as the three listed above, even though they might be unconscious products of one’s inability to possess intimate knowledge of a foreign culture. Scholar Adrian Hsia has also notably illustrated how Siddhartha incorporates components of Buddhism as well as other forms of Eastern philosophy. However, Hsia elucidates how the novel’s emphasis on individualism is distinctly European and argues that its western readers have overplayed its Buddhist principle.8Adrian Hsia, “Siddhartha,” in A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse, ed. Ingo Cornils (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 149–70. The most comprehensive investigation of Hesse’s engagement with Eastern thought to date also comes from Adrian Hsia: Hermann Hesse und China: Darstellung, Materialien und Interpretationen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974).

Both Zhan’s and Hsia’s analyses illustrate that Hesse’s literature inhabits Damrosch’s ellipses or, more accurately, Beebee’s Venn diagram even before its dispersal in the world literature market, and especially in digital spaces. It is difficult, though, to locate any sort of “Ansatzpunkt”—a phrase Beebee borrows from Erich Auerbach—or point of departure for analyzing Hesse’s work because an assemblage of cultural heritages is already a crucial component of his composition process.9Beebee, “German Literature as World Literature,” 11. The subreddit r/Buddhism is thus right in their assessment of the novel’s misappropriation of certain Buddhist concepts. It is certainly more than a simple “curio,” though, as one user phrases it. Both Zhan and Hsia illustrate how Hesse’s literary education is far from provincial; but they also demonstrate how his German-Swiss upbringing influences his readings of non-Western texts. The r/Buddhism group’s collaborative assessment of the novel leads them to observe the floating Ansatzpunkt that Siddhartha and its author occupy in Beebee’s diagram and, in turn, have addressed the critical dilemma one encounters when reading world literature. Thus, while a confluence of perspectives on Hesse’s literature in digital spaces (where people of all backgrounds can contribute) inevitably risks further misappropriation, we can nonetheless see how such digital interaction can also amend such mistakes, as evidenced by some members of r/Buddhism’s responses to the question: “is Siddhartha a good introduction to Buddhism?”