Comparing Siddhartha And Richard Taylor's An Introduction To Virtue

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse discusses the many paths of teaching that relate to Hinduism that Siddhartha followed on his journey through life and how each path helped him realize what he wanted with his life. Siddhartha follows many teachings or paths in which to reach his spiritual destination, which at the beginning was to reach Nirvana.

Siddhartha becomes a rich man and soon loses his desire to search for Nirvana.  Along with Kamala, a man named Kamaswami influences Siddhartha.  He convinces Siddhartha that material possessions can "fill" his life.  Siddhartha takes the advice, and he begins to live his life for money.  He starts to gamble and to compromise his true beliefs for material pleasure. While living in the village, Siddhartha slips into a deep depression.  He feels that he has lost a part of his soul, and he attempts to commit suicide.  However, during this attempt, Siddhartha becomes reborn and longs once again for Nirvana (http://splavc.spjc.cc.fl.us/hooks/ew/SmithSidd.html).  At this time, Siddhartha meets a ferryman named Vasudeva.  Vasudeva fascinates Siddhartha the way Buddha did (Welch 71).  Vasudeva tells Siddhartha that the way to find inner peace is by listening to the river.  He also tells Siddhartha that the river will teach him two things; however, Siddhartha must learn these things on his own.  Siddhartha's relationship with the ferryman is the key for Siddhartha to reach Nirvana.  Eventually, Siddhartha takes the place of Vasudeva as ferryman, and he soon attains

With every experience, there is a lesson learned. In Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, as the main character Siddhartha journeys through life, each experience he encounters teaches him a different aspect of the value of life. Through his relationship with Kamala he learns the importance of love, when he tries to commit suicide he realizes the beauty of life, and when he lives with the ferryman he is taught to listen and ultimately achieve the end goal to life, Nirvana.

From start to Finish, Siddhartha lived his life in search of one main facet; spiritual enlightenment. While in the process of his quest for enlightenment Siddhartha encountered the four noble truths of Buddhism. In the first part of the novel, Siddhartha is portrayed experiencing each of the noble truths.

“Happiness is in the enjoyment of man’s chief good. Two conditions of the chief good: 1st, Nothing is better than it; 2nd, it cannot be lost against the will” (Augustine 264-267). As human

Famous actor and comedian, Robin Williams, was very well known and lived a life with richness and supporting loved ones, but it must not have been all it was looked to be. He must not have been truly happy with his life because he committed suicide. Similarly, in the book, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha is not able to find true happiness. Siddhartha leaves his family in the beginning of the book because he wants to find himself. Then he ends up with the Samanas and is there for a while, but then he decides he has not truly found himself yet. So, he leaves again and meets this man on a ferry boat that encourages him to find enlightenment. Siddhartha then meets this woman named Kamala and they fall “in love” and he becomes wealthy and believes that he is happy. But after a while, he leaves Kamala and all of his wealth and social honor behind because he has not found enlightenment. All this shows the reader that Siddhartha does not find happiness with wealth and social status, as shown when he leaves Kamala and everything he has to go find himself and is only able to find enlightenment as a ferryman, which is not a wealthy position or rank in life.

There have been many teachers in one’s lifetime, some more important than others. These teachers and instructors affect different people in different ways, and lessons are learned that are important to prepare for real life situations. In the book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, a young Brahmin named Siddhartha is not content with his current spiritual self. Siddhartha is directed to spiritual enlightenment and Nirvana because of his guidance and teaching from Kamala, Kamaswami, and Vasudeva.

“What could I say to you that would be of value except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.” (113) Siddhartha, a book written by Hermann Hesse, is about this young boy who throughout the book grows to an old man who, throughout his journey, seeks to attain enlightenment. He comes from a Brahmin family and later decides to become a samana and lives in the woods with his “shadow”,Govinda. Siddhartha is distracted with obstacles throughout his life and ultimately finds a way to conquer them.

“That was how everyone loved Siddhartha. He delighted and made everybody happy. But Siddhartha was not happy.” (Page 6)

        Siddhartha reaches a town and is moved by the beauty of the courtesan Kamala as she enters her grove in a sedan.  This starts Siddhartha stage of the flesh.  He asks her to be his teacher in the arts of love, but Kamala laughs and says that she receives only those young men who approach her in fine clothes and shoes, with scent in their hair and money in their purses. When she learns that Siddhartha can read and write, she conducts him to the businessman Kamaswami, who will help him to acquire the tokens necessary for entrance into her garden of pleasure.  Kamala gives him a kiss in exchange for a good poem, and the amount of knowledge in that kiss amazes Siddhartha.

Joel Kupperman in Six Myths about the Good Life: Thinking About What Has Value evaluates that humans as a whole want more comfort and pleasure in life as he it “may represent a tendency that is wired into normal human nature” (Kupperman 1). Through the explanation of pleasure as well as its arguable counterpart, suffering and the discussion of their values in addition to the counterargument of hedonic treadmill, Kupperman’s views about the role of pleasure in living a good life can be strongly supported and evaluated.

Siddhartha is a young man on a long quest in search of the ultimate answer to the enigma of a man's role on this earth. Through his travels, he finds love, friendship, pain, and identity. He finds the true meaning behind them the hard way, but that is the best way to learn them.

In the departure phase of his journey, Siddhartha completely shuns both internal and external desires and lives a more than humble life. During Siddhartha’s conversation with his father about leaving home, Siddhartha’s father, “returned again after an hour and again after two hours, looked through the window and saw Siddhartha standing there in the moonlight, in the starlight, in the dark” (11). Hermann Hesse’s use of dark and light imagery, emphasizes Siddhartha’s stubbornness for his desire to go with the Samanas, whose religious ideals are severe self discipline and restraint of all indulgence; he is adamant about leaving home, as his father checked on him countlessly and Siddhartha stood there unwavering despite the many hours and change of daylight so he could earn his father’s blessing to live the lifestyle of an ascetic. Furthermore, Siddhartha travels to the Samanas with Govinda to destroy Self and the multitudinous amount of desire by quelling each desire and all together Self even though he knows it is a difficult goal to achieve, “Although Siddhartha fled from Self a thousand times, dwelt in nothing, dwelt in animal and stone, the return was inevitable” (16). The effect of Siddhartha’s multiple attempted destructions of Self as a consequence of living as a Samana are failure in his attempt to discover Nirvana. Moreover, Siddhartha travels with Govinda to the Buddha after leaving the

In part one of our book, “The Good Life,” we studied five different philosopher’s viewpoints on what is needed in order for a person to have a good, fulfilling life. They all included the concepts of pleasure and happiness to some extent in their theories, but they all approached the ideas in different ways. The two hedonists we studied, Epicurus and John Stuart Mill, place heavy emphasis on the importance of pleasure. They both believe that pleasure is a necessity in the ideal life. Jean Kazez agreed with their viewpoints in her theory and said that happiness was a necessity for a good life. Epicurus and Mill also argue that there is nothing else that we ultimately desire beyond pleasure and that it is an intrinsic good.

Unlike many people he treated business as a game and did not stress over his failures and did not praise his success. As a result, Siddhartha was able to go from “rags to riches.” Over time however, Hesse writes, “Gradually, along with his growing riches, Siddhartha himself acquired some of the characteristics of the ordinary people, some of their childishness and some of their anxiety” (77). Though Siddhartha envied them for the one thing he lacked, the sense of importance with which they lived their lives.