Long before Steve Jobs became the CEO of Appleand one of the most recognizable figures on the planet, he took aunconventional route to find himself -- a spiritual journey thatinfluenced every step of an unconventional career.
Jobs, who died Wednesday at the age of 56 of pancreatic cancer,was the biological child of two unmarried academics who only consentedto signing the papers if the adoptive parents sent him to college.
His adoptive parents sent a young Jobs off to Reed College, an expensive liberal arts school in Oregon, but he dropped out and went to India in the 1973 in search of enlightenment.
Jobs and his college friend Daniel Kottke, who later worked for him at Apple, visited Neem Karoli Baba at his Kainchi Ashram. He returned home to California a Buddhist,complete with a shaved head and traditional Indian clothing and aphilosophy that may have shaped much of his corporate values.
Later, he was often seenwalking barefoot in his trademark blue jeans around the office andreportedly often said that those around him didn't fully understand hisway of thinking.
"I wouldn't say Steve Jobs was a practicing Buddhist," said Robert Thurman, a professor of Buddhist studies at Columbia University, who met Jobs and his "Tibetan buddies" in the 1980s in San Francisco.
"But he was just as creativeand generous and went outside the box in the way that he looked toEastern mental discipline and the Zen vision, which is a compellingone."
"He was a real explorer andvery much to be mourned and too young at 56," said Thurman. "We willremember the design simplicity of his products. That simplicity is aZen idea."
Thurman met Jobs in SanFrancisco in the 1980s with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart and actorRichard Gere. The discussion was about Tibet.
"It was before the DalaiLama, and he was very sympathetic and had advice for the Tibetans," hesaid. "But he was into his own thing and didn't become a major player."
Jobs used Dalai Lama in one of Apple's most famous ad campaigns: "Think Different."
"He put them up all over Hong Kong," Thurman said of thecomputer ads. "But then the Chinese communists squawked very violentlyand as my son says, 'He had to think again.'"
Zen Buddhist monk Kobun Chino Otogawa married Jobs and his now widow, Laurene Powell, in 1991.
Jobs could have just as easily taken his philosophy from the hippie movement of the 1960s. The Whole Earth Catalogue was his bible, with founder Stewart Brand's cry, "We are as gods."
The catalogue offered anintegrated and complex world view with a leftist political calling.Jobs later adopted the catalogue's mantra: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."
Buddhism a Wake-Up Call for Steve Jobs?
The catalogue also delved intospirituality. In one 1974 article, author Rick Fields wrote thatBuddhism is "a tool, like an alarm-clock for waking up."
That may have been the case for Jobs. He said in his now-famous 2005 Commencement speech at Stanford that he lived each day as if it were his last, admonishing graduates not to "live someone else's life."
"Don't be trapped by dogma --which is living with the results of other people's thinking," Jobssaid. "Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own innervoice."
In that speech he toldstudents to relish the time to follow their passions, recounting thetime after he dropped out, but continued to audit non-credit classeslike calligraphy. The elegant typefaces -- serif and sans serif -- werelater introduced for the first time in the Macintosh.
"I didn't have a dorm room,so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles forthe 5 cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven milesacross town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the HareKrishna temple," he said. "I loved it."
Jobs was also influenced by Richard Baker,who was head of the Zen Center in San Francisco from 1971 until 1984,when Baker resigned after a scandalous affair with a wife of one of thecenter's benefactors. But Baker helped the center grow to one of themost successful in the United States.
Jobs was receptive to Baker's message of change, "helping the environment and empowering the individual."
Jobs admitted to experimentingwith the hallucinogenic drug LSD, which he has said was "one of the twoor three most important things" in his life.
In an unauthorized biographyby Alan Deutschman, a college friend said that Jobs had even been alover of folk singer Joan Baez, who was 41 at the time, and theattraction was largely because she had also been intimate with another'60s icon, Bob Dylan.
He was a fan of the Beatles,who also embraced spirituality and made a similar pilgrimage to India.Jobs told television's "60 Minutes" he modeled his own business afterthe rock group.
"They were four guys thatkept each other's negative tendencies in check; they balanced eachother," he said. "And the total was greater than the sum of the parts.Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by ateam of people."
Jobs said that "focus and simplicity" were the foundation of Apple's ethic.
"Simple can be harder thancomplex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make itsimple," he told Businessweek in 1998. "But it's worth it in the endbecause once you get there, you can move mountains."
Even the minimalist design ofhis products -- from the first Macintosh to the sleek iPad have a"aesthetic simplicity and keenness of line" that smacks of JapaneseZen, according to Columbia's Thurman.
Former Pepsico President John Sculley, who eventually fired Jobs, said walking into Jobs' apartment had the same design feel.
"I remember going into Steve'shouse, and he had almost no furniture in it," Sculley said in a 2010interview with Businessweek."He just had a picture of Einstein, whom headmired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed. Hejust didn't believe in having lots of things around, but he wasincredibly careful in what he selected."
Jobs reportedly convincedSculley to work for Apple when he asked, "Do you want to spend the restof your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to changethe world?"
Jobs Gave People Computer Power
Thurman contends Jobs' greatest success was not necessarily financial.
"It was his initial role inmaking the PC available to individuals to give them computer power,"said Thurman. "He was democratizing computer power. It was his owninspiration of things and not accepting the status quo and breakingthrough the power of the people."
Though Jobs may not have beena devout practitioner of Buddhism, his personal and corporate visioncertainly struck the same tone -- "wisdom and compassion," he said.
"Zen vision is that humanbeings can understand reality if they focus their mind on it anddevelop wisdom," said Thurman. "When you do, you have the greatercapacity to arrange the nature of things and to help people."
But the irony of Jobs'spirituality was that as much as it reflected the most beautifulaspects of the products he made, those very "machines" have in someways enslaved a generation of users, according to John Lardas Modern, a professor of religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania.
Jobs made computers and hand held devices that have allowed people tobecome "disembodied" on a certain level -- "to escape and transcend themundane reality of bodily existence," according to Modern.
Such spirituality begs for freedom from the trappings of tradition, he said, but they have a down side.
"These machines are amazing,"said Modern. "For the last 12 hours, I have been seeing people onFacebook and Twitter in praise of how the devices he made allow easeand convenience and empowerment."
"I love my iPad, preciselybecause it feels like an extension of my mind and I can't live withoutit," said Modern. "The irony is, these products ground us in a chairbehind a desk, behind a computer and in a sense they have pushed usinward?and you don't have physical connections with others."
"It cuts both ways," he said.
世事无常，平安是福。大家多保重。
Right on! Thank you for sharing.
Only a person like him who had a deep faith in Buddhism could be such a truly creative guy. But, on the other hand, his energy and attention was sucked so much into a computer screen, and much less into his own well being, he was not a true Buddhist - probably one of the chief reasons he died too young.
I personally knew that many former workers at software companies died of cancer before their 50's which I believe could be related to too much time spent in front of computers.