Chapter 7 reincarnation

Siddhartha lived a worldly life and a sex life for a long time without quite belonging to it.The sexual desire he had stifled in the crazy sramana years revived again. He tasted the taste of wealth, sensuality, and power, but he was still a sramana in his heart for a long time, and the smart Kamala also Saw this exactly.Still the art of thinking, waiting, and fasting guided his life, and he was as foreign to worldly people, to the childlike world, as they were to him. Time flies, and Siddhartha hardly notices the passage of time in his comfort.He was rich, and had already owned a house of his own and his own servants, and there was another garden by the river on the outskirts of the city.People liked him and came to him when they needed money or advice, but no one was particularly close to him except Kamala.

The heightened lucidity he had experienced before in his youth, the heightened lucidity he had experienced in the days after listening to Gotama's lectures, in the days after parting from Govinda, That tense expectation, that proud independence without doctrine or teacher, that flexible determination to listen to the voice of the gods in one's own heart, gradually became a memory, a past; The holy spring flowing through his heart is already flowing gently in the distance.Many things he learned from the Samana, from Gotama, and from the Brahmin father, remained in his heart for a long time: the frugal life, the joy of thinking, Time, and the silent awareness of oneself, the eternal self that is neither physical nor conscious.Some of them are indeed still in his heart, but, after all, they have disappeared one by one, covered by dust.Just like the potter's disc, once turned, it will keep spinning for a long time, and finally slow down and stop slowly, so are the wheels of penance, thinking and discrimination in Siddhartha's heart. It has been turning for a long time, and it is still turning now, but it has slowed down, shaken, and almost stopped.Just as warmth seeps into a dying tree trunk, slowly filling and rotting it, so vulgarity and inertia have entered into Siddhartha's mind, slowly filling and growing and wearying it. , to numb it.But his lust became active, he learned a lot and experienced a lot.

Siddhartha learned to do business, to wield power over people, to have fun with women.He learned to wear fine clothes, order servants, and bathe in fragrant water.He learned to eat well-cooked meals, with chicken, duck, fish, condiments, and desserts, and to drink wine that makes one lazy and forgetful.He learned how to throw dice, play chess, watch dances, sit on a sedan chair and sleep on a soft bed.Still, he was different from the others, he felt himself superior to them, and he always looked at them with that ironic, wry contempt which the Samana always has for the laity.Whenever Kamaswami was unwell, angry, insulted, troubled by the businessman's troubles, Siddhartha stood by with sarcasm.However, as the harvest season and the rainy season passed, his sarcasm slowly and imperceptibly weakened, and his sense of superiority also subsided.As his wealth grew, Siddhartha himself took on some of the traits of that childlike layman, their childishness and cautiousness.Moreover, he envied them, and the more he resembled them, the more he envied them.And what he envied was what he lacked and what they had, that they could make their lives count, their passions for joy and fear, the restless and sweet happiness they evolved.These people are constantly infatuated with themselves, with women, with their children, with fame or fortune, with plans or hopes.But there was one thing he didn't learn from them, and that was childlike joy and childlike stupidity; he learned from them precisely the very disgusting things he despised himself.So it happened more and more often that he stayed up late in the morning after a fun party, feeling groggy and sleepy.When Kamaswami bored him by telling his troubles, he tended to get angry and restless.When he lost money at the dice, he laughed aloud to excess.His face was still brighter and brighter than the others, but he smiled less, and there was a succession of those features that are only common on the faces of rich people, the ones of dissatisfaction, sickness, boredom, sluggishness, and callousness.The rich man's mental illness slowly took hold of him.

Fatigue was like a veil, a thin mist that slowly fell on Siddhartha, thicker every day, muddy every month, and heavy every year.Just like a new garment wears out with time, loses its bright colors over time, spots, creases, frays at the hem, starts to show holes in places, Siddhartha and Govinda broke up. My New Year's life has also become old, and with the passing years, it has lost its color and luster, and is full of wrinkles and spots. Disappointment and disgust have already been born, hidden in the bottom of my heart, and sometimes exposed ugly.Siddhartha didn't notice.He just found that the loud, confident voice inside himself, the voice that had once awakened in him and guided him at times in his glory days, had now become silent.

The world took him captive, and pleasure, lust, and idleness, and lastly that most scorned and ridiculed vice of all, which he always thought was stupid--greed.Possessions, family possessions, and riches finally took hold of him too, and ceased to be games and bric-a-brac for him, but became chains and burdens.Siddhartha came to this last and most ignominious astray by an unusually treacherous route, namely, by playing dice.From the time when he didn't want to be a monk anymore, Siddhartha started gambling to win money and jewels.In the past, he just laughed and casually participated as a mediocre custom, but now, his gambling addiction is getting bigger and bigger.He was a formidable gambler, and most people would not dare to gamble with him because he bet so much and so hard.He gambled out of inner distress, and losing and spending that nasty money gave him an angry pleasure that he could not have expressed more clearly and bitingly in any other way about the wealth that the merchant idolized. contempt.So he made big bets without regret, hated himself, mocked himself, won a lot of money, threw a lot of money, lost money, jewels, villas, won them back, and lost them again.He loved the dread, the dreadful, suffocating dread of betting big bets on one's shoulders, and tried to keep recurring, intensifying, stimulated. It became stronger and stronger, because only in this feeling was he somewhat happy, a little intoxicated, and somewhat at ease in his boring, lukewarm, monotonous life.After each big loss he managed to accumulate a new year's fortune, to trade more zealously, to press his debtors more severely, because he would continue to gamble, continue to spend, and continue to show his contempt for wealth.Siddhartha lost his composure when he lost money, his patience with delinquent debtors, his sympathy for beggars, his interest in alms, and his lending to borrowers.He can spend thousands of dollars in gambling and laugh it off, but he is more strict and stingy in business, and sometimes dreams of money at night!How often he woke from this hideous intoxication, how often he saw his face in the mirror on the bedroom wall grow old and ugly, and shame and nausea haunted him so often that he fled on, into new games , into the narcotics of carnality and alcoholism, and from there back to the instinct to save and earn money.In this pointless cycle he was exhausted, aging and ill.

At this time, a dream reminded him.He was with Kamala that night, in her big, beautiful garden.The two sat under the tree talking, and Kamala said something thought-provoking, with a certain sadness and weariness behind it.She begged him to tell about Gotama, and couldn't get enough of him, how pure Gotama's eyes were, how quiet and beautiful his mouth was, how kind his smile was, how steady his gait was.He had to tell her about this living Buddha for a long time, and then Kamala sighed and said: "In the future, perhaps not long after, I will follow this living Buddha too. I will give my big garden to Give him, believe in his doctrine." But then she teased him again, clutching him with painful passion in the game of love, biting him, weeping, as if trying to squeeze once more from this empty and fleeting passion. Bring out the last drop of sweetness.Siddhartha suddenly understood how acceptable lust and death were.Then he lay beside her, with Kamala's face next to his, and from under her eyes and around the corners of her mouth he clearly read a disturbing writing, a pattern of thin lines and shallow lines. The words are reminiscent of autumn and old age, just like Siddhartha himself, at the age of forty, but gray hair has appeared among the black hair.On Kamala's pretty face, I remember tiredness, tiredness and haggardness that had already begun, as well as an uneasiness that was intentionally concealed, unspoken, and perhaps unaware: fear of aging, fear of autumn, fear of inevitable death .He bid her farewell with a sigh, full of unhappiness, full of secret unease.

Then Siddhartha returned to his own home to drink away the night with the dancers, and to show contempt for his peers, although he had nothing to be proud of.He drank a lot, went to bed very late after midnight, tired but excited, wanted to cry, almost desperate, sleepy but couldn't sleep for a long time, full of a kind of sadness that he thought he could not bear anymore, full of pain. He felt an evil that made him sick, like the lousy taste of wine, like music that was too sweet and monotonous, like the smiles of dancing girls too soft, like their hair and The overly sweet aroma of breasts.But what disgusted him the most was himself, the smell of his hair, the smell of wine in his mouth, the tiredness and discomfort of his skin.Just as a person who eats or drinks too much, throws up with pain, and then is happy at being relieved, so the insomniac wishes, after a bout of vomiting, to be free from these pleasures, from these habits, from this sense of innocence. A meaningless life, get rid of yourself.It wasn't until daylight, when the street in front of his residence began to be noisy and busy, that he fell asleep in a daze, and fell into a semi-numb state, a kind of drowsiness.During this moment he had a dream.

Kamala kept a strange bird in a golden cage.He dreamed about the little bird.He dreamed that the bird had become mute, and it always sang in the morning.When he discovered this, he went to the cage and looked inside. The little bird was already dead, lying straight on the bottom of the cage.He took out the dead bird, weighed it in his hand, and threw it away, into the street.He was frightened and sick, as if he had thrown away all value and all goodness with the dead bird. Waking up from this dream, he felt himself surrounded by a deep sorrow.Worthless, he felt that the life he had lived was really worthless and meaningless, leaving nothing alive, nothing precious or worth preserving.He was alone and empty, like a wreck on the shore.

Sadly, Siddhartha went into a garden that belonged to him, locked the small door, and sat down under a mango tree, feeling the death in his heart and the fear in his chest.He sat there feeling how his heart was dying, how withering, how it was ending.Gradually he concentrated, and once again reviewed in his mind the path he had traveled in his life, starting from the earliest days he could remember.When had he experienced a bliss, felt a true ecstasy?Oh yes, he's had that experience a few times too.He had tasted this kind of joy in his youth, when he was praised by Brahmans, when he far surpassed his peers, and performed outstandingly in reciting poems and books, debating with scholars, and being a priest's assistant.At that time, he felt in his heart: "A road is set in front of you, and your mission is to walk this road. The gods are waiting for you." Stand out from the crowd.He pondered the true meaning of Brahman in pain, and each knowledge he gained only aroused a new longing in his heart, and in the longing, in the pain, he always heard the voice: "Go on! Go on! This It is a call to you!! He heard this voice when he left his hometown and chose to live in Samana; he heard this voice when he left Samana and went to that living Buddha; Here comes the voice. How long has he heard the voice? How long has he not climbed the mountain again? How flat and desolate is his path! Many long years, no lofty purpose, no longing, Not improving, content with small pleasures, but never satisfied! Over the years, he has been trying and aspiring to be the same person as many people, the same person as those children, but he doesn't know it, he life is far more miserable and wretched than theirs, because their aims are different from theirs, and their worries are different from his. The whole world of a man like Kamaswami is to him a game, a spectacle to be watched. It was a dance, a tragedy. Only Kamala was the one he really loved, the one he cherished—but is she still that? Does he still need her, or does she need him? Are they also playing an endless game? Is it necessary to live for this? No, it is not necessary! This game is called reincarnation. It is a game played by children. It may be fun to play once, twice, ten times-but it will be played like this forever go down?

By this time Siddhartha understood that the game had been played to the end and he could not continue playing.A shiver ran through him, and he felt something die deep inside. All that day, he sat under the mango tree, thinking of his father, Govinda, Gotama.Do you have to leave them to be Kamaswami?As night fell he remained motionless.He looked up at the stars and thought, "I'm sitting under my mango tree, in my big garden." He smiled -- he had a mango tree, he had a big garden, but was it necessary?Is this right?Isn't this also a stupid game? Even this he had to finish completely, even this died in his heart.He got up and said goodbye to the mango tree and the big garden.Because he hadn't eaten all day, he felt hungry and thought of his house in the city, his bedroom and bed, and the table full of good food.He smiled wearily, shook his head, and said goodbye to these things.

That same night, Siddhartha left his garden and the city, never to return.Kamaswami sent people to look for him for a long time, thinking that he had fallen into the hands of robbers.Kamala didn't send anyone looking for him.She was not surprised to learn that Siddhartha was missing.Hasn't she been looking forward to this news?Wasn't he just a Samana, a homeless person, a pilgrim?She felt it especially deeply during the last reunion.She rejoiced in the pain of failure, holding him to her heart one last time, feeling once more completely possessed by him. When she got the first news of Siddhartha's disappearance, she went to the window and to the golden cage that held a rare little songbird.She opened the cage door, took out the bird, and let it fly away.She watched the soaring bird go away for a long time.From this day on, she no longer receives guests and closes her own house.Some time later she discovered unexpectedly that her last meeting with Siddhartha had made her pregnant.