Topics and Questions We Can Help You To Answer:
Paper Instructions:

Meditative Essay: Thinking Like Dillard, Being Like Siddhartha…
Background: It’s November 20, the morning after little Julie’s crash and a chance encounter with a man who
called himself “Gotama.” Lost amidst the horror visited upon Julie, and fully thrown into the chaos of questioning
the nature of goodness and divine connection, you thought a walk would help clear your head. As you sat gazing
at a local river, an old man approached you, offering you a solution, a way beyond the suffering of this world…
Yet you remained skeptical, not necessarily of what Gotama said—that suffering comes from clinging and
desiring—but rather of what it did not say. As with Hesse’s Siddhartha, you recognized implicitly that, without
direct experience, his teachings mean nothing and, more than this, the meaning behind and lessons of Julie’s
accident cannot be answered by simply living in and of the moment. Suffering cannot be escaped, but your
recent experiences have compelled you to search out a way to live that seeks, as its core mission, to prevent
suffering as much as possible.
Adrift, you wander, searching for answers that not only “make sense,” but offer you (and others) a way to move
from a world defined by material worth (a way to escape suffering) to a reality conditioned on care, empathy,
and compassion (solutions to suffering). As with Siddhartha, such recognition ultimately emerges when we
experience the totality of the world, coming to see, like water in a river, how each moment is both unique and
connected to all other moments. This assignment, then, is asking you to reflect on Siddhartha in order to
highlight how a spiritual understanding of the world, in which all is interconnected (the final message of both
Dillard and Hesse), can become an effective process for establishing a mutually sustaining, everyday reality
based on lovingkindness, reciprocal responsibility, and empathic love.
Project: Reflecting on the nature of Siddhartha’s enlightenment as presented by Hesse, this essay asks that you
1) Meditate on the novel in relation to a personal experience in order to
2) Consider the conclusions established by Siddhartha.
NOTE: When I say personal experience, I am asking that you draw from your own experiences and
realities to test out the coherency of Siddhartha’s solution—you do not need to include extensive
personal details, but this assignment asks that you consider how an experience of (see list below) helps
you understand, engage, and complicate Siddhartha’s solution, while also aiding in your own
construction of how we might live more morally and compassionately. By no means is the following a
complete list, but, like Hesse, I am highlighting examples of personal experiences that might help you
arrive at the conditions that lead to and reify suffering, while also pointing to a way out based on love and
responsibility:
Ø Experience of love (with family, friends, significant other)
Ø Experience of loss (personal, physical, and/or financial)
Ø Experience of gain (personal, physical, and/or financial)
Ø Experience of nature (Have you ever sat by a river and heard its sound? Have you ever laid in a
field and felt holy the firm? Or looked into the sky, finding twinkling stars smiling back at you?)
Ø Experience of hate/unkindness (one you experienced or maybe impacted you indirectly)
Ø Experience of compassion/empathy (one you experienced or maybe impacted you indirectly)
Ø Experience of friendship/neighboring/companionship
Ø Experience of rejection/loneliness/aloneness
Again, I want to stress that this assignment does not require you to use personal/exact details (unless you choose
to)—but, it is asking you to consider how direct and personal experiences in relation to the extremes of living
(asceticism and hedonism) and the middle way, the exact conditions highlighted directly within the pages of
Hesse’s Siddhartha, can help lead to a spiritual understanding of the world (e.g., all is dependent and
interconnected) that, in turn, becomes the means to construct a life predicated on empathy, kindness, and
compassion.

Second, in no way must you agree with this connection—your essay, then, can push back against Hesse and
Siddhartha. If you take this route, however, please be advised that 1) you must still use course material (in
addition to your personal experience) to construct your argument, and 2) your counter must still include a
discussion of how we can arrive at a similar final position regarding empathy and care. In other words, a counter
argument is not about making a religious claim against Buddhism (e.g., that the God of Judaism, Christianity and
Islam establishes a moral code better than Buddhism), but rather how a personal experience, when thought
through the frames of our course material, helps one arrive at an understanding that human conduct should
begin and end in moments of holy care (think Dillard’s claim that she will be the nun for Julie and Siddhartha’s
statement of love at the end of the novel).
Structure: In constructing your response, you MUST draw directly on material from class. At the very least, in
addition to direct discussion/use of Hesse’s Siddhartha, you must use the ideas presented within THREE of our
additional materials; please note, additional material must come from our course, but can be drawn from
anything covered to date (from PPTs to readings to films), including all the material connected to Dillard (as well
as Dillard herself).
More than responding to and reflecting on Hesse, which is the core of this unit’s Discussion Forum, this project is
asking you to outline a vision of existing in this world with others based on how you and our various authors
approach the following themes: the sacred quest for meaning, identity, value, and connection. As we have
discussed, such themes emerge in relation to discussions regarding faith, personal belief, the nature of the divine,
institutional vs. personal religion, theodicy (presence of evil), etc.; what is most important, then, is that you use
the critical insights presented by our authors to offer a way of being that seeks solutions to evil and suffering
through compassionate responsibility.
Your response can take any form you deem necessary (traditional essay, speech, manifesto, short story, faux
sacred/religious text). Whatever you choose in terms of structure, you must directly engage Hesse and our
material explicitly (meaning, even a speech or short story requires direct and meaningful citations), while making
sure to establish a clear understanding of how we can arrive at a vision of the world predicated on accepting
responsibility for the well-being of all others. As you engage Siddhartha and this prompt, the following additional
questions might help—please note, these are included to help get you thinking and need not be answered nor
made the basis of/for your essay (the most important elements are included in the above description):
v How do people engage religion in their personal quest for wholeness? What do people seek in religion?
What kinds of questions do they ask?
v How does the self understand, communicate with, and engage the divine? What, in turn, does this
provide, specifically when we think of morals and ethics?
v Why do we suffer & why is there evil? How is this problem related to the quest for justice in religion and
society?
v How do people express their faithfulness or their commitment to what is sacred or transcendent, and
how do these practices shape their engagement with others?
v What is the goal of life—considering the personal, communal, and global spheres? How do those goals
(salvation, liberation from suffering, obedience to God—to name a few) shape human life and society?
Again, these questions are included to get you thinking—the main aim of this essay can be found in the section
titled “Project.”
in-text citations & works cited page.