ornoth | Such a Wise Guy

So I finally read Herman Hesse’s “Siddhartha”.

I’m not sure why I hadn’t before. I think it’s Nietzsche’s fault. My preconception was that anything philosophical, with such a long and obscure name, and written by a German, would certainly be a death march to read. But on the contrary, I found the writing pretty mundane: something that would be entirely readable at a high school level.

In terms of content, it was okay. Most of the book talks about the protagonist’s various failed attempts to find enlightenment: first from teachers, then from asceticism, then from hedonism and materialism. That didn’t have a whole lot of value to me. Like, most of us don’t need to know what doesn’t work; we want to know what does! In the end, Siddhartha finds his own path to wisdom, and it resonates somewhat with what I feel.

But there was one especially interesting nugget near the end of the book. Siddhartha’s lifetime friend Govinda chose to follow the Buddha, and they talk about how Siddhartha was unable to gain enlightenment from his teachers. Then they have the following exchange:

       Govinda said: “Oh, Siddhartha, you still seem to like joking a bit. I believe you and I know that you have not followed any teacher. But have you found, if not a teaching, then certain thoughts, certain insights that are your own and that help you live? If you told me a little about them, you would delight my heart.”
       Siddhartha said: “I have had thoughts, yes, and insights, now and then. Sometimes, for an hour or for a day, I have felt knowledge in me the way we feel life in our hearts. There were a number of thoughts, but it would be hard for me to communicate them to you. Listen, my Govinda, this is one of my thoughts that I have found: Wisdom cannot be communicated. Wisdom that a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.”
       “Are you joking?” asked Govinda.
       “I am not joking. I am telling you what I have found. Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. We can find it, we can live it, we can be carried by it, we can work wonders with it, but we cannot utter it or teach it. That was what I sometimes sensed in my youth, what drove me away from the teachers.”

I find this singularly insightful. I have no doubt that deep wisdom exists, but it does seem very difficult to share with others, at least until they’re ready and willing to hear it. But even then, the ultimate teacher of wisdom is life; no one can “tell” you wisdom.

I’ve seen that problem in action at some of the dharma talks I’ve attended, where in the Q&A period it becomes readily apparent that someone in the audience has completely missed the point of the talk, and the speaker struggles to find a way to plant what’s in his or her head into the listener’s.

For the past couple years, I’ve listened to dharma talks by the hundreds, both in person as well as via podcast. Have they made me any wiser? All I can honestly say is that in some cases they’ve given me meaningful things to think about. But as I stated earlier, it’s exactly that contemplative analysis—“thinking about it”—that fosters the growth of one’s own true wisdom; just listening to someone else’s words unquestioningly won’t do it.

And, of course, the teachings that I’ve internalized have only taken root because my mind and heart happened to be a fertile field at the moment. Five, ten, twenty years ago, I was a different person, and hadn’t had the life experiences necessary to be able to understand many of the things I’ve since come to believe.

And then there’s my own writings here in my journal. In many ways, I write these entries for myself, but there’s also a secondary desire that some of the nuggets of wisdom that I uncover will be of some value to my friends who read my entries. But Hesse’s assertion still rings true: I can’t just put wisdom down on a screen and expect others to receive it. The things that come as insights to me might seem simplistic or self-evident to you—or even to me—when they’re put down in writing.

Naturally, I’ll continue writing, and hope that my philosophical musings don’t become repetitive and bore you to tears. But I realize that you’ve got to find your wisdom yourself, and I can only make vague gestures toward the things that I have uncovered for myself.

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I kinda grok what you're putting down there, having recently discovered that my sister has fallen for the kind of supernatural mumbo-jumbo perpetrated by psychic John Edward and the make-a-wish nonsense of "The Secret" (both of which have the "Oprah stamp of authenticity"). I've tried to lead her to find out for herself the flaws in such bogosity, to no avail. Clearly, there's no quick way to make people "wise up"!

No, there isn't. People have to learn things for themselves. And part of knowing that is letting your sister make her own mistakes, and realizing that when she moves on, she will have learned something she needed to learn from the experience.

The next step is to realize that it could just be the right thing for her. The things she learns from life, her wisdom, will naturally be different than your wisdom, which will in turn be different from mine. There's no real right or wrong, there's just the lessons you've learned along the way.

All IMO, of course.

I mostly agree with you here, Orny. None of us have the wisdom to know if what his sister is doing is:
a) good or bad for her in the long run
b) something she needs to experience to learn some lesson
c) a path that strays from her main one.
d) whether she will learn a lesson at all
e) a path where she teaches her brother some wisdom
f) etc, etc, etc.

We muddle through the best we can and hopefully the lessons given are not more than we can bear.

Mark

Is true, I guess. All too often, though, the Path to Wisdom leads through the Quagmire of Quackery and the Forest of Financial Ruin!

Ah well. If I claim to be a wise man, it surely means that I don't know!

from the firespiral, who has a degree in Philosophy which has served her very well.

For me, the path of Knowledge is one of active learning, of pushing the edges and finding out who you are in the face of what the Universe/God(s) Etc. (Personally, I call it Izzy, the Cosmic Chef- because of the "is" factor of theolgy/theism) present, through your own filters. It strikes me that the end result of said path *is* Wisdom. I sence knowledge as more of a process and wisdom as a result.

But, that said, yeah, it *is* hard to communicate! In part this is because we all have different filters through which we "see" the world. And our language is garnered through a need to share information. But, for me, each persons "wisdom" is unique, and by that factor combined with the others, is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to communicate to the degree that the listener's understanding/parsing/processing of said information matches the speaker's understanding/experiencing of it.

My2centz,

the spiral

That was very well put (except for the extended-play parenthetical expression, which made that sentence difficult to parse).

I'll mostly agree that wisdom is unique to each person, and is "a result", although the idea of wisdom in the abstract poses some problems for me,as well. To me, wisdom describes an action. It's the old Buddhist thing about "skillful" and "unskillful" actions, in that what matters is not the gathering of some abstract quality, but how one's wisdom manifests itself in the world through one's actions.

Glad to have you aboard, FS! I didn't see you lurking back there...

something that would be entirely readable at a high school level.

As a junior in high school, I wrote a 20-page paper about Siddhartha (junior honors English paper). I think I still have it, actually.

In terms of content, it was okay. Most of the book talks about the protagonist’s various failed attempts to find enlightenment: first from teachers, then from asceticism, then from hedonism and materialism. That didn’t have a whole lot of value to me. Like, most of us don’t need to know what doesn’t work; we want to know what does! In the end, Siddhartha finds his own path to wisdom, and it resonates somewhat with what I feel.

This paragraph is so ironic to me. Would the nugget at the end of the book (which I believe is mostly the point of the book) mean the same if you'd found it on its own? If you just read the last chapter or few chapters, would you come to realize that yes, wisdom cannot be taught.

In the Never-Ending Story, where Sebastian has to read about Atrayu going through all the trials and tribulations, and at the end he asks why they didn't just ask him for a new name for the Princess, it could have saved so much grief, and the point was he had to read the book, and be there, to understand that it was real.

The point can be made today -- you can tell plenty of people that they cannot learn wisdom, yet they'll seek it from gurus (as you did). What you seek from other people is their own story, and you take the points you will from it. You might get inspired by someone else, but you don't actually gain wisdom. You gain insight, perhaps another side to a story, which might be directly applied to your life, so it might appear that you gained wisdom....

So yeah, you have to go through Siddhartha's journeys, to realize that yes, he learned information but not wisdom from teachers and society and the like. Otherwise the book would be the length of this post. :)

Well, the lesson might not have the same effect if it was, say, written in a blog entry, but I think it'd be close. The hard part with the blog is that it would never have reached the audience nor attained the stature in people's minds that the novel has.

On the other hand, what you and Hesse both point out is no less true: you don't learn wisdom by being told things, but only through firsthand experience. That experience can be enhanced and made more effective by words that influence how you approach or process the experience, but ultimately you still have to go through something to make it your own.

It is wisdom through experience that cannot be communicated conceptually, only experientially... using words, images, and archetypes to convey experience to be received through like experiential understanding, making the transmission personally meaningful, resulting in human connection, in edification, in self-knowledge, in healing, in joy, or just the aesthetic experience of being emotionally moved by beauty... that is the raison d'etre of art, music, poetry, and fiction.

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