With a smiling face, Siddhartha watched the leaving monk.  The sleep had strengthened him much, but hunger gave him much pain, for by now he had not eaten for two days, and the times were long past when he had been tough against hunger.  With sadness, and yet also with a smile, he thought of that time.  In those days, so he remembered, he had boasted of three three things to Kamala, had been able to do three noble and undefeatable feats:  fasting—­waiting—­thinking.  These had been his possession, his power and strength, his solid staff; in the busy, laborious years of his youth, he had learned these three feats, nothing else.  And now, they had abandoned him, none of them was his any more, neither fasting, nor waiting, nor thinking.  For the most wretched things, he had given them up, for what fades most quickly, for sensual lust, for the good life, for riches!  His life had indeed been strange.  And now, so it seemed, now he had really become a childlike person.

Siddhartha thought about his situation.  Thinking was hard on him, he did not really feel like it, but he forced himself.

Now, he thought, since all these most easily perishing things have slipped from me again, now I’m standing here under the sun again just as I have been standing here a little child, nothing is mine, I have no abilities, there is nothing I could bring about, I have learned nothing.  How wondrous is this!  Now, that I’m no longer young, that my hair is already half gray, that my strength is fading, now I’m starting again at the beginning and as a child!  Again, he had to smile.  Yes, his fate had been strange!  Things were going downhill with him, and now he was again facing the world void and naked and stupid.  But he could not feed sad about this, no, he even felt a great urge to laugh, to laugh about himself, to laugh about this strange, foolish world.

“Things are going downhill with you!” he said to himself, and laughed about it, and as he was saying it, he happened to glance at the river, and he also saw the river going downhill, always moving on downhill, and singing and being happy through it all.  He liked this well, kindly he smiled at the river.  Was this not the river in which he had intended to drown himself, in past times, a hundred years ago, or had he dreamed this?

Wondrous indeed was my life, so he thought, wondrous detours it has taken.  As I boy, I had only to do with gods and offerings.  As a youth, I had only to do with asceticism, with thinking and meditation, was searching for Brahman, worshipped the eternal in the Atman.  But as a young man, I followed the penitents, lived in the forest, suffered of heat and frost, learned to hunger, taught my body to become dead.  Wonderfully, soon afterwards, insight came towards me in the form of the great Buddha’s teachings, I felt the knowledge of the oneness of the world circling in me like my own blood.  But I also had to leave Buddha and the great knowledge.