Siddhartha
honourable one, one more word, give me something on my way which I can
grasp, which I can understand! Give me something to be with me on my
path. It is often hard, my path, often dark, Siddhartha.”
Siddhartha said nothing and looked at him with the ever unchanged,
quiet smile. Govinda stared at his face, with fear, with yearning,
suffering, and the eternal search was visible in his look, eternal
not-finding.
Siddhartha saw it and smiled.
“Bend down to me!” he whispered quietly in Govinda’s ear. “Bend down to
me! Like this, even closer! Very close! Kiss my forehead, Govinda!”
But while Govinda with astonishment, and yet drawn by great love and
expectation, obeyed his words, bent down closely to him and touched his
forehead with his lips, something miraculous happened to him. While his
thoughts were still dwelling on Siddhartha’s wondrous words, while he
was still struggling in vain and with reluctance to think away time, to
imagine Nirvana and Sansara as one, while even a certain contempt for
the words of his friend was fighting in him against an immense love and
veneration, this happened to him:
He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw
other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of
hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all
seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and
renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha. He saw the
face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely painfully opened mouth, the
face of a dying fish, with fading eyes—he saw the face of a new-born
child, red and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying—he saw the face
of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into the body of another
person—he saw, in the same second, this criminal in bondage, kneeling
and his head being chopped off by the executioner with one blow of his
sword—he saw the bodies of men and women, naked in positions and cramps
of frenzied love—he saw corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void—he
saw the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants, of
bulls, of birds—he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni—he saw all of these
figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each
one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving
re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful
confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died, each one only
transformed, was always reborn, received evermore a new face, without
any time having passed between the one and the other face—and all of
these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated themselves, floated
along and merged with each other, and they were all constantly covered
by something thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing,
like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or
mask of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was
Siddhartha’s smiling face, which he, Govinda, in this very same moment
touched with his lips. And, Govinda saw it like this, this smile of the
mask, this smile of oneness above the flowing forms, this smile of
simultaneousness above the thousand births and deaths, this smile of
Siddhartha was precisely the same, was precisely of the same kind as
the quiet, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps benevolent, perhaps mocking,
wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha, as he had seen it
himself with great respect a hundred times. Like this, Govinda knew,
the perfected ones are smiling.
Not knowing any more whether time existed, whether the vision had
lasted a second or a hundred years, not knowing any more whether there
existed a Siddhartha, a Gotama, a me and a you, feeling in his
innermost self as if he had been wounded by a divine arrow, the injury
of which tasted sweet, being enchanted and dissolved in his innermost
self, Govinda still stood for a little while bent over Siddhartha’s
quiet face, which he had just kissed, which had just been the scene of
all manifestations, all transformations, all existence. The face was
unchanged, after under its surface the depth of the thousand-foldness
had closed up again, he smiled silently, smiled quietly and softly,
perhaps very benevolently, perhaps very mockingly, precisely as he used
to smile, the exalted one.
Deeply, Govinda bowed; tears he knew nothing of, ran down his old face;
like a fire burned the feeling of the most intimate love, the humblest
veneration in his heart. Deeply, he bowed, touching the ground, before
him who was sitting motionlessly, whose smile reminded him of
everything he had ever loved in his life, what had ever been valuable
and holy to him in his life.