The after effects of Hesse’s ascetic childhood, particularly the imprint of his highly critical mother, left him unable to relate easily to women, as shown in his three unsatisfactory marriages, and the lack of realistic women characters in his writing. He also had deep ambivalence towards his three sons and family life. Generally limited by various obsessive behaviours and anxieties, he mostly found other people difficult. Accepting his failings, and deeply present to finding spiritual truths wherever he could, Hesse has God speak to one of his characters:

‘I could not have used you if you had been any other than the way you are, and I needed to give you the spur of homelessness and wandering … your function was to repeatedly instil a little yearning for freedom into people living settled lives.’

The motif from the novel ‘Demian’ was ‘become the person you are.’ Hesse saw this ‘be yourself’ as forming the decisive bridge between Eastern and Western thought. He believed that this was a synthesis that could not be institutionalized, and that could be revoked at any moment. His experience showed him that one cannot escape oneself, one cannot with impunity simply transform one’s life into a doctrine. One could overcome life only through living, and you have to travel the route that is assigned to you personally. ‘As I understand it, Nirvana is the return of the individual to the undivided whole … the reversion of the individual soul to the universal soul, to God.’

Despite the childhood damage, Hesse held to belief in God, truth, and beauty, with the knowledge that God always resides in things that are smaller, and more inconsequential, and disregarded. He wrote that one should place no credence in those who teach wisdom, for you can only attain wisdom through your own life and your own sacrifices … about not so much renouncing the Self as finding it.

‘I consider certain maxims from the New Testament, together with some from Lao Tzu and some of Buddha’s sayings, to be the truest, most pithy, and most vital utterances that have ever been said and made known on this earth. Nevertheless, the Christian way to God has been obscured for me by my strict and pious upbringing, by the laughable nature and petty quarrels of theology, by the sheer boredom and yawning barrenness of the established churches, and so on. So I sought God by other routes.’

Two journeys to India and Southern Asia deeply affected him: ‘I have revered the Buddha for many years and have been reading Indian literature since my early childhood. Later on I gained a more intimate knowledge of Lao Tzu and other Chinese writers.’ Hesse’s book ‘Siddhartha’ tries to synthesize Eastern and Western thinking. In the preface to the Japanese edition, he wrote:

‘Nowadays, it is no longer a question of trying to convert the Japanese to Christianity, or Europeans to Buddhism or Taoism. We have no desire, nor should we, to convert or be converted; instead it is incumbent upon us to open ourselves up and expand our minds. We no longer regard Eastern and Western wisdom as mutually hostile forces engaged in a power struggle, but as poles between which a bountiful life oscillates.’

Siddhartha’s concern, like Jesus, was not with doctrinal matters, or dogma, or about one institution sharply demarcating itself from others and declaring all apostates to be heretics, but instead with the atman, the living spirit within all things. This to be treated with reverence:

‘I do not believe in any religious dogmatism or in a god who has created humans and enabled them to develop their expertise in killing one another with a progression of weapons from stone axes to nuclear arms and to be proud of such progress into the bargain.’