A spiritual (?) journey (Part 5)

Today, some 60 years after his death, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff remains a controversial figure. While many people claim to have benefited greatly from his teachings, others maintain that he was a charlatan who preyed on his followers' weaknesses. It's easy enough to dismiss the wackier critics who argue that Gurdjieff was the devil incarnate, but not as easy to ignore analyses such as this one, which describes Gurdjieff as advocating "an almost fascistic conservatism". Some of Gurdjieff's ideas, including his contempt for Western medicine and his belief in strictly separate roles for men and women, certainly don't seem particularly progressive. But I tend to agree with Webb that Gurdjieff was sincere, that it's conceivable that he was both a spy and a seeker of the truth. This is not to say that he always did what he said he was doing. What he actually did may simply have been an elaborate form of psychotherapy. It's interesting to note that on a number of occasions he supported himself by working as a hypnotherapist.

To me one of the most fascinating aspects of his story is that it highlights the fact that there are esoteric schools within all the major religions that teach that it's possible to achieve higher levels of consciousness and that the true role of religion is not to gain and convert as many followers as possible but to preserve these ideas and pass them on in their original form. This explains one of the defining characteristics of esoteric religions, which is that the transmission of ideas must take place directly from teacher to student and cannot be learned from a book. The secrecy of the ideas itself is not important, as this is just a side effect of the reality that they cannot be passed on other than in the context of the teacher-student relationship.

And so we return to my original post in this series, in which I referred to my fascination with Kukai, the Japanese founder of Shingon Buddhism. Shingon is one of the two main sub-schools of esoteric Vajrayana Buddhism, the other being Tibetan Buddhism. The esoteric Buddhism practiced at the Qinglong monastery in Chang'an where Kukai was initiated was introduced from India in the eighth century. Later, the same teachings were introduced into Tibet. If Webb's account of events is accurate, then Gurdjieff had close contact with Tibetan Buddhism, even serving as a Tibetan Buddhist monk for a time. Webb goes as far as describing Gurdjieff's indebtedness to Tibetan Buddhism as "the greatest single debt Gurdjieff owed to any existing system". The teachings Gurdjieff developed based on this knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism in turn had a profound influence on Keith Jarrett. (There's also speculation that Vajrayana Buddhism influenced the construction of Borobudur, a place that's long been a source of fascination for me, but whose story will have to wait for another time.)

There's something very satisfying about finding connections like these. But do these connections really mean anything, or are they illusions that we cling to because they reassure us that there's a semblance of structure in the chaotic world around us? One evening in the French city of Avignon, Keiko and I stopped outside an Indian restaurant to look at the menu. The Indian proprietor came out and starting chatting to us. On hearing that I was from New Zealand and Keiko from Japan, he said, "Ah, Japan, India and New Zealand form a triangle!" I laughed. "Yes, but any three countries would form a triangle." Then we went into the restaurant.