Siddhartha (16 page)

“But let me speak no more of this. Words are not good for the secret meaning; everything always becomes a little bit different the moment one speaks it aloud, a bit falsified, a bit foolish—yes, and this too is also very good and pleases me greatly: that one person’s treasure and wisdom always sounds like foolishness to others.”

Without a word, Govinda listened. “Why did you tell me all that about the stone?” he asked hesitantly, after a pause.

“This happened unintentionally. Or perhaps what was meant was this: For the stone and the river, for all these things that we contemplate and from which we can learn, I feel love. I can love a stone, Govinda, and also a tree or a piece of bark. These are things and things can be loved. Words, however, I cannot love. This is why doctrines are not for me. They have no hardness, no softness, no colors, no edges, no smell, no
taste; they have nothing but words. Perhaps it is this that has hindered you in finding peace; perhaps it is all these words. For even redemption and virtue, even Sansara and Nirvana, are just words, Govinda. There is no thing that could
be
Nirvana; there is only the word Nirvana.”

Govinda said, “Nirvana is not only a word, friend. It is a thought.”

Siddhartha continued. “A thought—this may be true. I have to confess to you, my dear friend, I do not see much difference between thoughts and words. To speak plainly, I do not have such a high regard for thoughts, either. I have a much higher regard for things. Here on this ferryboat, for example, my predecessor and teacher was a man, a holy man, who for many years believed only in the river, nothing else. He noticed that the river’s voice was speaking to him, and from this voice he learned; it taught and educated him. The river seemed to him a god, and for many years he did not know that every wind, every cloud, every bird, every beetle is just as divine and knows just as much and can teach just as much as the river he so revered. But when this holy man went into the forest, he knew everything, knew more than you or I, without teachers, without books, only because he had believed in the river.”

Govinda said, “But what is it you are calling
things
if not real things, things that have being? Is this not merely an illusion of Maya, merely image and semblance? Your stone, your tree, your river—are they realities?”

“This too,” Siddhartha said, “concerns me little. Let the things be semblances or not; then I too am only semblance, and so they will always be like me. This is what makes them so dear to me, makes me so admire them: They are like me. This is why I can love them. And here now is a bit of doctrine that will make you laugh: Love, O Govinda, appears to me more important than all other matters. To see through the world, to
explain it, to scorn it—this may be the business of great thinkers. But what interests me is being able to love the world, not scorn it, not to hate it and hate myself, but to look at it and myself and all beings with love and admiration and reverence.”

“This I understand,” Govinda said. “But it is precisely this that he, the Sublime One, recognized as illusion. He commands benevolence, gentleness, pity, tolerance, but not love; he forbade us to bind our heart with love for earthly things.”

“I know,” Siddhartha said; his smile was radiant, golden. “I know, Govinda. And behold: Here we are in the middle of the thicket of opinions, in a battle over words. For I cannot deny that my words about love stand in opposition, in apparent opposition to Gautama’s words. This is precisely why I distrust words so much, for I know this opposition is an illusion. I know I am in agreement with Gautama. How could he not know love, he who recognized all humanity in its transitoriness, its insignificance, and nonetheless loved human beings so much that he devoted a long, laborious life to the sole purpose of helping them, teaching them? Even with regard to him, your great teacher, things are dearer to me than words, his actions and life more important than his speeches, the gestures of his hand more important than his opinions. It is not in his speaking or in his thinking that I see his greatness, only in his actions, his life.”

For a long time, the two old men were silent. Then Govinda said, bowing as he prepared to take leave of him, “Thank you, Siddhartha, for telling me something of your thoughts. They are in part strange thoughts; not all of them were immediately comprehensible to me. May this be as it will. I thank you and wish you peaceful days.”

Secretly, however, he was thinking, What an odd person this Siddhartha is! These thoughts he is uttering are odd, and his doctrine sounds silly. The pure doctrine of the Sublime
One is so different from this, so much clearer, purer, more comprehensible, with nothing strange, silly, or ridiculous about it. But Siddhartha’s hands and feet, his eyes, his brow, his breathing, his smiling, his way of greeting me, his gait seem to me quite different from his thoughts. Never since our sublime Gautama entered Nirvana, never since have I met a person who made me feel: This is a saint! He alone, this Siddhartha, has seemed a saint to me. His doctrine may be strange, his words may sound silly, but his gaze and his hand, his skin and his hair, everything about him radiates a purity, radiates a calm, radiates a gaiety and kindness and holiness that I have beheld in no other person since the final death of our sublime teacher.

As Govinda was thinking these things, his heart filled with conflict. He bent over once more to Siddhartha, drawn by love, and bowed deeply before the one sitting quietly beside him.

“Siddhartha,” he said, “we have become old men. It is unlikely that either of us will ever see the other again in this shape. I can see, beloved friend, that you have found peace. I confess that I myself have not done so. Grant me just one word more, O Revered One; give me something that I can grasp, that I can comprehend! Give me something to take with me when we part. My path is often difficult, Siddhartha, often dark.”

Siddhartha remained silent and continued to gaze at him with the same still smile. Govinda stared into his face with fear, with longing. Suffering and eternal searching stood written in his gaze, eternal not-finding.

Siddhartha saw this and smiled.

“Bend down to me,” he whispered softly in Govinda’s ear. “Bend down here to me! Yes, like that, closer! Even closer! Kiss me on the forehead, Govinda!”

When Govinda, perplexed and yet drawn by great love and foreboding, obeyed his words, bent down close to him, and
touched his forehead with his lips, something wondrous happened to him. While his thoughts were still lingering over Siddhartha’s odd words, while he was still fruitlessly and reluctantly attempting to think away time, to imagine Nirvana and Sansara as one, while a certain contempt for his friend’s words was even then battling inside him with tremendous love and reverence, this happened:

He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha; instead he saw other faces, many of them, a long series, a flowing river of faces, by the hundreds, by the thousands, all of them coming and fading away, and yet all of them appearing to be there at once, all of them constantly changing, being renewed, and all of them at the same time Siddhartha. He saw the face of a fish, a carp, its mouth wrenched open in infinite pain, a dying fish with dying eyes—he saw the face of a newborn child, red and full of wrinkles, all twisted up to cry—he saw the face of a murderer, saw him stick a knife into a person’s body, and saw, at the same instant, this criminal kneeling down in chains and having his head chopped off by an executioner with one stroke of the sword—he saw the bodies of men and women naked in the positions and struggles of furious love—he saw corpses laid out, still, cold, empty—he saw the heads of animals: wild boars, crocodiles, elephants, bulls, birds—he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni—he saw all these figures and faces in their thousandfold interrelations, each helping the others, loving them, hating them, destroying them, giving birth to them anew; each one was a wanting-to-die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died; each of them was only transformed, constantly born anew, constantly being given a new face, without time having passed between one face and the next—and all these figures and faces rested, flowed, engendered one another, floated off and streamed into and through one another, and constantly stretched over all of them was something thin, an
insubstantial but nonetheless existing thing like thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a bowl or shape or mask made of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha’s smiling face, which he, Govinda, at just this moment was touching with his lips. And Govinda saw that this smiling of the mask, this smile of Oneness over all the flowing figures, this smile of simultaneousness over the thousand births and deaths, this smile of Siddhartha was precisely the same, was precisely the same still, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps kind, perhaps mocking, wise, thousandfold smile of Gautama, the Buddha, as he himself had seen it a hundred times with awe. This, Govinda knew, is how the Perfect Ones smiled.

No longer knowing whether time existed, whether this looking had lasted a second or a hundred years, no longer knowing whether there was a Siddhartha, whether a Gautama, whether a Self, an I and You, wounded in his innermost core as if by a divine arrow whose wound tastes sweet, entranced and bewildered in his innermost core, Govinda remained standing there a short while longer, bending over Siddhartha’s still face that he had just kissed, that had just been the site of all shapes, all Becoming, all Being. This countenance appeared unchanged once the depths of the thousandfold immensity had closed again beneath its surface; he was silently smiling, smiling quietly and gently, very kindly perhaps, perhaps mockingly, precisely as
he
had smiled, the Sublime One.

Deeply Govinda bowed, tears of which he knew nothing coursed down his old face, and like a fire the feeling of the most ardent love, the most humble reverence was burning in his heart. Deeply he bowed, bowed to the very earth, before the one sitting there motionless, whose smile reminded him of everything he had ever loved in all his life, everything that had ever, in all his life, been dear to him and holy.