Siddhartha: A New Translation

· Shambhala Publications
4.6
92 reviews
Ebook
112
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

One America’s Favorite Books, PBS’s The Great American Read

Nobel Prize–winning author: This classic of 20th-century literature chronicles the spiritual evolution of a man living in India at the time of the Buddha—a tale that has inspired generations of readers
 
Here is a fresh translation of the classic Herman Hesse novel, from Sherab Chödzin Kohn—a gifted translator and longtime student of Buddhism and Eastern philosophy. Kohn invites readers along Siddhartha’s spiritual journey—experiencing his highs and lows, loves and disappointments along the way. We first meet Siddhartha as a privileged brahmin’s son. Handsome, well-loved, and growing increasingly dissatisfied with the life expected of him, he then sets out on his journey, not realizing that he is fulfilling the prophesies proclaimed at his birth. Siddhartha blends in with the world, showing the reader the beauty and intricacies of the mind, nature, and his experiences on the path to enlightenment.

Sherab Chödzin Kohn’s flowing, poetic translation conveys the philosophical and spiritual nuances of Hesse’s text, paying special attention to the qualities of meditative experience. Also included is an extensive introduction by Paul W. Morris that discusses the impact Siddhartha has had on American culture.

Ratings and reviews

4.6
92 reviews
Anibal Angeles
March 29, 2016
Read this book in high school as part of a reading assignment and fell in love with it. Just bought the digital copy and after reading through some of it can already interpret it in a different manner than what initially made me love it. Timeless.
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Brad MacDonald
January 29, 2016
When I purchased this book I thought it would be a biography of the Buddha and was confused when I realized it was written more like a folk tale in that every sentence, every paragraph, every page, and every chapter had a beautiful lesson behind it. The last chapter of the book stirs in you something that was already there, already a part of you, but had since been covered and buried in the worries of "life". I saw many ideas such as those presented in The Power of Now but in a more poetic and memorableform
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Noah Atwi
February 3, 2017
A story of growth and progression, but perhaps not in the linear fashion that we expect. With Siddhartha less is more, solitude is unity, and to gain perfection he must lose it all.
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About the author

Hermann Hesse was born in 1877 in Calw, Germany. He was the son and grandson of Protestant missionaries and was educated in religious schools until the age of thirteen, when he dropped out of school. At age eighteen he moved to Basel, Switzerland, to work as a bookseller and lived in Switzerland for most of his life. His early novels include Peter Camenzind (1904), Beneath the Wheel (1906), Gertrud (1910), and Rosshalde (1914). During this period Hesse married and had three sons.

During World War I Hesse worked to supply German prisoners of war with reading materials and expressed his pacifist leanings in antiwar tracts and novels. Hesse's lifelong battles with depression drew him to study Freud during this period and, later, to undergo analysis with Jung. His first major literary success was the novel Demian (1919).

When Hesse's first marriage ended, he moved to Montagnola, Switzerland, where he created his best-known works: Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), Journey to the East (1932), and The Glass Bead Game (1943). Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. He died in 1962 at the age of eighty-five.

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