7 ms·

What Kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs?

58 points by shahocean 12y ago

matt__rose 12y ago
Fascinating insight into a bit of Jobs life that is mostly overlooked, except as a "He used to be a hippy" anecdote. Steve Silberman does a good job of teasing out the bits and assembling a better vision of Jobs's belief system, and how it informed his work at Apple and NeXT
- mandeepj 12y ago
  > Steve Silberman does a good job of teasing out the bits and assembling a better vision of Jobs's belief system Could you please post the link ?
  - wpietri 12y ago
    Steve Silberman is the author of this article.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
irtefa 12y ago
Can someone please explain to me this part "The spectators were aghast until they looked up at Kobun, who gleefully shouted, “Bullseye!”? I have a hard time understanding why Kobun did what he did.
- purpletoned 12y ago
  Zen philosophy stresses on going with the flow and accepting things as they are. You could argue that Kobun did hit a target even if it wasn't the one the audience (or himself for that matter) anticipated.
  - Zelphyr 12y ago
    I tend to agree though a part of me also wonders if it wasn't also a little mischievous humor on his part. :)
- namenotrequired 12y ago
  Considering the sentence that prefaced the anecdote, I read it as an illustration of the mentioned "humor and a light touch".
- sp332 12y ago
  From the previous paragraph: Zen flourishes in irreverence, subversion, inscrutability, and self-mockery, so it sounds perfect :)
- onmydesk 12y ago
  My favourite part of the article. A few meanings I think are possible, I like the explanation that the observers were wrong to assume they knew where the target was ; It was after all his shot to take, he wasn't conforming to the expectation of the group. Reminds me of "A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to".
  - irtefa 12y ago
    This makes more sense now, thanks.
- wpietri 12y ago
  My inexpert take is that Zen makes a lot of use of contradiction of expectation as a way of waking people up. When my expectation of a situation is violated and I have a WTF moment, I start paying a great deal of attention to the exact details of the situation, and I start questioning all my assumptions. A good example is the story "A Cup of Tea": [1] Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!" "Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?" Without being there, I can't know what Kobun intended. (Even if I were I could well not know.) But one way to look at it is him getting people to empty their cups: they thought they knew what would happen, and suddenly they didn't. A joke? [2] A lesson? A metaphor? It almost doesn't matter, because now they're awake. To me the ultimate purpose of this is to get people to see the flashes of blue sky that the article talks about, those moments of insight that help us see through the useful illusions we collect as a way of getting by in the world. [1] From http://www.101zenstories.com/index.php?story=1 http://www.101zenstories.com/index.php?story=1 and I'd encourage interested parties to buy Paul Reps's "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones", a delightful book of similar and related material. [2] You might also find a useful analogy in the Native American notion of a sacred clown, a heyoka: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heyoka http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heyoka
andyl 12y ago
Silicon Valley people - interested in learning more? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kannon_Do_Zen_Meditation_Center http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kannon_Do_Zen_Meditation_Center KD has newbie instruction every Weds eve, and a sitting group every weekday at noon handy for people working nearby.
conectorx 12y ago
Funny, Buddha never believed in Gods, neither pretended to be one. Buddha never believed in miracles, neither did he practice them. Although many of his followers attribute one or more miracles in his favor. Buddha never believed in religions, neither did he fund any, and nowadays Buddhism is one of the more numerous religions. Buddha chocked with a piece of pork...
4ccc0f9200a7a 12y ago
Buddhism stresses compassion and identifies desire and the ego as the causes of suffering. Steve Jobs was, you could say, "interpersonally abrasive" and made a fortune by encouraging people to want devices built using slave labor from raw materials whose extraction harms people living nearby. You need a new one every year, too. In that sense, Steve Jobs was about as Buddhist as the "prosperity gospel" people are Christian. Richard Stallman was correct that the death of Steve Jobs was a good thing.
- judk 12y ago
  Unless you have an argument that Steve Jobs promoted materialism and slavery more than the average human and whoever replaced him in the commercial world, your gravedancing is illogical, beyond its crassness. Who is not on your list of people whose death would be good?
  - coldtea 12y ago
    """Unless you have an argument that Steve Jobs promoted materialism and slavery more than the average human and whoever replaced him in the commercial world, your gravedancing is illogical, beyond its crassness.""" Well, I'm as much an Apple fun as everyone, but: he was a ruthless businessman, leader of the one of the biggest companies (if not the biggest in market cap) in the world. If you think even for a momement that that is compatible with not being MORE materialist than the "average human", then I don't know what to say. In fact, his whole life he placed extreme emphasis if not in money itself (which is not the be all end all of materialism), to material items. He devoted his life into building and selling material things. In the process, he exploited cheap labor (when you have the highest profit margins and the largest cash stash in the industry, relying on cheap chinese works in 19th century conditions and not increasing their pay IS the very definition of exploitation), backstabbed those he could (Woz for one), and treated his averaged employee like "a means to an end" instead as people (from the programmers, who got the better treatment, but still were underpaid and forbidden to work for rival companies with secret deals, to the tons of industry and retail employees).
- paulhauggis 12y ago
PeterWhittaker 12y ago
tl;dr? Read the article.
- PeterWhittaker 12y ago
  Huh. I guess the ironic humour of that one was lost on a few people.
coldtea 12y ago
The Californian kind of Buddhist. That is: "I heard about this oriental religion in the sixties and I'll adopt it because it is currently perceived as cooler than my own. I won't follow much of what it preaches, nor study it with any seriousness of course, but it's nice to have a cool pseudo-spiritual thing to lean to while living a hardly spiritual life in a hardly spiritual environment".
- jmckib 12y ago
  From the article (which I'm doubting you read): > Isaacson does a fine job of showing how Jobs’ engagement with Buddhism was more than just a lotus-scented footnote to a brilliant Silicon Valley career. As a young seeker in the ’70s, Jobs didn’t just dabble in Zen, appropriating its elliptical aesthetic as a kind of exotic cologne. He turns out to have been a serious, diligent practitioner who undertook lengthy meditation retreats at Tassajara — the first Zen monastery in America, located at the end of a twisting dirt road in the mountains above Carmel — spending weeks on end “facing the wall,” as Zen students say, to observe the activity of his own mind.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    I've actually read both the article and Isaacson's biography. I don't find "Zen monasteries in America" anything but a novelty, much less those "lengthy meditation retreats".
    - karmelapple 12y ago
      Do you believe Catholic churches (or monasteries/convents) outside of Italy / Vatican City, mosques outside of Saudi Arabia, and temples outside of Israel are also novelties?
    - wpietri 12y ago
      Could you explain why you feel qualified to judge so thoroughly? Living in San Francisco, I know a number of California Buddhists. As with any religion, a wide variety of people are attracted to it. But I know plenty of sincere and thoughtful practitioners, so I think your views are not totally correct.
kstop 12y ago
A shitty one.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
virtualwhys 12y ago
I'm pretty shocked that Jobs sat at Tassajara, that place is no joke, retreats are 3 months long, and the initiate phase for new comers, 5 days of sitting without moving (short of bathroom breaks) is pretty insane. That must have been pre-Apple explosion, back when he was involved there likely wouldn't have even been a phone line, much less electricity. Tassajara is way out in the mountains of Carmel valley, literally a few miles from the closest humans.
DrFunke 12y ago
...A Buddhist of convenience?
subdane 12y ago
Jobs pursued spirituality with the same zest as he pursued art and technology. He was neither a great artist nor a great engineer. Or was he? In the same way, he was not a great buddhist.

58 points by shahocean 12y ago

Fascinating insight into a bit of Jobs life that is mostly overlooked, except as a "He used to be a hippy" anecdote. Steve Silberman does a good job of teasing out the bits and assembling a better vision of Jobs's belief system, and how it informed his work at Apple and NeXT

mandeepj 12y ago
> Steve Silberman does a good job of teasing out the bits and assembling a better vision of Jobs's belief system Could you please post the link ?
- wpietri 12y ago
  Steve Silberman is the author of this article.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

irtefa 12y ago

Can someone please explain to me this part "The spectators were aghast until they looked up at Kobun, who gleefully shouted, “Bullseye!”? I have a hard time understanding why Kobun did what he did.

purpletoned 12y ago
Zen philosophy stresses on going with the flow and accepting things as they are. You could argue that Kobun did hit a target even if it wasn't the one the audience (or himself for that matter) anticipated.
- Zelphyr 12y ago
  I tend to agree though a part of me also wonders if it wasn't also a little mischievous humor on his part. :)
namenotrequired 12y ago
Considering the sentence that prefaced the anecdote, I read it as an illustration of the mentioned "humor and a light touch".
sp332 12y ago
From the previous paragraph: Zen flourishes in irreverence, subversion, inscrutability, and self-mockery, so it sounds perfect :)
onmydesk 12y ago
My favourite part of the article. A few meanings I think are possible, I like the explanation that the observers were wrong to assume they knew where the target was ; It was after all his shot to take, he wasn't conforming to the expectation of the group. Reminds me of "A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to".
- irtefa 12y ago
  This makes more sense now, thanks.
wpietri 12y ago
My inexpert take is that Zen makes a lot of use of contradiction of expectation as a way of waking people up. When my expectation of a situation is violated and I have a WTF moment, I start paying a great deal of attention to the exact details of the situation, and I start questioning all my assumptions. A good example is the story "A Cup of Tea": [1] Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!" "Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?" Without being there, I can't know what Kobun intended. (Even if I were I could well not know.) But one way to look at it is him getting people to empty their cups: they thought they knew what would happen, and suddenly they didn't. A joke? [2] A lesson? A metaphor? It almost doesn't matter, because now they're awake. To me the ultimate purpose of this is to get people to see the flashes of blue sky that the article talks about, those moments of insight that help us see through the useful illusions we collect as a way of getting by in the world. [1] From http://www.101zenstories.com/index.php?story=1 http://www.101zenstories.com/index.php?story=1 and I'd encourage interested parties to buy Paul Reps's "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones", a delightful book of similar and related material. [2] You might also find a useful analogy in the Native American notion of a sacred clown, a heyoka: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heyoka http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heyoka

andyl 12y ago

Silicon Valley people - interested in learning more? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kannon_Do_Zen_Meditation_Center http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kannon_Do_Zen_Meditation_Center KD has newbie instruction every Weds eve, and a sitting group every weekday at noon handy for people working nearby.

conectorx 12y ago

Funny, Buddha never believed in Gods, neither pretended to be one. Buddha never believed in miracles, neither did he practice them. Although many of his followers attribute one or more miracles in his favor. Buddha never believed in religions, neither did he fund any, and nowadays Buddhism is one of the more numerous religions. Buddha chocked with a piece of pork...

4ccc0f9200a7a 12y ago

Buddhism stresses compassion and identifies desire and the ego as the causes of suffering. Steve Jobs was, you could say, "interpersonally abrasive" and made a fortune by encouraging people to want devices built using slave labor from raw materials whose extraction harms people living nearby. You need a new one every year, too. In that sense, Steve Jobs was about as Buddhist as the "prosperity gospel" people are Christian. Richard Stallman was correct that the death of Steve Jobs was a good thing.

judk 12y ago
Unless you have an argument that Steve Jobs promoted materialism and slavery more than the average human and whoever replaced him in the commercial world, your gravedancing is illogical, beyond its crassness. Who is not on your list of people whose death would be good?
- coldtea 12y ago
  """Unless you have an argument that Steve Jobs promoted materialism and slavery more than the average human and whoever replaced him in the commercial world, your gravedancing is illogical, beyond its crassness.""" Well, I'm as much an Apple fun as everyone, but: he was a ruthless businessman, leader of the one of the biggest companies (if not the biggest in market cap) in the world. If you think even for a momement that that is compatible with not being MORE materialist than the "average human", then I don't know what to say. In fact, his whole life he placed extreme emphasis if not in money itself (which is not the be all end all of materialism), to material items. He devoted his life into building and selling material things. In the process, he exploited cheap labor (when you have the highest profit margins and the largest cash stash in the industry, relying on cheap chinese works in 19th century conditions and not increasing their pay IS the very definition of exploitation), backstabbed those he could (Woz for one), and treated his averaged employee like "a means to an end" instead as people (from the programmers, who got the better treatment, but still were underpaid and forbidden to work for rival companies with secret deals, to the tons of industry and retail employees).
paulhauggis 12y ago

PeterWhittaker 12y ago

tl;dr? Read the article.

PeterWhittaker 12y ago
Huh. I guess the ironic humour of that one was lost on a few people.

coldtea 12y ago

The Californian kind of Buddhist. That is: "I heard about this oriental religion in the sixties and I'll adopt it because it is currently perceived as cooler than my own. I won't follow much of what it preaches, nor study it with any seriousness of course, but it's nice to have a cool pseudo-spiritual thing to lean to while living a hardly spiritual life in a hardly spiritual environment".

jmckib 12y ago
From the article (which I'm doubting you read): > Isaacson does a fine job of showing how Jobs’ engagement with Buddhism was more than just a lotus-scented footnote to a brilliant Silicon Valley career. As a young seeker in the ’70s, Jobs didn’t just dabble in Zen, appropriating its elliptical aesthetic as a kind of exotic cologne. He turns out to have been a serious, diligent practitioner who undertook lengthy meditation retreats at Tassajara — the first Zen monastery in America, located at the end of a twisting dirt road in the mountains above Carmel — spending weeks on end “facing the wall,” as Zen students say, to observe the activity of his own mind.
- coldtea 12y ago
  I've actually read both the article and Isaacson's biography. I don't find "Zen monasteries in America" anything but a novelty, much less those "lengthy meditation retreats".
  - karmelapple 12y ago
    Do you believe Catholic churches (or monasteries/convents) outside of Italy / Vatican City, mosques outside of Saudi Arabia, and temples outside of Israel are also novelties?
  - wpietri 12y ago
    Could you explain why you feel qualified to judge so thoroughly? Living in San Francisco, I know a number of California Buddhists. As with any religion, a wide variety of people are attracted to it. But I know plenty of sincere and thoughtful practitioners, so I think your views are not totally correct.

kstop 12y ago

A shitty one.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

virtualwhys 12y ago

I'm pretty shocked that Jobs sat at Tassajara, that place is no joke, retreats are 3 months long, and the initiate phase for new comers, 5 days of sitting without moving (short of bathroom breaks) is pretty insane. That must have been pre-Apple explosion, back when he was involved there likely wouldn't have even been a phone line, much less electricity. Tassajara is way out in the mountains of Carmel valley, literally a few miles from the closest humans.

DrFunke 12y ago

...A Buddhist of convenience?

subdane 12y ago

Jobs pursued spirituality with the same zest as he pursued art and technology. He was neither a great artist nor a great engineer. Or was he? In the same way, he was not a great buddhist.