He was well aware that this love, this blind love for his son, was a passion, something very human, aware that it was sansara, a cloudy source, a dark water. But he felt at the same time that it was not without value, that it was something necessary, that it sprang from its own essence. Even this craving had to be paid for, even these pains had to be tasted, even these follies had to be gone through.
During all this the son let him go through these follies, let him try to win him over, every day he would humiliate him with his moods. This father of his had nothing that pleased him and nothing that he would be afraid of. He was a good man, this father, a good, good-natured and gentle man, perhaps a very pious man, perhaps a holy man - but none of these characteristics were anything that could win the boy over. He found his father boring, keeping him prisoner in this miserable hut of his, he was boring, and every time he behaved badly he would respond with a smile, respond to insults with friendliness, respond to malice with goodness. This was probably the trick of the old creep that he hated most. The boy would rather have had him threaten him and mistreat him.
The day came when the young Siddhartha felt it was time to break out, and he turned against his father quite openly. Siddhartha had given him the task of collecting firewood, but the boy did not leave the hut, he stood there in angry defiance, stamped his foot, clenched his fists and burst out in a fit, screaming hatred and contempt in his father’s face.
“Get the firewood yourself!” he shouted, frothing at the mouth, “I’m not your servant. I’m well aware you never hit me, ‘cause you don’t dare to; I’m well aware you want to punish me a make me small with your God-fearingness and your softness. You want me to be just like you, all pious and all gentle and all full of wisdom! But listen! I’m going to make you sorry, I’d rather be a bandit on the roads, rather be a murderer and go to Hell than be like you! I hate you, you’re not my father even if you’d been my mother’s lover ten times over!”
He gushed over with anger and self-pity, spat a hundred vapid and spiteful words out at his father. Then the boy ran off and did not come back until late in the evening.
But by the following morning he had disappeared. The little basket, woven of fibres in two colours in which the ferrymen kept all the copper or silvers coins they received as passengers’ fares, was also missing. Also their boat was missing, which Siddhartha saw lying at the other side of river. The boy had run away.
“I will have to go after him,” said Siddhartha, who was still shaken from the previous day’s tirade by the boy. “A child cannot go through the forest by himself. He will be killed. We need to build a raft, Vasudeva, to get across the water.”
“We will build a raft,” said Vasudeva, “to fetch back our boat that the lad took away. But you should let him go, my friend, he is not a child any more, he knows how to look after himself. He is looking for the way to the city, and he is right, do not forget that. He is doing what you have failed to do yourself. He is looking after himself, he is following his own path. Oh Siddhartha, I can see that you are suffering, but the pains you are suffering are pains that could be laughed about, pains that you too will soon laugh about.”
Siddhartha gave no answer. He already held the chopper in his hand and had begun to build the raft from bamboo wood. Vasudeva helped him to tie them together with rope made of grass. Then they made the crossing, were carried far off course and, on the opposite shore, pulled the raft back upstream.
“Why have you brought the chopper with you?” asked Siddhartha.