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The Journal of the Royal Institute of Thailand Vol. 38 No. 1 Jan-Mar 2013 Abstract Associate Fellow of the Academy of Arts, The Royal Institute, Thailand A Buddhist Perspective Hermann Hesse’s short story The Journey to the East, or in its native German ‘Erzählung’, is considered by many Germanists as a preparatory work to one of his most admirable novels Das Glasperlenspiel (1931- 1942). The pilgrimage through both time and space, across geography imaginary and real, is told from the point of view of H.H., who is a member of “The League”, a timeless religious sect. The Journey to the East is mostly considered as a symbolic and categorical travel representing the process of the author’s self-development, a voyage back “home”, in search of an ideal, inner security. However, this Pilgrimage has in some ways a close connection to the Journey to the West (to India), of a Mahayana Tang Dynasty in the 7th century. The discussion of the Pilgrimage of H.H. to ‘Orient’ refers on one side to the real journey of the Buddhist monk to the ‘Okzident’, composed by a Chinese poet about a thousand years later in 17th century China. The paper aims to illustrate another aspect of the symbolic process of the Journey to the East in the search for self-knowledge of the author through the story-teller H.H., especially the meaning of self-knowledge from the Buddhist perspective. Additionally, it may come as a surprise that Hesse’s The Journey to the East can be shown to be a ‘mirror image’ of the Buddhist episode of The Journey to the West. Keywords :