e no pôr do sol e na lua e na sombra e na chuva, encontro-me sempre a mim própria

Siddhartha learned a lot when he was with the Samanas, many ways leading away from the self he learned to go.  He went the way of self-denial by means of pain, through voluntarily suffering and overcoming pain, hunger,thirst, tiredness.  He went the way of self-denial by means of meditation, through imagining the mind to be void of all conceptions.

These and other ways he learned to go, a thousand times he left his self, for hours and days he remained in the non-self.  But though the ways led away from the self, their end nevertheless always led back to the self.  Though Siddhartha fled from the self a thousand times, stayed in nothingness, stayed in the animal, in the stone, the return was inevitable, inescapable was the hour, when he found himself back in the sunshine or in the moonlight, in the shade or in the rain, and was once again his self and Siddhartha, and again felt the agony of the cycle which had been forced upon him.


In Siddartha, Hermann Hesse