Siddhartha is not primarily a Buddhist text. Its strongly constructivist features emphasize experience and the self as sources of knowledge over any kind of institutionalized teaching.
1Regarding constructivist features in the depiction of nature in Siddhartha, cf. Carina Gröner, “Innen und Außen als Einheit. Konstruktivistische Weltsicht in Naturdarstellungen von Hesses Siddhartha,” in Hermann Hesse Écrivain et Paintre: L’art du paysage et des jardins/Landschaftsproblematik und Gartenkunst: Hermann Hesse als Schriftsteller und Maler, ed. Régine Battiston and Sonia Goldblum (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2021), 317–26. On the rejection of institutionalized religion in Siddhartha, see also Gröner, “Peripherie der Moderne,” 144–60. As I have tried to show, the events depicted in the second part constitute an ongoing constructivist, experiential learning cycle using a particular narrative strategy supporting identification.
The many reflections on the protagonist’s experiences are presented by a distanced, heterodiegetic narrative voice, which switches between zero focalization and internal focalization on Siddhartha. Hesse’s repeated “zooming in” on his protagonist’s perspective and stream of consciousness enables us to understand Siddhartha’s cyclical experiential learning as a constructed world view. Hesse’s constructivist narrative method, characterized by shifts in perspective, fosters the reader’s identification with the protagonist’s experiential learning process. It helps readers to understand Siddhartha’s experiences beyond cultural and historical confines by inviting them to engage in a circular process of gaining knowledge that is universal and hence accessible to a global readership.
Shortly before publication, Hesse remarked that
Siddhartha was “heretical” towards Buddhism, because it blends experience and the search for a self with a benign acceptance of human imperfection.
2Hermann Hesse, Letter to Lisa Wenger, January 31, 1921, in Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Siddhartha,” vol. 1, 122. Experience is a major concept of Buddhism, one it shares with constructivism. Their goals, however, are different, as a comparative philosophical analysis shows: “Initially, a comparison between constructivism and Buddhism seems outrageous. On the face of it, the two views are antithetical to each other. One of Buddhism’s main tenets is nonself and the unity of all, whereas constructivism relies on the self as primary and as the source of all reasons.”
3Heather Salazar, Creating a Shared Morality (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2021), 163.Therefore, it is exactly this difference to traditional and institutionalized Buddhist teachings that explains the global impact of Hesse’s
Siddhartha on a modern and spiritually interested readership across the world. Reading
Siddhartha enables everyone to find their personal Buddha. Or, as Siddhartha points out: “No, the sinner now and today, already contains the future Buddha, his future is fully here; you must worship the sinner, in you, in everyone, the developing, the possible, the hidden Buddha.”
4Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Neugroschel, 125.