"fatherless charges beaten" - Siddhartha Campbell. WHAT WAS SHALL BE. WHAT SHALL BE WAS. Siddhartha. Young Siddhartha. Old Siddhartha. Kamala, ALSO SIDDHARTHA (wtf, weird?). River Siddhartha 😂😂😂['foolish Siddhartha']. ATONAL MUSIC.

So you guys have read Siddhartha, and understand the general plot of the book, right? Where he makes Kamala preggers, Kamala dies, and then Siddhartha adopts the son. And he runs away. And Siddhartha gets really sad, but then realizes that he has to let his son go his own way.

Joseph Campbell. Hero's journey. Atonement with the father. Atonement with the father. Atonement with the father. Atonement with the father. Atonement with the father. 

Siddhartha goes through this by taking on the role of his own father, thereby realizing his perspective and undergoing an atonement process.

 

Patrick Starrhartha attains enlightenment with the help of holy man Spongudeva

I, Maxwell He, am Siddhartha. Hence the title. Sorry about it being so long.

Yes, you read that right. I am Siddhartha. You are Siddhartha too! According to Siddhartha, at least. So, since you are Siddhartha as well, you are in agreement with me. You may say "No, I am not Siddhartha, I disagree", but since in every truth the opposite is also true (Siddhartha 143), you, in exact agreement with me, are Siddhartha. 

Besides, you are me as well, so naturally you agree with me. 

Why is that important? Hesse implants that principle - that everything is one another - into many of the characters of the novel. Perhaps not so literally, but at least metaphorically. All the characters are constructed based off of each other. In short:

Siddhartha's son is Siddhartha. It's fairly clear, considering that he becomes discontented with his life (5, 117) and leaves home (9, 124) despite his father's attempts to keep him at home (10, 124). Like the other time, his father eventually begrudgingly accepts, knowing his son's will to leave overpowers his own will to keep him on what he thinks is the better path (12, 126). 

Siddhartha's father is also Siddhartha. It's fairly clear, considering that his son becomes discontented with his life and [see above for rest. It really is pretty obvious.]

The point is, Siddhartha's son becomes Siddhartha. Therefore, Siddhartha, Siddhartha's father, becomes Siddhartha's father. 

"My dear friend, have you forgotten that instructive story about Siddhartha, the Brahmin's son...who protected Siddhartha the Samana from Samsara, from sin, greed and folly?" Vasudeva on page 121 of Siddhartha

"I have asked the river, my friend, I have asked it many times, and the river laughed, it laughed at me and it laughed at you; it shook itself with laughter at our folly." -Siddhartha to Vasudeva (or the other way around, same difference), on page 119 of Siddhartha

"Which father, which teacher, could prevent him from living his own life, from soiling himself with life, from loading himself, from finding his own path? - Vasudeva, father of Siddhartha, to Siddhartha, father of Siddhartha, on page 119 of Siddhartha, father of Siddhartha. 

Just saying, Hesse never gives us a name for Siddhartha's father. So he might also be named Siddhartha. Three Siddhartha's to toss around in this game of eternal Samsara. Fun.

What if Siddhartha's father died, and reincarnated as Little Siddhartha? Oh well, we'll never know.

Breaking News: Siddhartha beats fatherless charges, attains Nirvana shortly after

Siddhartha eventually gives up on finding his son, and begins to grieve. While going to the river to contemplate, he sees his reflection. However, instead of seeing himself, he sees his father.

"He saw his face reflected...and there was something in this reflection that reminded him of something he had forgotten...it resembled the face of his father, the Brahmin" (131). This is the moment when Siddhartha realizes that he is now as his father once was. He now can see that, at least in physical appearance, he is the same as his father. 

Siddhartha soon realizes that this similarity is more than just superficial. "He remembered how, as a youth, he had compelled his father to let him go and join the ascetics...how he had gone and never return. Had not his father also suffered the same pain that he was now suffering for his son...Did he not expect the same fare?" (131-132). 

Siddhartha never got to see what happened to his father after he left. 

In fact, up until this point, he never gave it a thought. Now with the same pain, same circumstance, and same fare, Siddhartha, as he later realizes in enlightenment, is the same person as his father. He understands that his pain and his father's pain are one and the same, and identifies with his father in that way.

Through taking on the experiences of Siddhartha's father, Siddhartha empathizes with his father, achieving atonement. 

In his final enlightenment (ULTIMATE BOON REFERENCE!?!??!), Siddhartha takes this atonement one further step. While Siddhartha at first sees many individual images of people he knows, and can draw associations between them, these dividing lines disappear. "The picture of his father, his own picture, and the picture of his son all flowed into each other...they all became part of the river" (134) 

All Three Siddhartha's, father, hero, and son, became indistinguishable from one another. As the river flows on, the details fall out, yet the water remains. The water, the representation of all life to have ever existed, has no individuality. 

From a human perspective, no one molecule is recognizable, so we only call it 'the river water,' instead of distinguishing between all the water molecules. With no way to distinguish between Siddhartha and his father, there can be no rift between them, and thus, no need for atonement. 

The Wikipedia Entry for 'Atonement with the Father' Says...it is 8:28 PM and I want to finish this blog before I go to sleep.

GOD DANG IT.

Just when I'm done explaining how Siddhartha atones with his literal father by unifying with him through his enlightenment experience, I have to think of another take on this.

And of course there's this Wikipedia entry on the Hero's Journey that says: "In this step, the hero must confront and be initiated by whatever holds the ultimate power in their life...this is the father or a father figure who has life and death power...All the previous steps have been moving into this place, all that follow will move out of it."

And for all my luck, I have to draw connection between the river, which is one of the most holy objects in this book, and a metaphorical father figure. The river just HAS to have been personified via 'laughing' as well. What an inconvenience.

So, unfortunately, I now have to write about how the river represents the all-powerful father deity very well, due to its nature as a tangible location. And how Siddhartha, by seeing these images in the river on and around page 134, sees the river in a new light, as an amalgamation of all his experiences. And so the illusion of the river as ordinary is truly and completely broken, and he confronts the river as it really is.

Oh right, and back in "By the River", that chapter, under this interpretation of the river as the father, can be viewed as an atonement in its own right. Whatever, I'm too far in now; scratch that off your mind. 

Since I'm too far into this rabbit hole, I might as well add that through using the river as a vector by which his enlightenment occurs, this all powerful river is 'initiating' him into a new view of the world. 

What makes it worse, is that since the image of Siddhartha's actual father is seen in the river, flowing along, his father is essentially also part of the river! So the atonement with the father, in both the semi-literal and wild metaphorical sense, is happening with the same entity!

And I have to write all about it.

...

Well, on second thought, I just wrote everything that I wanted to write.

In conclusion, I am Siddhartha, Siddhartha is his own father, and his own son, and I atoned with river Brahmin daddy, because, in the familial tradition, my son ran away from me in around the 5th century BCE, allowing me to understand how everybody is one and the same.

"time is an illusion"

WHAT

Siddhartha, after having achieved enlightenment.