“This too,” spoke Siddhartha, “I do not care very much about.  Let the things be illusions or not, after all I would then also be an illusion, and thus they are always like me.  This is what makes them so dear and worthy of veneration for me:  they are like me.  Therefore, I can love them.  And this is now a teaching you will laugh about:  love, oh Govinda, seems to me to be the most important thing of all.  To thoroughly understand the world, to explain it, to despise it, may be the thing great thinkers do.  But I’m only interested in being able to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate it and me, to be able to look upon it and me and all beings with love and admiration and great respect.”

“This I understand,” spoke Govinda.  “But this very thing was discovered by the exalted one to be a deception.  He commands benevolence, clemency, sympathy, tolerance, but not love; he forbade us to tie our heart in love to earthly things.”

“I know it,” said Siddhartha; his smile shone golden.  “I know it, Govinda.  And behold, with this we are right in the middle of the thicket of opinions, in the dispute about words.  For I cannot deny, my words of love are in a contradiction, a seeming contradiction with Gotama’s words.  For this very reason, I distrust in words so much, for I know, this contradiction is a deception.  I know that I am in agreement with Gotama.  How should he not know love, he, who has discovered all elements of human existence in their transitoriness, in their meaninglessness, and yet loved people thus much, to use a long, laborious life only to help them, to teach them!  Even with him, even with your great teacher, I prefer the thing over the words, place more importance on his acts and life than on his speeches, more on the gestures of his hand than his opinions.  Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.”

For a long time, the two old men said nothing.  Then spoke Govinda, while bowing for a farewell:  “I thank you, Siddhartha, for telling me some of your thoughts.  They are partially strange thoughts, not all have been instantly understandable to me.  This being as it may, I thank you, and I wish you to have calm days.”

(But secretly he thought to himself:  This Siddhartha is a bizarre person, he expresses bizarre thoughts, his teachings sound foolish.  So differently sound the exalted one’s pure teachings, clearer, purer, more comprehensible, nothing strange, foolish, or silly is contained in them.  But different from his thoughts seemed to me Siddhartha’s hands and feet, his eyes, his forehead, his breath, his smile, his greeting, his walk.  Never again, after our exalted Gotama has become one with the Nirvana, never since then have I met a person of whom I felt:  this is a holy man!  Only him, this Siddhartha, I have found to be like this.  May his teachings be strange, may his words sound foolish; out of his gaze and his hand, his skin and his hair, out of every part of him shines a purity, shines a calmness, shines a cheerfulness and mildness and holiness, which I have seen in no other person since the final death of our exalted teacher.)