Your Own Personal Buddha: Hermann Hesse's "Siddhartha": Depicting Constructivist Experiential Learning through Internal Focalization

Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha is not only the most influential narrative dealing with Buddhist ideas in German literature but also has a global readership until today. Playing with the hagiographic form of Buddha Siddhartha Gautama’s life story, Hesse focuses on existential topics such as the search for wisdom, love, the experience of nature and death instead of describing miracles and exotic settings. The protagonist’s universal human experiences are presented in a “constructivist” manner. As Ernst von Glasersfeld shows, this involves creating knowledge and a world view out of different experiences and learned elements. This constructivist point of view, presented by the heterodiegetic narrative voice, and focalized internally in Siddhartha, represents experience as a major concept of Buddhism in contrast to Christian belief. Thus, the text allows readers to reflect on their own individual existential and spiritual issues while also granting access to basic Buddhist ideas, like the impermanence of all worldly things or the search for enlightenment. Therefore this constructivist narrative perspective can be seen as one reason for the novel’s continuing impact. Readers across the world can identify with this cognitive process and with this wisdom of experience, as summarized by Siddhartha (“Wisdom cannot be communicated” (p. 124), and use it for their own development.