Noticing Siddhartha
By Lacey Segal, Poway High School

I was nine years old when I took off all my clothes and stared in the mirror. Scanning the length of my body, I paused and gazed into my own eyes. Is that what the being thinking these thoughts looks like? The expressionless face observing me seemed distant, somehow, to my thoughts, my feelings, all the sensations, emotions, memories, and pulsations that made up “me.” I wondered by the mirror that day who, and more importantly, what I was.

Thomas was in his body, too, like me. If he could open his eyes, he would see a body. But Thomas wasn’t really alive. Mom told me that he was a vegetable and that meant his brain was dead. They (I wasn’t sure who they were) had to pull some sort of a plug and then he would be dead, officially; even though, she said, he might as well be dead now. He was my friend who died in a Jet Ski accident on Mission Bay when we were nine.

Was my body a shell or was my body my self? Why did Thomas still have a body but he didn’t really exist any more? What does it mean to be half alive? I stood by that mirror for a long time, thinking and looking.

I’ve learned a tool for successful introspection. It goes like this: trace the thought that lead to the thought, and then mine for the thought behind it. If I really want to get subtle, I try to examine the energy behind the thought that lead to the thought that lead to the thought….. It’s a seemingly endless process of knot-untying. So many of my thoughts today lead back to that day when I heard about Tom and I looked in the mirror.
Since I am now a high school teacher, I wonder about my students and their experiences. I think good teachers observe their students quietly, and thoughtfully, viewing each child as an individual, and recognizing the knots they will spend their lives untying. Great teachers provide tools and inspiration to help students understand themselves with clarity and honesty; thus students see the world through lenses not tainted by inner turmoil or warped by personalized misconception.

At the same time, a model teacher realizes the importance of a learner’s autonomy and self-reliance. The novel, Siddhartha highlights this truth when the fictional Buddha-to-be tells his best friend, Govinda, of his recent revelation that wisdom cannot be verbalized or written down. "I'm not kidding. I'm telling you what I've found. Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and taught. This was what I, even as a young man, sometimes suspected, what has driven me away from the teachers” (Hesse 115). To Siddhartha, wisdom is like a harmonious sensation, as the mind and the physical body blend. It is something to be experienced, not learned from an outside source.

I loved the novel Siddhartha….when I read it at age 23 after I had gotten really excited about yoga. I had a context for the novel as well as an intrinsic drive to read it. As I approached my world literature teaching assignment in a suburban, mostly white, mostly Christian, mostly conservative district, I can honestly say I shuddered at the thought of teaching the novel. I could already hear their voices: “Miss Segal, this is so boring! Why do we have to read this!”

And truthfully, the first time I taught the book I did a terrible job. They didn’t get it. I didn’t get it either. (What is enlightenment? For example) How to teach a novel with very little plot drive befuddled me. They said what I imagined and much worse: “I hate this book!” “Everybody said it was bad so I didn’t read it last night.” “What’s up with this Sidd guy running around naked? What a freak.” “This book sucks.”

Besides the inherent challenges of teaching a book with a humdrum plot, a vast cultural divide between reader and character, and some unique philosophical essences, I balked at the idea of teaching a book which embodied the message to readers: You Don’t Need Teachers.

I spent the next year trying to understand Siddhartha. I did this because I wanted to be a better teacher but I also did it because it bothered me. Maybe Siddhartha knew what he was when he looked in a mirror. Maybe if somebody is enlightened, she gets to know answers to secrets about life and death. If I really thought about it, I was still trying to figure out what happened to Tom, my own primordial question, and I was using great literature as a guide.

So began (or perhaps continued) my own “spiritual journey.” I attended yoga classes which seemed more like aerobics with burning incense and I tried to learn meditation. It was really boring and stressful. My father taught me a mantra but my list of “things to do” would always trump his “Ra-Da-Humm.” After meeting a few self-professed “healers” and attending a handful of quasi-spiritual gatherings, classes, and services, I began to feel like young Siddhartha himself, only much less dedicated. I was not willing to renounce my life and wander in the forest; I was just a teacher checking out some spiritual stuff in her free time.

Then, two significant things happened. I met an acupuncturist who taught me Taoist standing meditation and I spent a week at a Buddhist monastery in Big Sur. The contents of those experiences may be reserved for another essay; however, I can profess that I learned techniques to lower my stress level, increase my vitality, and feel connected to things bigger than me. Most important of all: I learned to teach the novel Siddhartha!

On the first day of the unit I told my high school seniors, “This book changed my life.” I told them of my terrible time teaching it last year and how I went to a monastery for a week in the summer so that I could teach it better.

I created an anticipatory set that included Buddhist philosophical ideas, themes from the book, and then had them rate the ideas on a spectrum of 1-10, one indicating strong agreement, and ten indicating strong disagreement. After that, they stood in places along the spectrum in the room, discussing their perceptions of the statements and opinions. They formed groups and discussed hand-picked passages before reading the book, making predictions and sharing out to the class.

I met a filmmaker who had just created a documentary about two young kids from the United States traveling in India during a rare spiritual gathering of Gurus and followers along the Ganges called the Kumba Mela. I convinced the artist to give me a copy of his film so that my students could visualize the book and get a taste of the country.

Each teen received a straw that he was to breathe through as I briefly lectured about Herman Hesse. They observed their breathing. Was it smooth and rounded? Was it choppy and shallow? Did it spasm? These were the questions I asked. Then I explained how many eastern religions, like Buddhism, believe that the way one breathes is a direct reflection of his health: mentally, physically, and spiritually. If one is stressed and living in the future, his breath would be choppy or shallow or tense; therefore, his blood could not flow properly into his internal organs to nourish them, and his thoughts might be racing, his hasty actions not matching feelings in his heart.

We did mind-body, stress-reducing, metacognitive activities like this through the entire reading of the book. As we ended the novel, I guided the students through an optional meditation (with an alternative assignment if students did not want to participate) where the goal was to notice tension in their bodies and release it.

How did the Siddhartha unit go this year? They loved it. It was their favorite. At least ten of them, on separate occasions approached me in the hall and asked when we could meditate again.

Something really beautiful happened. They slowed down. They read the text. In Socratic Seminars they pointed out how the number three resonated throughout the book. They liked the rhythmical flow and the poetry of the repetitions. One student said that Hesse’s syntax flowed like the river, a very important symbol in the novel. I am not kidding about this: he actually said the word syntax. I almost fell off my wooden stool. When my students took a deep breath, relaxed, and read Siddhartha, it wasn’t boring anymore. My students noticed it.

“You, oh venerable one, are perhaps indeed a searcher, because, striving for your goal, there are many things you don't see, which are directly in front of your eyes"(Hesse 113).