A Critical Exploration of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha through the Integrative Onto theology of Shakta Tantra

ermann Hesse’s celebrated Novel Siddhartha (1922) explores the quest for enlightenment and spiritual salvation sought by the eponymous protagonist Siddhartha, a Brahmin turned into an ascetic after his passionate espousal of the Buddhist philosophy of Nirvana. However, Buddhism’s insistence on spiritual salvation vehemently undermines and castigates the pulsating flow of life and materiality. The protagonist, Siddhartha, has realized the dissociative principle of Buddhism that eliminates the circumambient material dimension of life from the sphere of spirituality. Nevertheless, he embarks on a spiritual quest where the samsara and the Nirvana, the mundane and the supra terrestrial, seamlessly converge to ensure a holistic experiential dimension of eudaimonia of enlightenment. This essay aims to trace the vestiges of Shakta-tantric onto-theological assumptions on the world, which imbue the perception and spiritual quest of the protagonist Siddhartha. The essay also aims to interpret Siddhartha’s subjective quest for spiritual eudaimonia as something informed and shaped by the profound Shakta-tantric epistemology of interconnectivity that blissfully hyphenates the principles of samsara with that of Nirvana.