On page 119 of Blah, Blah, Blah, in the footnote at the bottom of the page, the text currently states that in Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha, the lead character Siddartha later becomes known as the Buddha.

This is incorrect. The protagonist who gives Hesse’s book its title is not the Buddha. Rather, Hesse invented Siddartha as a character who lived at the same time as the Buddha and who, coincidentally, had the same name. Hesse’s Siddartha also went through the same stages of disillusionment, asceticism, satiation of desire, discovery of a middle path, and an experience of “extinguishment/enlightenment” that the Buddha went through. In Hesse’s story, Siddartha even meets the Buddha, but instead of following the Buddha, he blazes his own spiritual path. Ironically, this is what the Buddha taught all along, that all the truth you need is within your own grasp, and that nobody else can tell you what it is.

In future printings of Blah, the footnote will be changed to read like this:

You may recall Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha, required reading in many high school literature classes. A fictional character with the same birth name and personal experience as the Buddha eventually decides to reject even the Buddha’s path and follow his own — which, ironically, would have made the Buddha happy.

Here’s the story behind the error: I had six or seven people review my book for errors and omissions, including two PhDs; My publisher ran it through at least a couple of their own fact checkers; and nobody caught it. It took a high school literature teacher — Steve Hagberg at the Oaks Christian High School in Thousand Oaks, California — to point out this error to me. Just goes to show that things can fall through the cracks even when you’re really trying to pay attention.

Here’s the story behind the story behind the error: As a seminarian, I had been traveling through North India studying theological education methods. I had a few days off toward the end of my trip, so I went to Simla, a mountain village in the Himalayas. When I got there I was surprised to find a relatively high concentration of light-skinned Europeans and Americans who had gathered there because the weed in that region was particularly good to smoke.

After he discovered I was a Christian, one of these foreigners, an American, told me to “read this book, it’s my Bible” as he handed me a copy of Siddartha. That very night I read through the whole book. It was a gripping story, and, reading quickly, I made the assumption that perhaps many people have made, that the book was an imaginative re-telling of the Buddha’s life. (Incidentally, my high school literature class did not include reading Siddartha.)

The next day we had a very interesting discussion, and I remember the incident vividly to this day, even though it happened a long time ago.

Here’s a summary from a worldview perspective: Hesse wasn’t doing biography. He was spinning a tale to lure people into a mindset that says “the truth is within you; you don’t need God.”