Wisdom is not expressible. Wisdom, when a wise man tries to express it, always sounds like foolishness. Knowledge can be expressed, but not wisdom. One can discover it, one can live it, one can be borne along by it, one can do miracles with it, but one cannot express it and teach it…The opposite of every truth is also just as true. A truth can be expressed and cloaked in words only if it is one-sided. Everything that can be thought in thoughts and expressed in words is one-sided, only a half. All such thoughts lack wholeness, fullness, unity…The world itself, existence around us and within us, is never one-sided. Never is a person or an act wholly samsara or wholly nirvana; never is a person entirely holy or sinful. That only appears to be the case because we are in the grips of the illusion that time is real. Time is not real…And if time is not real, then the gap that seems to exist between the world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

The river’s voice was full of longing, ardent with sorrow, full of unquenchable longing. The river strove toward its goal; Siddhartha saw it hurrying on, this river composed of himself and those near him and of all the people he had ever seen. All the waves and currents hurried onward, suffering, toward objects, many goals. The waterfall, the lake, the rapids, the sea, and all the goals were reached; and each was followed by a new one, and the water became vapour and climbed into the sky, became rain and crashed down from the sky, became springs, brooks, became a river, strove onward again, flowed anew. But the passionate voice had changed. It still had the sound of suffering, questing, but other voices were added – voices of joy and suffering, good and evil voices, laughing and lamenting voices, a hundred, a thousand voices…And everything together, all the voices, all the goals, all the striving, all the suffering, all the pleasure – everything together was the river of what is, the music of life.

Everything returned that had not been suffered through to the end and resolved. The same pains were always suffered again.

There slowly bloomed and ripened in Siddhartha the realization and knowledge of what wisdom, the object of his long quest, really was. It was nothing more than a readiness of the soul, a mysterious knack: the ability at every moment in the midst of life to think the thought of unity, to feel and breathe unity.

He felt he had been given the wound not so he could wallow in the pain of it but so it could become a flower, a shining blossom.

The indestructibility of life, the eternity of every instant.