'Oxherding Tale' and 'Siddhartha:' philosophy, fiction, and the emergence of a hidden tradition

African American Review, Winter, 1996 by Rudolph P. Byrd

He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha. Instead he saw other faces, many faces, a long series, a continuous stream of faces - hundreds, thousands, which all came and disappeared and yet all seemed to be there at the same time, which all continually changed and renewed themselves and which were yet all Siddhartha. He saw the face of a fish, of a carp, with tremendous painfully opened mouth, a dying fish with dimmed eyes. He saw the face of a newly born child, red and full of wrinkles, ready to cry. He saw the face of a murderer, saw him plunge a knife into the body of a man; at the same moment he saw this criminal kneeling down, bound, and his head cut off by an executioner. He saw the naked bodies of men and women in the postures and transports of passionate love. He saw corpses stretched out, still, cold, empty. He saw the heads of animals - boars, crocodiles, elephants, oxen, birds. He saw Krishna and Agni. . . . And all these forms and faces rested, flowed, reproduced, swam past and merged into each other, and over them all there was continually something thin, unreal and yet existing, stretched across like thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, shell, form or mask of water - and this mask was Siddhartha's smiling face which Govinda touched with his lips at that moment. And Govinda saw that this mask-like smile, this smile of unity over the flowing forms, this smile of simultaneousness over the thousands of births and deaths - this smile of Siddhartha - was exactly the same as the calm, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps gracious, perhaps mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha. (150-51)

Hesse's novel closes with Govinda's achievement of moksha. Honoring the powerful symmetry that endows his novel with unity and force, Siddhartha is the vehicle for Govinda's release from samsara.

In the final chapter of Oxherding Tale, a chapter significantly entitled "Moksha," Andrew Hawkins, like Siddhartha and Govinda, achieves release from the double yoke of slave life and samsara, or the slavery of human existence. The vehicle for Hawkins's release - that is, his ferryman - is Reb, Leviathan's Coffinmaker, and Horace Bannon, the Soulcatcher. In his ascetism and the practice of non-engagement, Reb embodies the values so central to Buddhism and Taoism. Through the practice of non-engagement and the extinguishing of desire, fear, and ego, Reb successfully eludes Horace Bannon, the Soulcatcher. Reb's seamless flight into freedom has profound consequences for both Hawkins and Bannon. Honoring a promise he made to Hawkins and Reb - "'If Ah ever meet a Negro Ah can't catch, Ah'll quit!'" (116) - Bannon renounces his vocation of assassin and slave catcher. In so doing, Hawkins, unlike his father George Hawkins, is spared a painful death at the hands of Bannon. Reb's example of asceticism and self-sacrifice has far-reaching and concrete consequences in the world of slavery: Reb is a free man; Bannon is a reformed man; and Andrew is a free man. Interestingly, the tripartite configuration of male friendships in Siddhartha - Govinda, Siddhartha, Vesudeva - is invoked and in part preserved through the shifting and complex relationship among Reb, Hawkins, and Bannon. Through his practice of non-engagement, Reb secures Hawkins's liberty; in his final metamorphosis into the Hindu God Krishna, Bannon is the vehicle for Hawkins's achievement of moksha: