Hermann Hesse
and his intense and exciting relationship
with the world of Indian thought
From the time of his early childhood Hermann Hesse cultivated an intense and exciting relationship with the world of Indian thought.
His father was a Christian missionary who lived for a long time in India and his mother was actually born in India. She was the eldest daughter of the well-known Indologist, Dr. Hermann Gundert (1814 - 1893), who had spent decades there and who was the only European at the time who could not only read the Sanskrit language but could also converse in Sanskrit with the Brahmanas there. He travelled large parts of the country by bullock cart and did not consider it only as an element of his missionary work. He had mastered about ten Indian dialects, published the first German-Indian dictionary and he translated the New Testament in the Malayalam language. This wonderful grandfather, on whose death Hesse was sixteen years old, had a lasting influence on his grandson in his early years. His parents wished young Hesse to study Protestan theology, but at the age of fifteen he fled from the Evangelist seminar in Maulbronn and learned book-selling for himself. (Decades later he wrote to Stefan Zweig that the fulfillment of his parental expectations of becoming a theologist was, for him, synonymous with the loss of one's personality.)
It is thus possible that his early open-mindedness to the Indian culture, which his parents and grandparents set off to missionarise, was, in his puberty, perhaps a result of the protests against the parental intolerance of other forms of belief and against the pietistic educational principle of "breaking the will". His awakened interest in Indian thought did indeed lead him on to a meaningful path which later enabled him to continue the missionary work of his forefathers in an opposite direction, from East to West. Not that he wanted to convert the West to the Eastern thinking and to the Asian lifestyle, but rather to, as no other European could, make visible the apparent oppositeness of both cultures not as incompatible but as poles of a whole and construct bridges between the East and the West. The Indian influence thus accompanied Hesse's development and creations all his life and left a lasting impression on them. Rather early, at the age of 30 (1907), he wrote a short work " Legends of an Indian King " and in 1911, as a 34-year old, he undertook a three-month journey to India, to get to know the land of his childhood dreams through his own experiences. But the journey which also took him to Indonesia, Singapur and Ceylon, led rather to a disappointment than to a fulfillment. It nevertheless stimulated Hesse in the coming years to let elements of Indian philosophy and literature influence his works.
In the year 1913 the records of his journey appeared under the title "From India" and in September 1914, just a month after the outbreak of the First World War in Germany, he wrote a poem with the title "Bhagavad Gita". A high point of Hesse's examination of Indian thought is, however, depicted by the short work "Siddhartha", written in the years 1919-1922. Hesse himself says about this "Indian poem" - as it is called in the subtitle:
" This narrration is the declaration of a man of Christian origin and upbringing, who left the Church rather early and who endeavoured to understand other religions, especially Indian and Chinese forms of belief. I tried to discover that which is common to all confessions and all human forms of religiousness and that which stands above all national differences, that which can be believed in and respected by all races."
(From the Persian edition. 1958).
On the Bhagavad Gita, Hesse wrote in a review:
"The wonderful thing about the Bhagavad Gita is that an unpreached, experienced wisdom reveals itself as a helpful suggestion. This beautiful revelation, this wisdom of life, this philosophy which has blossomed out into a religion is that what we are looking for and need."
One can clearly make out in some of his poems that he, in particular, was inspired by the Gita.
An example that Hermann Hesse was inspired by the verses of the Vedas is certainly the third life in the Glass Bead Game, the story of "Dasa" (Servant / Knecht) who asked the yogi what Maya is. This story is an extremely close adaptation of the story about Narada Muni in the Visnu Purana, who poses the same question to Krsna and who has to fetch a glass of water for Krsna as an answer. The story then turns out in an similar, interesting way.
In this last great book of his, which he worked at for twelve years and for which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, Hermann Hesse describes nothing more than a European form of the Varnasrama Dharma, an ancient Indian social system, which is described in the Vedic Literatur.
He describes here a intellectual elite maintained by the State and which provides the country with teachers as the Board of Educators and thus resembles the Vedic concept of the Brahmanas a great deal. This is especially true when one considers that their lives include, besides the daily Vita activa and the daily Vita contemplativa, the daily practice of meditation, as described beautifully by Hermann Hesse. It is interesting to see how Hermann Hesse disguises his ideal state with the Glass Bead Game and yet points to it every now and then in the course of the book, more so to the necessity of an intellectual elite, such as that of the Castalians, exercising its influence on the political fate of the country. The Glass Bead Game itself, can very well be compared to the Sanskrit word Lila, a word which is especially used for the activities of the Indian god Lord Visnu (and his various incarnations), for whom the whole cosmic manifestation with its countless aspects is nothing but a game, a pastime or an interesting composition.
We would now like to end this article with a small quote from the introduction to the Glass Bead Game which underlines the Indian influence in this work:
"A second focus of resistance to degeneration was the League of Journeyers to the East. The brethren of that League cultivated a spiritual rather than an intellectual discipline. They fostered piety and reverence, and to them we are important elements in our present form of cultural life and of the Glass Bead Game, in particular the contemplative elements."
The importance of this is seen especially when one thinks about the dedication to "The Journeyers to the East" at the beginning of the Glass Bead Game.
Your servant,
Albertus Secundus
asecundus@iname.com
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