Siddhartha (12 page)

“Does the gentleman mean to continue on without clothes?”

“Oh”—Siddhartha sighed—“what I would like best would be not to continue on at all. What I would like best, ferryman, is if you were to give me an old loincloth to wear and keep me on as your assistant, or rather your apprentice, for I would first have to learn how to handle the boat.”

For a long time the ferryman gazed searchingly at the stranger.

“Now I recognize you,” he said at last. “You spent the night in my hut once, a long time ago, surely it’s been more than twenty years, and then I ferried you across the river and we parted from each other like good friends. Were you not a Samana? I can no longer recall your name.”

“My name is Siddhartha, and I was a Samana when you saw me last.”

“Then welcome, Siddhartha. My name is Vasudeva. You will, I hope, be my guest tonight as well and sleep in my hut and tell me from where you have come and why your clothes are such a burden to you.”

They had reached the middle of the river, and Vasudeva leaned his weight more heavily upon the oar, pressing against the current. Peacefully he worked, his eyes fixed on the boat’s tip, his arms strong. Siddhartha sat watching him. He remembered how, over twenty years ago, on that final day he’d spent as a Samana, love for this man had stirred in his heart. Gratefully he now accepted Vasudeva’s offer. When they reached shore, he helped tie the boat to the stakes, and then the ferryman invited him to enter the hut and set bread and water before him. Siddhartha ate with relish, and also ate with relish of the mango fruit Vasudeva offered him.

After their meal—it was nearly twilight now—they found seats upon a tree trunk on the riverbank, and Siddhartha told the ferryman of his origins and his life, just as it had passed before his eyes today, in the hour of his despair. His story lasted deep into the night.

Vasudeva listened with great attentiveness. He took in everything as he listened, origins and childhood, all the learning, all the searching, all the joy, all the suffering. This was one of the greatest among the ferryman’s virtues: He had mastered the art of listening. Although Vasudeva himself did not utter a word, it was clear to the one speaking that each of his words was being allowed to enter into his listener, who sat there quietly, openly, waiting; not a single word was disregarded or met with impatience; Vasudeva attached neither praise nor blame to what he heard but merely listened. Siddhartha felt what a joy it was to be able to confide in such a listener, to entrust his life, his searching, his sorrow, to this welcoming heart.

Near the end of Siddhartha’s tale, when he began to speak of the tree beside the river and his deep fall, of the holy
Om
, and how after his slumber he had felt such love for the river, the ferryman listened twice as attentively as before, utterly and completely absorbed, his eyes closed.

Then, after Siddhartha had fallen silent and some time had passed, Vasudeva said, “It is just as I thought. The river spoke to you. To you as well it is a friend; to you as well it speaks. That is good, that is very good. Stay here with me, Siddhartha my friend. Once I had a wife, her bed lay beside mine, but she died a long time ago; for a long time I have lived alone. Now you will live with me. There is plenty of room and food enough for both of us.”

“I thank you,” Siddhartha said. “I thank you and accept. I thank you also for listening so well to me! Rare are those who know how to listen; never before have I met anyone who was
as skilled in listening as you are. This too I shall learn from you.”

“You will learn this,” Vasudeva said, “but not from me. It was the river that taught me to listen, and it will teach you as well. It knows everything, the river, and one can learn anything from it. You too, after all, have already learned from the river that it is good to strive for downward motion, to sink, to seek the depths. The wealthy, elegant Siddhartha will row as others bid him; the learned Brahmin Siddhartha will become a ferryman. In this too you were instructed by the river. You will learn the rest from it as well.”

Siddhartha responded after a long pause. “What is the rest, Vasudeva?”

Vasudeva got up. “It has grown late,” he said. “Let us go to bed. I cannot tell you what the rest is, my friend. You will learn it; perhaps you already know it. You see, I am not a learned man. I do not know how to speak, I do not even know how to think. I know only how to listen and to be pious; these are the only things I have learned. If I could say and teach these things, perhaps I would be a wise man, but as it is I am only a ferryman, and it is my task to transport people across this river. I have ferried a great many people across it, thousands, and to all of them my river was nothing more than a hindrance in their travels. They were traveling for money and for business, to weddings and on pilgrimages, and the river was in their way; the purpose of the ferryman was to carry them past this obstacle as quickly as possible. But there were a few among these thousands, just a few of them, four or five, for whom the river ceased to be an obstacle. They heard its voice, they listened to it, and the river became holy to them as it has become holy to me. Let us retire now, Siddhartha.”

Siddhartha stayed with the ferryman and learned to handle the boat, and when there was nothing to do at the ferry he
worked with Vasudeva in the rice paddy, gathered wood, and picked the fruit of the pisang trees. He learned to hammer together an oar and to repair the boat and to weave baskets; he was joyful over all he learned, and the days and months went swiftly past. But even more than Vasudeva could teach him, he learned from the river, which taught him unceasingly. Above all, it taught him how to listen—how to listen with a quiet heart and a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinion.

He lived beside Vasudeva as one friend beside another, and from time to time they exchanged words, a few carefully considered words. Vasudeva was no friend of words, so Siddhartha rarely succeeded in moving him to speech.

“Have you too,” he asked him once, “have you too learned this secret from the river: that time does not exist?”

Vasudeva’s face broke into a radiant smile. “Yes, Siddhartha,” he said. “Is this what you mean: that the river is in all places at once, at its source and where it flows into the sea, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the ocean, in the mountains, everywhere at once, so for the river there is only the present moment and not the shadow of a future?”

“It is,” Siddhartha said. “And once I learned this I considered my life, and it too was a river, and the boy Siddhartha was separated from the man Siddhartha and the graybeard Siddhartha only by shadows, not by real things. Siddhartha’s previous lives were also not the past, and his death and his return to Brahman not the future. Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has being and presence.”

Siddhartha spoke with rapture; this enlightenment had made him profoundly happy. Oh, was not then all suffering time, was not all self-torment and fear time, did not everything difficult, everything hostile in the world vanish, was it not overcome as soon as one had overcome time, as soon as one could think it out of existence? He had spoken in rapture,
but Vasudeva smiled at him, beaming, and nodded in affirmation; he nodded silently, ran his hand across Siddhartha’s shoulder, and turned back to his work.

On yet another occasion, when the river had swollen in monsoon season and was raging, Siddhartha said, “Isn’t it true, my friend, that the river has many voices, very many voices? Does it not have the voice of a king, and of a warrior, and of a bull, and of a nocturnal bird, and of a woman giving birth, and of a man heaving a sigh, and a thousand voices more?”

“It is so.” Vasudeva nodded. “All the voices of the creatures are in its voice.”

“And do you know,” Siddhartha went on, “what word it is the river is speaking when you succeed in hearing all its ten thousand voices at once?”

Vasudeva smiled happily; he leaned toward Siddhartha and spoke the holy
Om
into his ear. And this was just what Siddhartha had heard.

And each time Siddhartha smiled, his face became more and more like that of the ferryman, almost as beaming, almost as suffused with happiness, almost as shining from a thousand tiny wrinkles, as childish, as aged. Many travelers, seeing the two ferrymen together, took them for brothers. Often they sat together in the evenings beside the riverbank on the tree trunk, sat in silence, both listening to the water, which for them was not water but rather the voice of Life, the voice of Being, of the eternally Becoming. And from time to time it would happen that both of them, listening to the river, thought of the same things—of a conversation from the day before yesterday, of one of their travelers whose face and destiny occupied them, of death, of their childhoods—and both of them would glance at each other at just the same moment when the river had said something good to them, and both were thinking precisely the same thing; both men were glad about the same answer they had received to the same question.

There was something about the ferry and the two ferrymen that some travelers could feel. From time to time it would happen that a passenger, having looked into the face of one of the ferrymen, began to tell the story of his life, told of his sorrow, confessed to wicked deeds, asked for consolation or counsel. From time to time it would happen that someone asked for permission to spend an evening with them so as to listen to the river. It happened, too, that the curious came, people who had heard it said that this ferry was home to two wise men or magicians or saints. The curious asked many questions, but they received no answers, and they found neither magicians nor wise men; they found only two old, friendly little men who appeared to be mute and somewhat odd and benighted. And the curious laughed and conversed with one another about how foolishly and credulously people spread such empty rumors.

The years passed without anyone counting them. Then one day monks arrived on a pilgrimage, disciples of Gautama, the Buddha, asking to be ferried across the river, and from them the ferrymen learned that they were journeying back to see their great teacher as swiftly as possible because the news had reached them that the Sublime One was gravely ill and would soon die his last human death and attain salvation. Not long after, another group of monks came to the ferry on their pilgrimage, and then another, and not only the monks but most of the other travelers and wanderers as well spoke of nothing but Gautama and his impending death. And just as people come streaming through the countryside from all directions to witness a military campaign or the coronation of a king—gathering here and there in little groups like ants—this is how they came streaming now, as if drawn by a magic spell, to where the great Buddha was awaiting his death, where this colossal event would take place and the
great man of the epoch, the Perfect One, would go to his glory.

Siddhartha thought often in these days of the wise man on his deathbed, the great teacher whose voice had prevailed on entire peoples and roused hundreds of thousands, whose voice he too had once heard, whose holy countenance he too had once gazed upon with awe. He thought of him with affection, saw the path of his perfection in his mind’s eye, and with a smile recalled the words with which he had once, as a young man, addressed the Sublime One. These words, it now appeared to him, had been proud and precocious; he smiled as he remembered them. A long time ago he had realized there was no longer anything separating him from Gautama, whose doctrine he had been unable to accept. No, a true seeker could not accept doctrine, not a seeker who truly wished to find. But the one who had found what he was seeking could give his approval to any teaching, any discipline at all, to any path, any goal—there was no longer anything separating him from the thousand others who were living in the Eternal and breathing the Divine.

On one of these days when so many were making pilgrimages to see the dying Buddha, Kamala was among the pilgrims: Kamala, once the most beautiful of courtesans. She had long since withdrawn from her former way of life, had given her garden to Gautama’s monks, had taken refuge in his teachings, and was one of those women who provided for and gave friendship to the pilgrims. Together with the boy Siddhartha, her son, she had set out as soon as word of Gautama’s impending death reached her, set out wearing simple clothes and on foot. She had been walking beside the river with her little son, but the boy soon grew tired and wanted to go home, wanted to rest, wanted to eat, became stubborn and tearful. Frequently Kamala had to stop with him; he was accustomed to having his way, and she had to feed him, console him, and
scold him. He didn’t understand why he was having to go on this exhausting, gloomy pilgrimage with his mother, having to go to a strange place to see a man he did not know who was holy and now lay dying. Let him die; what was it to the boy?

The pilgrims were approaching Vasudeva’s ferry when little Siddhartha again forced his mother to stop and rest. Even Kamala was exhausted, and while the boy was chewing on a banana, she squatted down on the ground, closed her eyes for a little, and rested. But suddenly she gave a piteous wail. The boy looked at her, terrified, and saw her face ashen with horror; beneath her dress a small black snake darted out that had just bitten her.

Quickly the two of them raced down the path to get to where people were; not far from the ferry, Kamala collapsed, unable to go on. But the boy began wailing with misery, kissing and embracing his mother between his cries, and she too joined in his loud cries for help until the noise reached the ears of Vasudeva, who was standing beside the ferry. He ran up, took the woman in his arms, and carried her to the boat, the boy running alongside, and soon they all reached the hut where Siddhartha stood at the hearth, making a fire. He glanced up and saw first the face of the boy, which he found strangely evocative, reminiscent of things long forgotten. Then he saw Kamala, whom he recognized at once, though she lay unconscious in the arms of the ferryman, and now he knew it was his own son whose face had so struck him, and his heart stirred in his breast.