Hermann Hesse’s intellectual trajectory is admirable. The “posthumous writings of Joseph Knecht”, especially “The Three Lives”, are like a synthesis of a lifetime dedicated to study, of a long immersion in the highest philosophies of the East and the West; a synthesis of the great religions and the great understandings of reality, starting from the simplest to the most complex elements, from practical morals to abstractions of thought. And to see such lines coming from the author of Demian… Not a few have tried to harmonize East and West in the last century; but very few have done it with the beauty achieved by Hesse.