Siddhartha Contemplates the Buddha's Teachings

Enlightenment, Nirvana (ego dissolution), salvation. All of these terms are matters of the spirit. What can a depraved body do for the spirit? Siddhartha gives one answer. As Samana he is well aquatinted with asceticism. He learns that deprivation, stillness, and contemplation bring about clarity of thought. A recipe for lucidity. Siddhartha follows a logic of wisdom that centers around the body, aimed at dousing desire. Let the body starve so the mind may not want. Give the body stillness so that the mind may wander further inward. For some of his peers all desire may be sublimated to this mode, but here Siddhartha reaches an impasse. He has mastered the techniques of lucidity, gone as for as possible to dissolve desire, all wisdom is available to him, even the wisdom of the Buddha. Siddhartha realizes that wisdom is bounded by subjectivity - consequentially the more one experiences the more it is possible for one to know.

This is Siddhartha in the moment he realizes his horizon of conception is bounded by the senses. Moreover, that his current horizon is to constricted to contain the vastness of enlightenment. It is a pivotable moment in Siddhartha’s life. Here the logic of wisdom that centers around the body turns. It is made reversible. Now, as consort to Kamala and merchant he puts this new logic into practice. Feast, so the mind may be full. Dance and fuck so the mind might be propelled to greater heights. It is interesting to note that this logic of the body also works to produce lucidity, but only during the short period after the highest intensities of stimulation. After many years at one such point this logic suddenly inverts once again upon itself and Siddhartha returns to asceticism. In time he finds that the impasse he encountered long ago has been removed by experience. His life a sine wave of intensities.

The events of Siddhartha’s life were accounted neither good nor bad. In the end he bears no guilt for hedonism nor regret for suffering. His worldview was one that privileges the spirit, and his strategy for shaping the spirit was manipulation of the body. Asceticism and hedonism are both powerful tools to this end. Siddhartha shows that these tools do not necessarily work in opposition to one another, but might form a dialectic that propels the subject onwards.

A final note: almost the same analysis could be done with Solomon. This flavor of asceticism is expressed by both characters in much the same way.