This is Chapter 9 of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. Missed the last chapters? Here are 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.
Let us quickly recall where Siddhartha is coming from. In the last segment, in Chapter 8, he got close to taking his life. Having indulged in the seductive pleasures of the material world (money, wine, gambling) for years on end, Siddhartha just ended up feeling… empty. He fled the city to the river and reached rock bottom. Siddhartha wanted to give up, fall into the water, and let gravity pull him down to the riverbed, where he would become one with the mud and sludge.
But then, two unexpected things happened.
Siddhartha heard the holy “Om” from the river. The sound of unity. He became aware of his grim reality (and its groundlessness) and fell into a deep slumber.
Upon his awakening from his nap, Siddhartha found his best friend Govinda standing in front of him. They briefly exchanged life updates before parting ways again.
These two events rekindled hope within Siddhartha. Suddenly, his life didn’t look so grim anymore. He found serenity in staying by the river — and committing his life to it.
Now, walking downstream, Siddhartha reaches the ferryman’s hut. (Yes, that ferryman from Chapter 5 — the one who provided Siddhartha with shelter and took him across the river.) Of course, the ferryman doesn’t recognize Siddhartha, who’s still wearing his fine merchant clothing. But once Siddhartha tells him that he’s that strange Samana who once crossed the river many years ago, the ferryman remembers. He welcomes Siddhartha and is willing to listen to his life story.
And so begins the last life chapter of Siddhartha.
The art of listening like a ferryman
Siddhartha takes up an apprenticeship under Vasudeva, the ferryman. In the process, he learns many lessons. One of them is, of course, how to be a good ferryman. But perhaps even more importantly, Vasudeva teaches Siddhartha a sort of meta-skill: the art of listening.
Listening, Vasudeva shows, is more than just hearing another human utter sounds. It’s a way of being in the world.
I didn’t realize it on my first readthrough of the book, but on the second and third, it occurred to me that this—listening as a way of being—is an incredibly profound insight. To unpack this, we might start thinking about the qualities of a good listener. What comes to mind? Personally, I think about a person who shows patience, reassurance, and empathy. I suppose we all crave these virtues from the person listening to our problems—no matter if our troubles are small and fleeting (an annoying co-worker) or pervasive and paralyzing (the death of a loved one).
But there’s one quality of a good listener, I suppose, that rules them all. Let’s call this quality “non-judgmental presence.” That is, we don’t want the listener to be our judge or executioner. We simply want them to accept, relate, and understand. It’s not that they must agree. It’s simply that they must refrain from rating our thoughts and actions as “good” or “bad.” These moral decrees cut the cord of human connection.
This is where Vasudeva’s teaching comes in. We’d do ourselves a great favor if we adopted the quality of a good listener not just in conversations but in life in general. Rather than labeling every bit of our experience as “good” or “bad” from the get-go, we might simply start by investigating it like a curious scientist.
The meditation teacher and psychotherapist Loch Kelly perfectly captures this frame of mind with a powerful question: “What is here now if there’s no problem to solve?” Listening — whether in conversations or in life — isn’t about solving problems. It’s about unconditional awareness.
Here’s how Siddhartha internalizes this:
But he [Siddhartha] learned more from the river than Vasudeva could teach him. He learned from it continually. Above all, he learned from it how to listen, to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgement, without opinion.
This new form of listening allows Siddhartha to reach unprecedented discoveries about his life — and reach a new form of enlightenment.
Everything flows
As the years pass, Siddartha settles into his new life with Vasudeva at the river. It’s a simple life. A good life. They carry out their duties as ferrymen, take care of the boat, work in the ricefields, gather wood, pick fruit from banana trees. But perhaps most importantly, they listen to the many lessons of the river. They speak very little—not because they don’t know what to say, but because there’s not much to say when one is absorbed in the holistic art of listening.
Soon, Siddhartha realizes something that allows him to escape the mental prison of regret and misery he’d been locked in for many years. The realization goes like this:
He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.
I find this sentence not just lyrically beautiful but also endlessly wise. Later on, Siddhartha exchanges his discovery with Vasudeva:
I reviewed my life and it was also a river, and Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man and Siddhartha the old man were only separated by shadows, not through reality … Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.
It always boggles my mind when I think how a river can look as if it’s continually the same thing, and yet, it always flows. This seems paradoxical. But in reality, we experience a very similar phenomenon with each passing moment. Every thought, every emotion, every experience we’ve ever had or ever will have is temporary. None of it will last. All of it will pass.
This too—whatever “this” might be.
Some people find this depressing. And to be fair, it feels gloomy to think about the fact that, one day, we’ll all be wiped from this world. But I don’t think this implies nihilism — simply resigning to life’s absurdity. Siddhartha realized this himself after he fled the city and was re-awakened by the river. It’s quite the opposite, then: The flow of life is the very thing that makes it worth living.
In some of my articles, I talk about the Japanese sentiment of mono no aware, meaning “the pathos of things.” It’s this idea that there’s beauty in the unavoidable fate that things pass, fade, slip away. The really interesting part about mono no aware is that it’s an emotion—which means it can rise beyond words and concepts. We can feel and experience it.
Of course, I don’t know about you, but whenever I glimpse into mono no aware, there’s no dread, no terror, no sorrow. Not in the slightest. Instead, it’s a lightning bolt of awareness. I get this warm, fuzzy feeling in my chest. My eyes heat up to the point where I’m close to tearing up — not out of sadness about what might happen but pure appreciation and gratitude for what is here, now.
Hesse encapsulates this beautifully:
Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.
Everything flows. That’s what makes life so beautiful.
Accepting that everything flows like a river resolves the clenched fist we often hold over life. The trouble is, we desperately want things to last. Lasting things give us a sense of stability, of selfhood. So much so that we even cling to uncomfortable and unproductive thoughts, goals, and emotions. Our ego would rather be miserable than abandon its own identity.
However, when we truly accept that everything flows, we loosen this tight fist. We might not always succeed—sometimes, the knee-jerk reaction to grab and hold on to stuff will return. But we can finally relax over something that we could never control in the first place.
Everything flows — it’s an adage that provides consolation in moments of hardship. Humility in moments of pride. Appreciation in moments of bliss. We might as well hop into the river of life rather than forcefully try to mold and control it.
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