Slower, he walked along in his thoughts and asked himself: "But what
is this, what you have sought to learn from teachings and from teachers,
and what they, who have taught you much, were still unable to teach
you?" And he found: "It was the self, the purpose and essence of which
I sought to learn. It was the self, I wanted to free myself from, which
I sought to overcome. But I was not able to overcome it, could only
deceive it, could only flee from it, only hide from it. Truly, no
thing in this world has kept my thoughts thus busy, as this my very own
self, this mystery of me being alive, of me being one and being
separated and isolated from all others, of me being Siddhartha! And
there is no thing in this world I know less about than about me, about
Siddhartha!"

Having been pondering while slowly walking along, he now stopped as
these thoughts caught hold of him, and right away another thought sprang
forth from these, a new thought, which was: "That I know nothing about
myself, that Siddhartha has remained thus alien and unknown to me, stems
from one cause, a single cause: I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing
from myself! I searched Atman, I searched Brahman, I was willing to
to dissect my self and peel off all of its layers, to find the core of
all peels in its unknown interior, the Atman, life, the divine part, the
ultimate part. But I have lost myself in the process."

Siddhartha opened his eyes and looked around, a smile filled his face
and a feeling of awakening from long dreams flowed through him from his
head down to his toes. And it was not long before he walked again,
walked quickly like a man who knows what he has got to do.

"Oh," he thought, taking a deep breath, "now I would not let Siddhartha
escape from me again! No longer, I want to begin my thoughts and my