How Steve Jobs found
Buddhism
BRENT
SCHLENDER & RICK
TETZELI| NOVEMBER 3, 2015 Lion’s
Roar
Buddhism had a significant influence on Steve Jobs. Brent Schlender
and Rick Tetzeli explain that Jobs’ 1974 trip to India sparked an
interest in Buddhism that stayed with for the rest of his life.
From their book, Becoming
Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs ostensibly went to India hoping to meet
Neem Karoli Baba, known as Maharaj-ji, the famous guru who was an
inspiration to his friends Larry Brilliant and Robert Friedland,
and other seekers. But Maharaj-ji died shortly before Steve’s
arrival, to his lasting disappointment. Steve’s time in India was
splintered, as unfocused as the searches of many young people
seeking a broader vision than the one they were handed as children.
He went to a religious festival attended by ten million other
pilgrims. He wore flowing cotton robes, ate strange foods, and had
his head shaved by a mysterious guru. He got dysentery. For the
first time he read Yogananda’s Autobiography of a
Yogi, a book that he would return to several
times throughout his life, and that would be given to everyone who
attended the reception following Steve’s memorial service at
Stanford University’s Memorial Church on October 16,
2011.
Early in his stay, according to Brilliant, “Steve had been flirting
with the idea of beingsadhu.”
Most Indian sadhus live
a monk-like existence of deprivation as a way of focusing solely on
the spiritual. But Steve was obviously too hungry, too driven, and
too ambitious for that kind of life. “It was a romance,” says
Brilliant, “with the idea of being a renunciate.” But that doesn’t
mean he came back to the United States disillusioned, or that he
dismissed Eastern spiritualism altogether. His interests migrated
toward Buddhism, which allows for more engagement with the world
than is permitted ascetic Hindus. It would enable him to blend a
search for personal enlightenment with his ambition to create a
company that delivered world-changing products. This appealed to a
young man busy trying to invent himself, and it would continue to
appeal to a man of infinite intellectual restlessness. Certain
elements of Buddhism suited him so well that they would provide a
philosophical underpinning for his career choices—as well as a
basis for his aesthetic expectations. Among other things, Buddhism
made him feel justified in constantly demanding nothing less than
what he deemed to be “perfection” from others, from the products he
would create, and from himself.
In Buddhist philosophy, life is often compared to an
ever-changing river. There’s a sense that everything, and every
individual, is ceaselessly in the process of becoming. In this view
of the world, achieving perfection is also a continuous process,
and a goal that can never be fully attained. That’s a vision that
would come to suit Steve’s exacting nature. Looking ahead to the
unmade product, to whatever was around the next corner, and the two
or three after that one, came naturally to him. He would never see
a limit to possibilities, a perfect endpoint at which his work
would be done. And while Steve would eschew almost all
self-analysis, the same was true of his own life: despite the fact
that he could be almost unfathomably stubborn and opinionated at
times, the man himself was constantly adapting, following his nose,
learning, trying out new directions. He was constantly in the act
of becoming.
None of this was readily apparent to the outside
world, and Steve’s Buddhism could befuddle even his closest friends
and colleagues. “There was always this spiritual side,” says Mike
Slade, a marketing executive who worked with Steve later in his
career, “which really didn’t seem to fit with anything else he was
doing.” He meditated regularly until he and Laurene became parents,
when the demands on his time grew in a way he hadn’t anticipated.
He reread Suzuki’s Zen Mind,
Beginner’s Mind several times, and made the
intersection of elements of Asian spiritualism and his business and
commercial life a regular subject of the conversations he and
Brilliant enjoyed throughout his life. For years, he arranged for a
Buddhist monk by the name of Kobun Chino Otogawa to meet with him
once a week at his office to counsel him on how to balance his
spiritual sense with his business goals. While nobody who knew him
well during his later years would have called Steve a “devout”
Buddhist, the spiritual discipline informed his life in both subtle
and profound ways.