Samsara
All this had always existed, and he had never seen it, he had never been present.
For a long time Siddhartha had lived the life of the world and the pleasures without actually belonging to it. His senses, which he had deadened in his ardent samana years, had reawakened. He had tasted wealth, tasted lust, tasted power. Yet for a long time he had remained a samana at heart; Kamala, the clever woman, had correctly recognized this. It was always the art of thinking, of waiting, of fasting that guided his life; the worldlings, the child people, were still foreign to him as he to them.
The years ran by. Enveloped in well-being, Siddhartha barely sensed their disappearance. He had grown rich, he had long since had his own house and his own servants, and a garden on the river, outside the town. People liked him, they came to him when they needed money or advice; but no one was close to him except Kamala.
Siddhartha had learned how to business, wield power over people, take pleasure with a woman; he had learned how to wear beautiful clothes, command servants, bathe in fragrant water. He had learned how to eat delicately and meticulously prepared dishes, including fish, including meat and fowl, sweets and spices, and to drink wine, which makes you slothful and forgetful. He had learned how to dice and play chess, watch dancing girls, be carried in a sedan, sleep on a soft bed. Yet he still felt different from others and superior to them; he had always watched them with a touch of scorn, the very scorn that a samana alaways feels toward people of the world.
Like a veil, like a thin mist, weariness descended on Siddhartha, slowly a bit denser each day, a bit dimmer each month, a bit heavier each year. A new garment grows old with time, loses itslovely color with time, gets stains, gets wrinkles, frays out at the hems, and starts showing awkward, threadbare areas.
The world had captured him: pleasure lustfulness, sluggishness, and finally the vice he had always scorned and scoffed at most as the most foolish vice: greed. Property, ownership, and wealth had also finally captured him, were no longer glitter and glamour for him, had become a chain and a charge.
Now Siddhartha knew that the game was gone, that he could play it no longer. A shudder ran through his body: inside him, he felt, something had died.
That same hour of night Siddhartha left his garden, left the town, and never came back. Was he not a samana, a homeless wanderer, a pilgrim?
