Brian+Interpretation

Siddhartha Hesse

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The above video is pretty good. It a special documentary done by [|BBC](British Broadcasting Corporation). The video is approximately forty-nine minutes long but is well worth it if you are highly interested in the religion.

One can gain many insights and interpretations through reading this story of Siddhartha's quest to find nirvana. He has been surrounded by many intellictual figures in his life, one of the foremost in his life being his father. He has advanced very quickly in his pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment but yet he earns for something more, something more than even the highest priests and sages in his community don't even have. You can see the respect Siddhartha has for his father when he refuses to leave to pursue a life with the Samanas. His dedication is shown when he stands in the same spot all night in the same spot after his father tells him her would rather he stayed, eventually through a sleepless night the father's opinion sways and he lets Siddhartha go with the Samanas. Great lessons can be learned from this display of respect towards his father. We must respect their guidance and try to appease their interests and desires for us. Siddhartha's fathers interest for him was that he become a sage or even a priest, but the loving father agrees to let him go do whatever he please because he realizes it is not Siddhartha's dream. So eventually Siddhartha leaves on his quest with his good friend to find Nirvana.

One particular portion of the our assigned text strikes me as very interesting. We can find it on page seven of the text. At the beginning we see Siddhartha giving his robe's away to another individual. The can obviously be construed as him giving up his old ways and believes in search of something new. The way of the Samanas would give Siddhartha a dark view on the world, one of pesimism and anger. On the page it mention Siddhartha passing through a town and seeing many various things such as people conduction business, mothers nursing their children, people lamenting for their dead, and whore doing their services. He sees many other thing but I find his comment about all of this very interesting. He says "it was all a lie, it all stank, it all stank of lies, it all gave the illusion of meaning and happiness and beauty, and it was all unacknowledged decay" Our previous version of Siddhartha was a pleasant tall and slender young that everyone delighted in his company and all the women in the town loved and adored him, but know he has drastically turned into someone else. He is know a begger with the skin falling of his cheeks subjecting himself to pain at every opportunity. He later decides to give this up and move along in search of something else with his good friend. The way the first part of the book started will this ever end. I interpret this sudden change in Siddharta as sin. Sin can drastically change our views and opinions on many subjects. I believe that this is the case. Perhaps this has something to do with forsaking his original ways of though and action when he was amongst his family. 2nd Half