No, a true seeker could not accept any teachings, not if he sincerely wished to find something. Be he who had found, could give his approval to every path, every goal; nothing separated him from all the other thousands who lived in eternity, who breathed the Divine.

When I read Siddhartha for the first time, I couldn’t understand what this passage meant. Or rather, I didn’t want to understand it. At the time (maybe 2-3 years go) I thought of myself as a budding Buddhist, seeing Buddhism as really the end all be all of spiritual paths. Indeed, that Siddhartha had met the Buddha himself (in the story) and yet had rejected him as a teacher I found to be personally a little insulting. This is how much I had identified myself as a Buddhist.

Fast forward 3 years later and a second reading has proved to be much richer (perhaps that is how these kinds of books are meant to be read, after long intervals throughout a lifetime). Siddhartha’s disillusionment with teachers I now share as well, to an extent. Perhaps this is also what Herman Hesse found prior to writing his novel, that he could find no suitable teachers and thus concluded that “wisdom is not communicable,” that to awaken one had to find is own way independently. I sense there is much of Herman Hesse in Siddhartha and yet as a Westerner, I can understand where he is coming from.

However, I think the Tibetan tradition advocates the opposite approach. That not only is awakening communicable (through different lifetimes even), it is bestowed upon you through empowerments and teachings, through total surrender to a guru who leads you to the final goal. There are even meditations where the teacher will “point out the mind,” which I’m told are moments where he will somehow alert you to your essential nature as clear luminous consciousness. Of course, these kinds of things they may not have had in the Buddha’s day, and Herman Hesse probably never heard of them because Tibet was closed to world when the book was written (pre-1950).