“Yes, Siddhartha,” he said. “Is this what you are saying: that the river is the same along his whole length, at his source and at his estuary, at the waterfall, at the ferry crossing, at the rapids, at the sea, in the mountains, everywhere the same, and that for him there is only the present, no shadow of the future?”
“Yes, that is right,” said Siddhartha. “And when I had learned this I looked at my life and saw that it too was a river, and separating the boy Siddhartha from the man Siddhartha, and the man Siddhartha from the old man Siddhartha, there was merely a shadow, nothing real. And Siddhartha’s previous births too were not in the past, and his death and his return to Brahma were not in the future. Nothing has been and nothing will be; everything is, everything has its essence and its presence.”
Siddhartha spoke with delight, this elucidation had made him deeply happy. For was not, then, all suffering time, was not all self-torture and self-fear time, was not all difficulty, all hostility in the world expunged and overcome as soon a time has been overcome, as soon as time could be removed from our thoughts? He spoke with gleeful passion, but Vasudeva simple gave him a bright smile and nodded agreement, he nodded in silence, touched Siddhartha’s shoulder and went back to his work.
Another time in the rainy season, and the swollen river made a mighty roar, Siddhartha said, “Would you say, my friend, that the river has many voices, very many voices? Does he not have the voice of a king, and of a warrior, and of a bull, and of a bird at night, and of a mother giving birth, and of a man who sighs and a thousand other voices?”
“You are right,” Vasudeva nodded, “all the voices in creation are in his voice.”
“And do you know,” Siddhartha, “what word he says when you succeed in hearing all ten thousand voices at once?”
Happy laughter appeared on Vasudeva’s face, he leant towards Siddhartha and into his ear he spoke the holy word Om. And this indeed was what Siddhartha also had heard.
And little by little his smile became like the ferryman’s, became nearly as beaming, nearly as permeated with happiness, just as radiant from a thousand tiny wrinkles, just as child-like, just as mature. Many travellers who saw the two ferrymen thought they must be brothers. In the evenings they would often sit together on the tree trunk at the riverside, they would say nothing but both would listen to the water which, for them, was not water but the voice of life, the voice of existence, of eternal becoming. Sometimes, as the two of them listened to the river together, they would both think of the same things, of a discussion that had taken place two days earlier, of one of the travellers whose face and whose destiny occupied them, of death, of their childhood. Sometimes, when the river had said something good to them, they would each look at the other at the same moment, both thinking the same thing, both feeling the same joy at hearing the same answer to the same question.
Many of the travellers felt there was something given out from the ferry and the two ferrymen. Sometimes a traveller would look into the face of one of the ferrymen and begin to tell his life story, would tell of his sorrows, acknowledge where he had done wrong, ask for solace and advice. Sometimes one of them would ask permission to spend the evening with them to listen to the river. Sometimes someone would come to them because he was curious, someone who had heard about these two wise men or magicians or holy men who lived beside this ferry. They would ask many questions but received no answers, and they found neither magicians nor wise men, all they found were two elderly and friendly little men who seemed unable to speak and, in some special way, demented. They would laugh, and tell their friends about how foolish and credulous those people were who spread such empty rumours.
The years went by and nobody counted them. One time there came monks on a pilgrimage, disciples of Gotama, the buddha, and they asked the ferrymen to take them across the river, and the ferrymen learned that they were hurrying back to their great teacher because word was spreading that the noble one was mortally ill and must soon suffer his last death as a human before going to his release. Not long after came a new flux of monks on pilgrimage, and then another, and not only the monks but most of the other travellers and wanderers spoke of nothing but Gotama and his impending death. There was a flow of people here from all parts as if they had been an army on campaign or were going to attend the coronation of a king, they collected like ants, they flowed as if drawn by some kind of magic on their way to where the great buddha lay awaiting death, to the place where that awful event would take place and the great perfect one of an era would rise to majesty.