Siddhartha

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1922

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-4

Part 2, Chapters 5-7

Part 2, Chapters 8-12

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Part 2, Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “Kamala”

Siddhartha travels along his path through mountains, forests, and rice fields, noticing with renewed wonder and appreciation every detail, color, and sound offered by the natural world. He reflects on what he learned from the Buddha, reasoning that “[b]oth thoughts and senses were fine things, [and] behind both of them lay hidden the last meaning” (39). He will listen to both their voices in his attempt to reach enlightenment. One night, sleeping in a ferryman’s hut, Siddhartha has a sensual dream in which Govinda appears and transforms into a woman. On awakening, Siddhartha’s senses are even more receptive to stimuli. A friendly ferryman named Vasudeva takes him across the river, commenting on its beauty and demanding no payment from his passenger, whom he swears he will see again. Siddhartha reflects that the grateful, simple ferryman is like Govinda. On reaching the next village, Siddhartha comes across an attractive and friendly young woman, who makes an inviting sexual gesture toward him. Siddhartha is aroused and tempted but follows his inner voice’s command to refuse her.

Siddhartha moves on and reaches a busy town, where he feels the need to be with people. Just outside it, he crosses the path of a slender, beautiful, and clever-looking woman named Kamala, a well-known courtesan. He laughs at his own appearance, still that of an ascetic, and determines to make himself presentable enough to meet her in person by shaving and bathing. Admitted to her grove and pavilion, he says how beautiful she is and declares his interest in learning the art of love from her. Intrigued by his confidence, Kamala teases him about his status as a “poor, ignorant Samana” (45) but advises him to find fine clothes, shoes, money, and presents for her if he wants to enjoy her favors. Siddhartha impresses Kamala with a poem he invents on the spot, and she responds with a deep and sensual kiss, which further awakens Siddhartha’s longing to learn more from her. She dismisses him but presents him with a robe. Siddhartha decides he is no longer a Samana and will no longer beg for food, as he feels his luck will bring him whatever he needs.

The following day, Siddhartha meets Kamala in her town house, where she feeds him and tells him she has arranged for him to work with a rich merchant, Kamaswami; she wants Siddhartha to be his equal, not his servant. Siddhartha agrees and explains to Kamala that his determination to achieve his goals—which he learned through thinking, waiting, and fasting with the Samanas—is what has allowed him to reach this fortunate situation, not the whim of Kamala, nor magic or demons. Kamala tells him he is handsome as she starts to feel love for him.

Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Amongst the People”

In Kamaswami’s lavish home, he and Siddhartha have a philosophical discussion in which Siddhartha persuades the merchant that his Samana skills of fasting and waiting are useful. Then Siddhartha shows that he can read and write, and Kamaswami offers him a job and a home in his house. Siddhartha receives clothes and a daily bath and eats well, but only once a day and without meat or alcohol. He learns Kamaswami’s business but does not share the man’s passion for his trade, instead seeing it as a game. Siddhartha visits Kamala regularly and learns all about physical pleasure, romantic love, reciprocity, and respect. This is the side of his new life that he values, while the business—in which he is successful due to his charming and calm nature—remains merely a source of entertainment to him. Although the merchant finds his attitude strange and annoying, he cannot change Siddhartha’s way of thinking. Siddhartha’s interest lies in people, not money, and he observes them with curiosity and detachment. He is amused by and feels sympathy toward people with their trivial lives, but he does not share their feelings. He hears a quiet voice reminding him that “real life was flowing past him and did not touch him” (56). Although he wishes at times that he could share the people’s childish preoccupations, he feels his real self wandering elsewhere, far away.

As Siddhartha’s relationship with Kamala continues to grow deeper, he feels closer to her than even Govinda. Like Siddhartha, she is able to retreat to her own “stillness and sanctuary” (57), a rare gift. He tells her, “Few people have that capacity yet everyone could have it” (57), adding that Gotama possesses this ability. Kamala continues to teach him of passion and sexual pleasure and says she will have his child one day. However, she declares that he is still a Samana who loves nobody, not even her. He tells her they are the same in this respect.

Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Sansara”

After several years living as a businessman in the town, the influence of this comfortable and materialistic lifestyle on Siddhartha gradually becomes stronger than what remains from his life with the ascetic Samanas. He has a house and garden and is rich and popular, though his only true friend is Kamala. Slowly, the moderation and meditation of his former life give way to the realm of the senses, to his detriment. Siddhartha’s life revolves around sensual pleasures and lazy amusement, a way of life he previously felt superior to. However, with the passing of time, he becomes more like the people he originally disdained, experiencing some of their anxieties and passions, but not all. The one emotion he remains unable to feel is love, and eventually he becomes tired of this life: “Slowly, the soul sickness of the rich crept over him” (61). The energy and hope of his new life when he parted from Govinda and Gotama fades and leaves him with “disillusionment and nausea” (61), the result of his passion for obtaining, gambling, and squandering money. His life becomes hedonistic, shallow, and meaningless: “He wore himself out in this senseless cycle, became old and sick” (63).

One evening, Siddhartha tells Kamala more about Gotama, and she says that one day she will become his follower. Kamala makes love to him passionately but then Siddhartha notices how she looks weary and full of fear of old age and death. He leaves her and spends the night with dancers and wine, eventually feeling disgusted by himself and his “entirely senseless life” (64). He has a dream in which he finds Kamala’s caged songbird dead. The sadness evoked in him by the dream leads him to sit under a mango tree and reflect upon his life. Siddhartha feels in his heart once more the calling to his path toward the gods. He regrets the wasted years “without any lofty goal, without any thirst, without any exaltation” (65) and the game of Sansara, the endless cycles of rebirth and death that he has played like a child. After a day of such meditation, he decides to say goodbye to that life and leaves, never to return. Kamaswami searches for him, but Kamala does not, as she has always known that he was a Samana at heart. She frees her songbird from its cage and closes her house to visitors. A while later, she finds out she is expecting Siddhartha’s child.

Part 2, Chapters 5-7 Analysis

There are eight chapters in Part 2 of the book, corresponding to the Eightfold Path taught by Gautama Buddha. Rather than a set of consecutive steps, however, the Buddha taught the eight principles, which reinforce rather than precede or follow each other. The Eightfold Path is also known as the Middle Way, which preaches a lifestyle that is neither extremely ascetic nor extremely indulgent, and this teaching can be seen reflected in the experiences that Siddhartha learns from and which govern his choices and his spiritual development.

Chapters 5 to 7 detail Siddhartha’s years in the busy town, where he experiences all that the material and sensual world have to offer. His behaviors and thoughts contrast sharply with those he exhibited during Part 1, where his focus was on the meditation, spiritual reflection, and self-denial. Siddhartha recognizes the need to include both thought and senses at the beginning of Chapter 5, and his journey takes him toward the latter, where he will cease to deny the Self but acknowledge it through his interactions with the physical world. However, over the years his immersion in the sensations and feelings of ordinary people reaches an extreme level. By the end of Chapter 7, he has over-indulged in pleasure and greed to the point where he leaves it behind to start fresh. Siddhartha’s search for meaning continues, as he gathers experiences and reflects upon them, but still fails to find unity and fulfillment.

The physical environment plays a much more important role in this section of the book than the previous one. Hesse begins Chapter 5 by describing in great detail the many sensations that Siddhartha experiences with his renewed awareness of his natural surroundings. The reader, like the protagonist, is bombarded with the sights, colors, sounds, and elements of nature. Later in the chapter, Siddhartha is enticed by the smile and lips of the girl washing clothes in a river, and Siddhartha’s first impression of Kamala is built up through details of her beauty, including “a bright red mouth like a freshly cut fig” (42). These references to the visual and sensual place Siddhartha firmly in the realm of the sensory, away from the purely spiritual.

Siddhartha’s erotic side is stimulated, and his senses and body are ready and receptive to the pleasures that await him. Siddhartha makes a conscious decision to seek sexual instruction from Kamala, whose name is based on the Hindu word “Kama,” meaning the god of love and desire. In contrast to Part 1, Siddhartha is willing to accept teaching by an expert, although here he hopes that learning about the essential sexual side of life will contribute to his understanding of life as a whole, which is still his overall goal. Siddhartha learns a great deal from Kamala about much more than just sex, but he is ultimately unable to learn to love from her. That one aspect of life remains for him to experience.

The merchant Kamuswami also plays a vital role in Siddhartha’s development, but not as he intended. Siddhartha learns business from him but does not take what these lessons seriously. Though naturally talented in business, Siddhartha sees it all as a game. However, he learns much about himself through his relationships with Kamala and Kamaswami, who represent two key aspects of the real world. His experiences with them and what they reveal about him and his nature are essential to his discovery of himself, which he has vowed to undertake. He has started to develop some of the qualities contained in the Eightfold Path, including Right Mindfulness and Right Action.

Another essential character Siddhartha encounters along this part of his journey is Vasudeva the ferryman, who is introduced briefly but with an important instance of foreshadowing, when he says he is sure to meet Siddhartha again. The river’s future role in the story is also signposted here, as Vasudeva mentions how beautiful it is and how “[o]ne can learn much from a river” (40). Siddhartha’s attitude to the ferryman is typical of his feeling of superiority over ordinary, simple people at this stage: “People are children” (40).

In Chapters 6 and 7, Siddhartha’s gradual fall away from his spiritual and ascetic side bring him closer to the ordinary people that he has disdained throughout his life. His struggle to find respect for them, to experience what they feel, and ultimately to love like them is part of his spiritual journey and the most difficult aspect of life for him to reconcile. Chapter 7 finds him at his lowest point, having become that drunkard who temporarily escapes his Self but who is destined to always return to everyday life, in the endless cycle of Sansara. Like Kamala’s songbird in his dream, the part of him that had played the games of Kamaswami and Kamala has died, and Siddhartha decides to break away again and resume his path. As he leaves the town, Kamala’s release of her precious caged songbird symbolizes her letting go of Siddhartha, the eternal Samana, whose voice she had loved.