Dear Haijin, visitors and travelrs,
Today I love to tell you a little bit more about the friendship between Siddhartha and Govinda. Both Brahman's sons who befriended already early in their lifetime. Together they started a quest for enlightenment, but somewhere on their quest their paths separated. Govinda stayed at the Buddha and became a Buddhistic monk and Siddhartha became a merchant. As we read in one of our earlier episodes Siddhartha has chosen to leave his beloved Kamala and ran away from his home.
At the start of his quest he had to cross a river and now he has returned to that river ... and here is what happened after he heard the mysterious and holy "om", before he fell asleep against the trunk of a coconut-tree.
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| Siddhartha at the river (illustration from the novel by Hermann Hesse) |
[...] "Deep was his sleep and without dreams, for a long time he had not known such a sleep any more. When he woke up after many hours, he felt as if ten years had passed, he heard the water quietly flowing, did not know where he was and who had brought him here, opened his eyes, saw with astonishment that there were trees and the sky above him, and he remembered where he was and how he got here. But it took him a long while for this, and the past seemed to him as if it had been covered by a veil, infinitely distant, infinitely far away, infinitely meaningless. He only knew that his previous life (in the first moment when he thought about it, this past life seemed to him like a very old, previous incarnation, like an early pre-birth of his present self)—that his previous life had been abandoned by him, that, full of disgust and wretchedness, he had even intended to throw his life away, but that by a river, under a coconut-tree, he has come to his senses, the holy word Om on his lips, that then he had fallen asleep and had now woken up and was looking at the world as a new man. Quietly, he spoke the word Om to himself, speaking which he had fallen asleep, and it seemed to him as if his entire long sleep had been nothing but a long meditative recitation of Om, a thinking of Om, a submergence and complete entering into Om, into the nameless, the perfected.
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| OM |
Siddhartha straightened up, then he saw a person sitting opposite to him, an unknown man, a monk in a yellow robe with a shaven head, sitting in the position of pondering. He observed the man, who had neither hair on his head nor a beard, and he had not observed him for long when he recognised this monk as Govinda, the friend of his youth, Govinda who had taken his refuge with the exalted Buddha. Govinda had aged, he too, but still his face bore the same features, expressed zeal, faithfulness, searching, timidness. But when Govinda now, sensing his gaze, opened his eyes and looked at him, Siddhartha saw that Govinda did not recognise him. Govinda was happy to find him awake; apparently, he had been sitting here for a long time and been waiting for him to wake up, though he did not know him." [...] (Source: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse)
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| Buddha |
In the story about Siddhartha and Govinda we see the embodiment of OM, because they belong to eachother like Yin and Yang and after they were separated they are again together ... that's the meaning of OM in this story. They will be together always in a spiritual way, because they both take their own path, but in a way the same path. Govinda follows his master Buddha and Siddhartha follows his master ... his Higher Self.
chanting OM
nature awakes in the early light
souls re-united
© Chèvrefeuille
This episode is NOW OPEN for your submissions and will remain open until March 1st at noon (CET). I will try to publish our new episode later on.
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