BETRAYING GURDJIEFF: The Fourth Way is Not Esoteric Buddhism
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A General Rebuttal of the Buddhist and Syncretic Misidentifications of Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way, with a Defence of Its Identity as Esoteric Christianity
The article can be downloaded at the below link.
Summary
This essay launches a direct scholarly challenge to Stephen A. Grant's 2024 Shambhala book and the broader trend of identifying Gurdjieff's Fourth Way with Esoteric Buddhism or perennial syncretism. The argument is methodologically sharp: when you test these attributions against Gurdjieff's own authoritative texts rather than traceable influences or institutional trajectories, they collapse. The essay builds its case across six interlocking arguments — Gurdjieff's own explicit declaration that the Fourth Way is esoteric Christianity, his equation of the Law of Three with the Holy Trinity, his specific and non-negotiable Christology, a teleology of theosis that is structurally incompatible with Buddhist nirvana, and a negative proof showing the system is incoherent as Buddhism at precisely the points that matter. It also raises a candid institutional question: whether the Gurdjieff Foundation's post-de Salzmann trajectory has quietly displaced the founder's own written testimony in favour of a more universally palatable, Buddhist-adjacent practice.
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