The first key concept concerning the significance of the river in Siddhartha is really two very closely related ideas. These thoughts are that time is not real and the oneness of all experience. All experience is happening every moment. Everything exists all at once, and the only thing separating these existences is the illusion of time. When Siddhartha is sitting by the river V

New York: Baron's Educational Series, Inc. 1985.

According to Joseph Mcleck, Siddhartha becomes more progressively intrigued by the ever-changing yet never different, the ever-flowing yet always present river. At first it puzzles him, but further contemplative observation of its waters persuades him to conclude that there is no such cthing¯ as time. Contemplation of the river suggests only a present, no past, and no future. The river simply is. It is not first here, then there, but is everywhere simultaneously; at its source and at every point along its mouth. Contemplating himself in the manner in which he has contemplated the water, Siddhartha realizes that his life is a river. It too has its source, its course, and its point of termination; birth, childhood, youth, manhood, old age, and death. So observed, his life also suggests only a present, and as such, timelessness. To contemplate life in this manner is to concentrate on essence, on the idea of Siddhartha, and not just on the on the ephemeral manifestation of the idea, on noumenon and not phenomenon. Nor do Siddhartha¯s many reincarnations suggest any past or future. Siddhartha simply is. Time and timelessness depends entirely upon what the individual in his observation concentrates upon(166).

Ruth Goode asserts that °In the eight out of the twelve chapters of Siddhartha a clear boundary is drawn between the spiritual and the material world: the river. When Siddhartha crosses it, he leaves on one side the Brahmins, the Samanas, the Buddhists-all aspects of the religious and spiritual. On the other side he plunges into the merchant Kawasani, the sensuous world of the courtesan Kamala, and the physical luxuries and pleasure of city life. He savors all this for twenty years, and then suddenly turns away and returns to the river. Here he shares the simple life of Vaseduva the ferryman, and for the next twenty years listens to the river. The river is no longer a boundary that divides. Now it represents a unity in which past, present, and future, all people and their experiences, all aspects of life flow together. Siddhartha comes to understand that there is no conflict between the spiritual and the material, that all human experience is to be embraced, and that the only difference between ordinary people and sages is that the sages understand this unity. This is the vision that Siddhartha at last sees in the river±(80).

To G.W. Fields, the river symbolizes the boundary betw

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