Given that Buddhist thought is widely circulated in popular culture (in reference to mindfulness, wisdom, productivity, and spirituality), it is not surprising that Buddha’s story, or the Buddha himself, has come to be the subject of storytelling aimed at the larger audience. Advait Kottary’s debut novel Siddhartha: The Boy Who Became the Buddha reconstructs the Buddha’s story to present a version of how perhaps the most well-known spiritual quest in the world might have unfolded.
The story has all the ingredients for the archetypal hero’s journey. It speaks of an infant from a warrior community who was prophesied to be a great soul who would renounce everything in search of truth and end to suffering and who is therefore sheltered from the harsh realities of life and pampered in the palace until he discovers that the life he has lived is a lie and walks away from it all on a spiritual quest. Where it deviates from the archetypal hero’s journey is that the quest the hero is involved in is for the true self as it engages with suffering, instead of moving towards some external goal. In Kottary’s rendition, the legend as well as the journey find a satisfactory expression that will appeal to those curious about Buddha’s life as well as the application of fictional licence.

The novel opens with the moment of the Buddha’s Enlightenment: in a dream or a state of meditation, he is tempted by celestial nymphs symbolizing the impulses of hunger, lust, and restlessness. He resists them all and starts on his way to his past and in space towards others establishing the sangha or the Buddhist order of the monks.
The third person narrative is unusual: in addition to the main plot of the Buddha’s story, the Buddha himself is looking at or revisiting the key moments of his life—the latter in italics. The dual third person view gets established towards the beginning itself when the Buddha looks at his father Shuddhodana getting married to Prajapati (the one who is to raise Siddhartha), sister of his first wife, Mahamaya (Siddhartha’s biological mother who passes away at his birth):
The Buddha stood in a long alleyway, adorned with several pillars on either side. They were ornately carved and looked beautiful as they glowed… He had walked these same floors so many times before, yet he couldn’t feel the smooth stone beneath his feet. He could hear the footsteps of a small group of people in the passageway and the clinking of jewellery with every step they took. He waited until they came into view, and then he saw his mother…
Prajapati looked resplendent in her bridal gown. She was young, vibrant and beautiful while suitably shy for the occasion.
Having the Buddha look at his younger, pre-enlightened self, to some extent, adds the requisite sense of novelty to an otherwise familiar plot. In contrast to the contemporary rewritings of the Indian epics that resort to relying on prophecies as a device (as if to say, nothing much can be said here, that’s the way it is in the text as most people know of it), Siddhartha adds some variety to the picture. Of course, there are warnings and foretellings of what is to come but there are moments in the story when having the Buddha witness his past adds perspective to why things turn out the way they do. One such moment is when the Buddha looks at himself starving because another ascetic tells him that mastering the mind requires mastering the body, which, in turn, requires one to overcome dependence on food and water:
‘Can I offer you some fruit?’ Assaji held up an apple. He was very tempted to take it. He could almost feel its juices on his tongue as he looked at it, and so he turned his face away.
‘I have given it up. I will not eat.’
Siddhartha looked like a frail and shrivelled creature; what he was attempting to do to himself was borderline self-destructive. The Buddha almost wished that he could go to Siddhartha as he lay against the trunk, drifting in and out of consciousness, and shake him out of his stupidity.
As a work that is presumably targeted at general readers or those interested in popular spirituality, Siddhartha has not been written with an intention to address nuances of the Buddha story. For instance, the story very unproblematically has it that Mahamaya’s sole purpose in life was to give birth to this great soul who would show the right path to humanity! Some of the prose, furthermore, can be awkward: “When you do not see suffering as misery to be borne, rather than a fact of life like our breath… it ceases to hold its power…” or “Mahanama looked like a rug had been pulled from under his feet” and so on.
The first half of the book holds attention because it is largely focuses on Siddhartha but as it progresses, Kottary layers in too many characters: emperors, a courtesan, the Buddha’s larger family, the ordination of women into the sangha and more,pulling the narrative in too many directions. However, among the novel’s achievements is the suggestion that Siddhartha had guides in his journey who advised him. Thus, in what is otherwise treated as a “great men” story, Kottary attempts to push for a collaborative view towards the very great accomplishment of understanding how to overcome suffering.
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