6

"What do you think, Govinda?" Siddhartha asked on one of these begging expeditions. "Do you think we are any further? Have we reach our goal?"

Govinda replied: "We have learned and we are still learning. you will become a great Samana, Siddhartha. You have learned each exercise quickly. The old Samanas have often praised you. Some day you will be a holy man, Siddhartha."

Siddhartha said:" It does not appear to me, my friend. What I have so far learned from the SAmanas I could have learned more quickly and easily in every inn in a prostitutes' quater, amongst the carriers and dice players."

Govinda said: "Siddhartha is joking. How could you have learned meditation, holding of the breath and insensibility towards hunger and pain, with those wrethes?"

And Siddhartha said softly, as if speaking to himself: "What is meditation? What is abandonment of the body? What is fasting? What is the holding of breath? It is a flight from the Self, it is a temporary palliative against the pain and folly of life. The driver of oxen makes the same flight, takes this temporary drug when he drinks a few bowl of rice wine or coconut milk in the inn. He then no longer feels his Self, no longer feels the pain of life; he then experiences temporary excape. Falling asleep over his bowl of rice wine, he finds what Siddhartha and Govinda find when they escape from their bodies by long exercises and dwell in the non-Self."

Govinnda said:" You speak thus, my friend, and yet you know that Siddhartha is no driver of oxen and a Samana is no drunkard. The drinker does indeed find excape, he does indeed find a short respite and rest, but he returns from the illusion and finds everythng as it was before. He has not grown wiser, he has not gained knowledge, he has not climbed any higher."

Siddhartha answered with a smile on his face: " I do not know. I have never been a drunkard. But that I, Siddhartha, only find a short respite in my exercises and meditation, and am as remote from wisdom, from salvation, as a child in the womb, that, Govinda, I do know."