“The Brook” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson is a wonderful little poem. It gently trickles into the reader’s heart at first sight and stays there. One of my favorites, it has always been a pleasure to read ever since the first time in high school. Each and every stanza of this beauty is a pretty painting, both literally and figuratively.

This poem also contains one of the most quoted lines in the English language – “men may come and men may go, but the brook goes on forever.”
In addition to capturing the essence of the poem, this quotation has a profound philosophical message that the destiny of mortals (symbolized by the brook) is to merge with the ultimate (symbolized by the river). For those interested, another major work by Tennyson, The Ancient sage, delves much deeper into this complicated philosophy. Although I am an ignoramus when it comes to philosophy in general, I love the poem purely for the beauty of its words, their meaning, and the murals it draws on my mind’s canvas…

Men may come and men may go, but the brook goes on forever…whenever I read these lines I am immediately transported to another literary masterpiece, Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse. If you have not read the book, I highly recommend it. Small in size but huge on message, the book distills a whole universe of philosophical teachings down to about a hundred pages. Hesse has written a few other self-exploratory books with similar philosophical themes; some day I hope I will get to read them.

Siddhartha’s story takes place in ancient India. He is a rich young man born into aristocracy. Feeling dejected by the materialism around him, he relinquishes all and begins to wander the country in search of enlightenment. After experiencing bucketfuls of ups and downs, years later he finds what he was looking for – self awareness – from a ferryman. Again, this self-awareness stuff is too serious a business for me to go into. Actually, believe it or not, according to some modern thinkers, even quantum physics is trying to burrow into this subject these days. In addition, since I flunked physics in school with honors, I am being advised by my conscience to steer clear of it.

One of the interesting things about the book is that the protagonist’s life chronologically parallels that of the real Buddha…(much like Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”, where Brian’s life parallels that of Jesus Christ in that the two men were born in adjoining mangers...but that’s a whole ‘nother story).

The most important thing that stuck with me since my first reading of Siddhartha a long time ago is the significance of a river as a teacher. Te river plays big a role in the book for Siddhartha…He keeps returning to it throughout the story and also receives, with the ferryman’s guidance, his final enlightenment from it. For instance, in the following passage, Siddhartha asks his friend and mentor Vasudeva, the ferryman…

“...did you too learn that secret from the river: that there is no time?”
Vasudeva’s face was filled with a bright smile.
“Yes, Siddhartha,” he spoke. “It is this what you mean, isn’t it: that the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future?”

Perhaps, in retrospect, the blind leap that my mind took from Tennyson to Hesse’s Siddhartha shouldn’t be too surprising, as I later found out that both Tennyson and Hesse were avid students of Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived around 500 BC, who is famously quoted to have said that one could not step twice into the same river...Here, he is said to have used ‘the flow of a river’ as an allegory for life, in that all things pass and nothing stays and that life is a never-ending flux, a theme common to both The Brook and Siddhartha.

Now for some interesting coincidences…did you know that Heraclitus and Buddha were contemporaries – both lived between 500 to 400 BC? Other than that, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of a connection between the two. Both were courageous, original, and iconoclastic thinkers. Both believed in the theme of constant change in life, like a river which changes constantly while appearing to be static. Some philosophers attribute the similarity of their ideas to telepathy; apparently Buddha had such supernatural powers! Definitely, the similarity cannot be attributed to Alexander’s invasion of India, which occurred 150 years later….

Also, some lines in The Brook appear to be directly comparable to some original teachings of Buddha; for e.g., the following (translated) lines from Nalaka Sutta…

Know from the rivers
in clefts and in crevices:
those in small channels flow noisily,
the great flow silent.

…are so similar to

I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.
……
I chatter, chatter, as I flow
To join the brimming river

Well, before I say toodle-oo, for those who are interested, the full movie of Siddhartha is available on YouTube, easy to find. However, but I do feel compelled to post this short video of a song from the movie sung by Hemant Kumar; a rare gem of a song O nodi re ( meaning ‘O river...’), at once beautiful and haunting. Although it is in Bengali, let me assure you, one really doesn’t need to know the language to appreciate the song’s beauty…