This is Chapter 10 of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. Missed the last chapters? Here are Chapter 9, Chapter 8, Chapter 7, Chapter 6, Chapter 5, Chapter 4, Chapter 3, Chapter 2, Chapter 1, and the announcement. Also, you can find the regularly updated reading schedule here.
Today, we’ll unravel the issues of lopsided love, finding one’s life path, and accepting unwanted experiences. But first, we’ll have to catch up on what happened previously in Siddhartha’s life journey.
The gift and the goodbye
At the end of the last chapter, something unexpected happened: Siddhartha found out he had fathered a son. The mother turned out to be Kamala, Siddhartha’s former beloved from the city.
Of course, Siddhartha wasn’t aware of this. He had left the city many months before the birth of his son, and Kamala raised the son on her own. And so, for many years, it looked as if Siddhartha, Kamala, and their son would never be united…
… until the miraculous unpredictability of life defied the odds.
One day, Kamala and her now eleven-year-old son embark on a pilgrimage to see the nearly-deceased Buddha. The journey does not last long, however. When they reach the river—the very same river where Siddhartha had his lowest moments after leaving the city—Kamala gets bitten by a snake. The poison is deadly. Kamala loses her strength at an alarming pace.
A bit further down the river, Siddhartha and the ferryman Vasudeva hear the cries for help. They rush down to help and bring Kamala and the son back to the ferryman’s hut.
It’s tragic. At last, Kamala, Siddhartha, and their son meet — but the poison has progressed to a critical point. Moments later, Kamala passes away.
Surprisingly, Siddhartha doesn’t feel sad about Kamala’s death — at least not in this all-encompassing, paralyzing way. As he tells his good friend Vasudeva: “Why should I be sad? I who was rich and happy have become still richer and happier. My son has been given to me.” Rather than focus on what he has lost (the only person he has ever loved), Siddhartha focuses on what he has gained: the gift of a son. Siddhartha decides to take in his son and raise him with Vasudeva by the river.
And yet, this “gift” will cause him a fair share of headaches.
The troubles with lopsided love
To put it bluntly, the son detests living with his father, Siddhartha. And who can blame him? Here is an eleven-year-old boy who spent his childhood in a luxurious upbringing and is now forced to live with his spartan father. And so, the son does what any sensible young person would do: he starts revolting. He insults his father, refuses to work, and robs the fruit trees. Eventually, when the son can’t take it anymore, he runs away from the hut, stealing all the coin Vasudeva and Siddhartha had earned for their work as ferrymen.
The first concept I find worth exploring here is lopsided love. Why does Siddhartha desperately cling to the relationship with his son even though it makes the two of them miserable?
The existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir offers a helpful framework for this. In her book The Second Sex (1949), she distinguishes between authentic and inauthentic love. We love inauthentically when we believe love will complete us. Which is, when you think about it, still the gold standard these days—particularly in Western societies. If we needed to assign a hymn for modern love, it would probably be All You Need Is Love.
The result of inauthentic love is that we erase ourselves as individual, independent beings. In fact, we erase ourselves and our target of love. Love is not just an emotional gamble, then. It’s an existential threat.
Conversely, authentic love is not a mutilation but an augmentation. It allows both parties to recognize one’s own and the other’s sovereignty. “[E]ach lover,” de Beauvoir writes, “would then experience himself as himself and as the other”.
Siddhartha fails to see this. If he were truly to experience himself as himself and his son, he would realize that their existential foundations are at stake. Instead, though, Siddhartha resorts to an extremely treacherous belief of inauthentic love: “He will love me back, eventually.”
The sneaky universality of lopsided love
Now, intuitively, we tend to think of these concepts of love as something inherently romantic. But I think they can apply to any relationship. Non-romantic relationships can be extremely lopsided and inauthentic, too, just like relationships with objects, places, and activities.
The common denominator of lopsided love—no matter the object—is that we fall in love with the ideal of something or someone. When we idealize another person, we might think that we’re doing them a favor, because we’re treating them better than everyone else, because we’re “fixing” them, even if just in our imagination. The irony is, however, that no one truly likes to be idealized. Having to meet an ideal comes with a lot of pressure. Namely, reaching this ideal (and sadly, ideals can’t be reached by definition). It’s like signing up for failure and misery in advance.
Worse, when idealizing another person, we fail to see their flaws. That is, we can’t hold them responsible for their actions, thus sabotaging the foundation for healthy boundaries.
This idealization is exactly what happens in the relationship between Siddhartha and his son. The son repeatedly crosses the line—by stealing, insulting, and loafing around—while Siddhartha can’t let go. He’s blinded by love. The sad reality is that all this love isn’t doing anyone any favors.
One day, Vasudeva pulls Siddhartha aside to scrutinize the relationship with his son:
Do you not chain him with your love? Do you not shame him daily with your goodness and patience and make it still more difficult for him? … Is he not constrained and punished by all this?
Honestly, my first feeling when reading this chapter was a sort of hubris. “How can Siddhartha be so stupid?” I thought. “Why can’t he let go and accompany his son back to the city, where he grew up and would be cared for?”
But soon, it began to occur to me: I enter lopsided relationships all the time. And again, not just with people but also with work, places, and possessions. When reflecting on this chapter, I thought back to how, years ago, I moved to Portugal with highly limited language skills, social connections, and future prospects—simply because I was lovestruck by the country. Or, recently, I applied for a job that I wanted so badly that I momentarily failed to see that it was incompatible with my weekly schedule and other responsibilities.
In all these cases, I idealized, clung, and crossed boundaries—and consequently, I loved inauthentically. That’s not so far from Siddhartha’s situation now, is it? Here’s another passage from the chapter that encapsulates this feeling nicely:
Siddhartha began to realize that no happiness and peace had come to him with his son, only sorrow and trouble. But he loved him and preferred the sorrow and trouble of his love rather than happiness and pleasure without the boy.
So, if Siddhartha—who is as close to enlightenment as a person can get—has fallen prey to lopsided love, I certainly have and will continue to.
One question that remains is, why? Why do we choose the misery of lopsided love over freedom, independence, and authenticity?
There’s interesting neuroscientific research that suggests we think less critically and register fewer negative emotions when we’re in love. One study, for instance, analyzed the brain activity of mothers while they were looking at pictures of their own children, good friends, and acquaintances. The researchers conclude that both romantic and maternal attachment “deactivated a common set of regions associated with negative emotions, social judgment and 'mentalizing', that is, the assessment of other people's intentions and emotions.” Love is not just blind; it’s blinding.
In this sense, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that, as human beings, we must idealize others to enter relationships in the first place. It’s a survival mechanism. If we merely focused on a person's many, many flaws, we would never find them desirable. The encyclopedia of human faults and biases is a never-ending book—and yet, we put it aside for a spark of love.
The necessity of loving like a fool
What I love about this chapter—and the entire book—is that it doesn’t convey the slimy moral of “be better than Siddhartha.” No—throughout the entire book, Hesse approaches these topics with immense compassion and empathy. In fact, we could make the case that, according to Hesse, follies like lopsided love are vital and inevitable parts of the human experience. They are the very condition for growth.
As Hesse writes in the chapter:
[Siddhartha] felt indeed that this love, this blind love for his son, was a very human passion, that it was Sansara, a troubled spring of deep water. At the same time he felt that it was not worthless, that it was necessary, that it came from his own nature. This emotion, this pain, these follies also had to be experienced.
“This emotion, this pain, these follies also had to be experienced.” That’s not a bad quote to pin on your wall if you ask me.
Ultimately, every experience is necessary. No matter how much we think we know about something, there’s only one true teacher: the palpable, present-moment reality. That is, the actual time we spend with ourselves and others in this very instance, not in some imagined possible world.
Of course, this does not mean that every experience is desirable. Nor should it lessen the gravity of adversities like loss, injustice, or sickness. Rather, I think it’s about an approach we might call self-friendliness (and I’m using the word “friendliness” here because, as we’ve seen, love can quickly oversteer, blind, and corrupt). It’s about cutting ourselves some slack.
Any time we reflect back on a bad relationship, it’s so easy to think things like, “I should’ve known better,” or, “How could I be so blind?” But these statements are wrong: We shouldn’t have and couldn’t have known better. If we did, we would’ve acted differently. Heck, even if we knew we were doing “the wrong thing” at the time, this doesn’t mean we failed. We did it because we hadn’t yet garnered the necessary experience to act differently.
The follies of lopsided love, then, might not actually be follies, at least not in the classical sense of the word. Instead, they are—as cliche as it may sound— necessary lessons we need to undergo in the never-ending emotional education of adulthood.
What Siddhartha’s relationship with his son shows is that even the wisest person struggles. Even the most pensive person—sooner or later—finds themselves back on the hamster wheel of human passions. Even the most detached person gets blinded by love.
But occasionally, perhaps, we endure a worrisome experience and become wiser, not in spite of it but because of it.
When Siddhartha notices that his son ran away from the hut, he acts against the advice of his friend Vasudeva and follows his son to the city. It’s the first time in twelve years that Siddhartha returns there. He sees the gamblers, the merchants, and Kamala’s garden. He sees the shadows of his past: Siddhartha the Samana, Siddhartha the hedonist, Siddhartha the depressed. The many lives flash in front of Siddhartha’s eyes until, at last, he realizes that:
… the desire that had driven him to this place was foolish, that he could not help his son, that he should not force himself on him. He felt a deep love for the runaway boy, like a wound, and yet felt at the same time that this wound was not intended to fester in him, but that it should heal.
I like the ambiguity of the “runaway boy” in this passage. It could refer to both Siddhartha’s son and young Siddhartha. After all, he also ran away from home when he was still a boy to join the Samanas, even though it was the opposite of what his father wanted. This circles back nicely to the theme of “self-friendliness.” By reconnecting to his own childhood, Siddhartha can forgive not just himself but also his son.
Eventually, Siddhartha returns home and falls into a deep sleep. Ironically, it’s this act of letting go of his son that allows Siddhartha, at last, to love him authentically.
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