The Wounded Swan

(OPWC Ch. 4)

– December 16, 2025, 3:14 to 4:14 pm

So far, my favorite chapter. I’m excited to dive into this one. Svasti returns to the forest to see Siddhartha, bringing some brown rice as an offering, and notices that he is already sharing rice with another child: Sujata. Several years older than Svasti, Sujata comes from a higher caste (her father is a local leader) and considerably more wealth than he does, so she has brought “fragrant white rice.” Siddhartha invites Svasti to join them, and they pool together all the rice to share resources as well as presence. Given the social norms, including the bodily stigma attached to an “Untouchable” like Svasti, this itself is a radical act: passing food containers, sharing utensils and especially cups, provides another avenue for loosening the hold of that culturally-trained aversion to difference. By sharing a cup with Svasti, Sujata learns not just through teaching but through feeling, sensation, affective resonance, that he is just as sacred as she. So the first teaching comes through the practice of sharing food, drink, and presence. Friendly introductions are exchanged, that narrativize and emphasize the caste (and class) differences being worked through. 

Then Siddhartha lays out the teaching in two parts, which he then elucidates further by telling a story about his childhood, about a wounded swan. But first, the teaching in two parts: 

1. “People are not born with caste. Everyone’s tears are salty, and everyone’s blood is red” (31). 

Another deceptively simple maxim that sounds, on a casual read, like: “external differences are misleading; we’re all the same underneath,” something to that effect. Which is both true and woefully incomplete. What do tears and blood have in common, besides both being bodily fluids? They both are suffering as material flow, as visible signifier of that suffering and the portal it opens up from one becoming to another. It’s not just that “everyone’s blood is red”: it’s that we all experience ego-annihilating suffering, and there’s a way to walk through that suffering feeling more connected, rather than more isolated. It also feels like a throwback to the sensory organs line a few chapter ago. 

Sujata asks Siddhartha a follow-up question, something like… But everyone else believes that the caste system is real, no one “dares to think differently.” He responds: 

2. “The truth is the truth whether anyone believes it or not. Though a million people may believe a lie, it is still a lie. You must have great courage to live according to the truth. 

More anti-gaslights, this time as structural ETHOS. I love this! How validating, how ennobling. I see myself in this: a brave, noble, lonely truth-teller. My ego purrs with delight. But wait—on a reread, it seems I’ve missed some important nuance, busy as I was crowning myself fucking Cassandra. Pause. “You must have great courage to LIVE according to the truth.” Not just tell the truth, or dismantle corrosive frames, but LIVING according to the truth. Sara Ahmed’s “Living a Feminist Life” comes to mind here as another companion text; I’ll revisit that this week and report back. I appreciate the reminder that telling the truth is impressive—and, yes, often isolating—but the next step is turning truth into praxis, lifestyle, the very project of becoming-awake. I’ve started walking this path but I could commit more to it. I’m nowhere near Buddhahood, obviously. To deepen my living of truth, not just telling it or hoarding it, I will frame my later writing exercises today around naming and processing the medical truths around Drew’s illness that I disavowed until it was far too late, and examine how I managed to so thoroughly deceive myself and curate my own knowledge/information ecosystem to avoid the truth about what was happening to my brother. 

Let me tell you a story about when I was a little boy” (31). 

Great, my instincts are correct here: to reflect on the teaching with a story. This is clearly a favorite pedagogical tool from Siddhartha, and more broadly of the book as a whole, structured as it is around the temporality of storytelling. Siddhartha tells Svasti and Sujata about an incident with his brother, growing up in their palace, when he was nine years old. Here’s the gist of it: his brother Devadatta shoots down a swan flying over palace grounds but fails to kill it. Young Siddhartha, who evidently has a much gentler temperament than his bloodthirsty sibling, takes the wounded swan into his arms and tries to nurse it back to health. Devadatta demands to be given the swan and claims possession because he shot it down, therefore it should be his (presumably to kill). 

Siddhartha gives a counter-argument that seems pretty logically sound: he wants to rescue it and Devadatta has lethal designs on the swan, so he should be chosen as the steward. They go to the King, who presents it to the Ministers, there’s a vote, and Siddhartha wins. Still, he acknowledges, he found himself dissatisfied, even as a little child, because he intuited that the Ministers only voted for Siddhartha to please the King—not because they agreed on principle. Siddhartha notes that way you convince others of your argument, even if it is the truth or the “right” side, also matters. Once again, I find in a more careful reading of the text, with my ego safely sidelined, that it’s far more subtle and intricate than it appears in its spiritual transmissions and actionable guidance. Here’s the line I’m referring to: 

“I knew that my victory had been less than honorable. I was given the bird because the ministers wanted to please my father, not because they saw the truth of what I said” (33). 

→ Follow up questions for upcoming reflection, possibly psychic triage: How do I create the conditions under which I can see the truth, and help others to see the truth? Where have I failed to see the truth, or been willfully blind to it, and why? 

After recounting this story/parable from his childhood, Siddhartha returns us to the present moment, smiles at the children (who I imagine are enraptured, that seems like the vibe under this pippala tree), and repeats the teaching, but with a few new layers, textures, dimensions. Here’s the passage in full, with my bold/italics to indicate the new additions to the teaching:

3. “In this world, few people look with the eyes of compassion, and so we are cruel and merciless toward each other. The weak are always oppressed by the strong. I still see that my reasoning that day was correct, for it arose from love and understanding. Love and understanding can ease the suffering of all beings. The truth is the truth, whether or not it is accepted by the majority. Therefore, I tell you children, it takes great courage to stand up for and protect what is right” (33). 

“Look with the eyes of compassion”: this seems to close the loop about the ministers. Seeing the truth = looking with the eyes of compassion. The ministers were looking with the eyes of opportunism and narrative positioning, which may have the same outcome/destination but comes from a fragile process, unstable foundations to the extent that they depend on external validation, social power, affirmation from others. Compassion becomes an ethical viewpoint, a way of re-visioning, adjusting how one looks, I’m feeling some Levinas coming in here, maybe even Barthes, Melanie Klein. Yes, yes, yes!

Next addition: correct, for it arose from love and understanding. DIRECT EGO HIT, right there. Let me briefly absorb the hit. Okay. I like being right because my argument coheres, the evidence is incontrovertible and compelling, the implications urgent and timely, the rhetorical style is persuasive, and the whole nine. I’m right, in other words, because I’m that bitch. I’m brilliant! Look at me being right and proving it! That’s part of the thrill of academic writing, in a certain sense. Let me go deeper still… pause. Zooming in from a canted angle—finding another way in—aha. Of course.

Here’s a gentler, more actionable frame that decenters the ego and loosens my attachment to some kind of symbolic recognition (my “Wizard and I” fantasy, as it were): Rightness/Correctness comes not from architectural logic and rhetorical flourish but from the purity of purpose and the devotional quality of the process pursued to nurture and deliver that knowledge. The process becomes the point of focus, rather than institutional or external accolade, affirmation, or prestige. While this frame will take more time to hold, without a doubt, because again, my ego exists… I do see the ways in which my writing, reading, and teaching practice is already devotional and rigorous in the most loving sense of the word. Close reading and rigorous deconstruction as not just love language, but scriptural/devotional/religious praxis? I like the sound of that. 

More to follow soon. The writing churns on.