Hermann Hesse’s Siddharta – Also a guide to trading and investment?

I recently read Siddharta by Hermann Hesse,  a wonderful book set in ancient India about a young man’s search for understanding and inner peace. Amongst other profoundities, the book also contains some interesting insights on trading and investment. After a thorough brahmin education, followed by three years of life as an ascetic sadhu, the young Siddharta becomes an apprentice under a rich merchant. Only knowing how to, according to himself, think, wait, and fast, he quickly becomes a highly successful and very rich merchant. Importantly, he does this not by using greed or a hunger for “success” as a motivation, but rather by means of cool detachment. Hesse, of course, describes this far more eloquently than I could ever hope to:

“This Brahmin,” [the master merchant Kamaswami] said to a friend, “is not a proper merchant and will never be one; never is his heart passionately engaged in our transactions. But he has the secret of those to whom success comes of ts own accors, be it that he was born under a lucky star, be it magic, be it something he learned among the Samanas. He seems only to be playing at doing business. Never do the transactions have any real effect on him; never are they his master; never does he fear failure or worry over a loss.”

There is an interesting connection here, of course, to modern “practical investment” literature, in which the virtues of emotional control and self discipline are frequently emphasized as being of critical importance to success. The lesson to be drawn from Hesse, then, is perhaps that one possibly extremely effective way of achieving this just this is to not care very much about money – in a Siddhartian sense, “rise above” is perhaps a more appropriate choice of words.

It might not be so easy, though. In Hesse’s work,  Siddhartas spirituality is almost completely killed off by many years of hedonism and financial success – and he becomes so emotionally and philosophically tortured that he abandons his life as a wealthy merchant and almost commits suicide.