The Short Answer
What happens at the end of Siddhartha? Here is the short answer. An old monk named Govinda asks the old ferryman for one last word, and the ferryman asks him to kiss his forehead. Govinda sees a river of faces, hundreds and thousands of them, human, animal and divine, all at once, all wearing one smile. Then he bows to the ground, and the book ends.
This is the ending of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha explained, with full spoilers. The facts come from the Project Gutenberg text. I read the whole book, and the last three chapters closely. Where I am giving my own reading, I will say so.
The Boy Runs
The ending starts in chapter ten, once Siddhartha’s son is living in the hut. He is about eleven, spoiled, and grieving for his mother. Siddhartha gives him everything and demands nothing, and the boy hates it.
Vasudeva, the old ferryman, tells Siddhartha the truth. The boy belongs in the city, among other children. And no father, he says, can spare a son from living his own life. Siddhartha cannot take that advice. Then the boy explodes. He says he would rather be a robber and a murderer than turn out devout, soft and wise like his father. The next morning he is gone, with the coins and the boat.
Siddhartha chases him through the forest as far as the edge of the city. He stops at Kamala’s old garden, now full of monks, and sits in the dust for hours. A monk leaves two bananas in front of him. Then Vasudeva touches his shoulder, and they go home. Nobody mentions the boy.
Love as a Wound
Chapter eleven is called Om. It begins with Siddhartha ferrying other people’s families and envying every father. The wound keeps burning, and the book uses that word, wound, eighteen times, ten of them in this chapter.
Here is a key idea. Earlier, Kamala told him he cannot love. Now he loves his son blindly, and suffers for it. In chapter ten the book says that this is a passion, a murky source, and that it is still necessary. The ordinary people are no longer childish to him. They are his brothers.
Then the river laughs. He looks down and sees his face, and it looks like his father’s face. He remembers leaving his father, and wonders whether his father suffered as he does now. It is a circle, a comedy. Everything that has not been worked through comes back.
The River Listens
He goes back to the hut and tells Vasudeva everything, even the embarrassing parts. To tell it feels like bathing the wound in the river. And as he talks, Vasudeva stops looking like a man. He looks like the river, like the eternal itself.
Then Vasudeva takes him to the bank and says, listen. In the water Siddhartha sees his father, himself, his son, Kamala and Govinda. All of them flow together. The river runs to its goals, a waterfall, a lake, the sea, and the water rises as vapour and falls as rain. All of it is longing and suffering. Then other voices join in, joyful ones, laughing ones, and he can no longer tell them apart. Together they say one word, Om.
His wound blossoms. He stops fighting his fate, and the book says he now has the cheerfulness of a knowledge that no will opposes. Vasudeva says he has waited for this hour, and he leaves for the forests. By my count the word Om is used only twice in this chapter, and the chapter is named for it.
Three Generations
Put the three father and son scenes side by side. In chapter one, Siddhartha tells his father he will leave, then stands all night, and the father, hour after hour, watches and finally gives in at first light. In chapter ten, the son runs, and Siddhartha cannot stop him. In chapter eleven, the river shows him his own father’s face in the water.
The pattern is a circle, and the book says so, a fateful circle, a comedy. But there is one difference. Siddhartha’s father let him go, and Siddhartha walks after his son only as far as the garden, then sits, and then turns back. In my reading, that is the first step out of the circle. That is my opinion.
An Old Monk Crosses
Chapter twelve is Govinda. He is old now, a monk, and he has never stopped searching. He hears about a ferryman who is called wise, and he takes the ferry across the river. He does not recognise the ferryman, just as he did not recognise the sleeper years before.
Siddhartha tells him why. When a man is searching, he sees only what he is searching for. Searching means having a goal. Finding means being free. Govinda is a searcher, so he cannot see what is in front of him.
The Teaching He Won’t Teach
The next morning, Govinda asks if Siddhartha has a teaching. Siddhartha lists his teachers, and then says the central thing. Wisdom cannot be passed on. Knowledge can be taught. Wisdom can only be lived.
Then comes his best thought, he says, that the opposite of every truth is just as true. Any truth that can be put into words is one-sided. The Buddha had to divide the world into suffering and salvation in order to teach it. But the world is never one-sided. Time is not real, so the sinner already contains the Buddha. The world is perfect at every moment.
Next he picks up a stone. In the past he would have valued it because it might become something else. Now he loves it as a stone, because it is already everything. He says he cannot love words, but he can love things. And love, he says, is the most important thing of all. That sounds like a quarrel with the Buddha, who warned against tying the heart to the world. Siddhartha says it is only a quarrel about words.
The Kiss
Govinda thanks him, and thinks, privately, that these teachings are strange. But something about the man’s body shines with a peace Govinda has seen in no one since the Buddha died. So he asks for one more thing to carry on his way. Siddhartha smiles and whispers, bend down, kiss my forehead.
As Govinda’s lips touch, the face disappears. He sees a river of faces. A dying carp. A newborn baby. A murderer, and then the same man being beheaded. Lovers, corpses, boars, crocodiles, gods. All of them change into each other with no time in between. Over all of them lies a smiling mask, thin as glass, and it is Siddhartha’s smile.
That smile, Govinda knows, is exactly the Buddha’s smile, which he has seen a hundred times. The vision could have lasted a second or a hundred years. Then the face is Siddhartha’s again, smiling quietly. Govinda weeps and does not know why, and bows to the ground. That is the last image of the book.
Why a Kiss
Why does Siddhartha answer with a kiss and not an argument? Look at what Govinda has just said. He asked for a word to carry on his dark path, and he admitted he had not found peace. The text tells us he is still struggling in vain to think time away, and to imagine Sansara and Nirvana as one.
That is the trap Siddhartha described in the same chapter. Words are one-sided, and a teaching cannot hand over wisdom. So he stops talking. The smile Govinda sees is the one Siddhartha himself noticed on the Buddha in chapter three, a smile on a man who looked as if he searched for nothing. The ferryman has become what he admired.
In my reading, the kiss is the book’s own answer to its own problem, which is how to teach what cannot be taught. That is my opinion, and the book does not spell it out.
Questions Readers Ask
Does Siddhartha die at the end? The text does not show it. The last picture is Govinda bowing before a man who sits motionless and smiling.
Does Siddhartha become a Buddha? The book never uses that label for him. What it does is show Govinda a smile that matches the Buddha’s.
Does the boy come back? No. He never returns in person, and the book never says where he went.
Is Govinda enlightened? The text says he is overwhelmed with love and veneration, and it stops there.
What the Ending Means
The book never says Siddhartha reaches nirvana, and it never says Govinda does. The capitalised word Nirvana appears nine times, and all nine are in this last chapter, mostly in Siddhartha’s argument that Sansara and Nirvana are only words. The word smile and its forms appear seventeen times in this chapter, more than in any other.
My reading is that the vision is the whole teaching in one picture. Siddhartha could never say it, so he lets Govinda see it. That is my opinion. The text also leaves some things open. We never learn what became of the boy. We never learn what Govinda did after he rose.
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