Siddhartha is a Buddhist philosophy novel, written by a German guy in 1922. I’m not much of a philosophy guy myself, but I was interested in Eastern philosophy to see how it was different from the philosophy I was used to. In addition, Westerners tend to “fetishize” Eastern philosophy; a lot of hippies in the 60’s heralded it as this perfect wonderful truth that would solve all our problems. I assume that one of the earlier pieces will be less distorted because it won’t have that echo chamber effect; in addition, my English teacher swore up and down that this was totally legit Buddhism.
If it is, though, this book convinced me to not touch it with a ten-foot pole. (more…)