Gurdjieff on Buddhism

In Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff’s cosmic critique of human religions is unflinching yet profoundly reverent toward their divine origins. His treatment of Buddhism—what he calls the religion founded on the teaching of “Saint Buddha”—is no exception. It reveals both profound admiration for the genuine Messenger sent from Above and a deep sorrow over the inevitable distortion of his sacred indications through the strange psychic tendency of terrestrial beings: wiseacring.

For Gurdjieff, Buddhism arose as one of the great attempts to aid humanity in destroying the crystallized consequences of the organ Kundabuffer—that maleficent implant whose residual properties continue to hinder the proper functioning of human Reason and conscience. Yet, like every sacred teaching before and after it, it was gradually transformed into something scarcely recognizable, until “only-information-about-its-specific-smell” remained" (p. 240).

Gurdjieff’s Reverence for Saint Buddha as Genuine Messenger

Gurdjieff never questions the divine legitimacy of Saint Buddha. He names him unequivocally a “genuine Messenger of our COMMON ENDLESS CREATOR” and a “Sacred Individual” intentionally coated in a planetary body to regulate the being-existence of the three-brained beings of “Pearl-land” (ancient India and surrounding regions) (pp. 233-4).

Buddha’s mission was precise: to enlighten the peculiar “instincto-terebelnian” Reason of earthly beings and to indicate practical means for eradicating the hereditary predispositions left by the organ Kundabuffer. Chief among these means were the:

• enlightenment of Reason with objective truths;

• practice of conscious endurance of the “displeasing-manifestations-of-others-towards-yourselves”; and.

• cultivation of intentional suffering in ordinary life among others.

These were designed to evoke the sacred data for Partkdolg-duty—that objective conscience for conscious labours and intentional suffering whose absence defines even the most “responsible” terrestrial beings.

In Gurdjieff’s cosmology, such Messengers appear when planetary disharmony threatens the greater cosmic Trogoautoegocrat. Saint Buddha’s teaching was thus a direct intervention from Above, offered at a moment when the psychic consequences of Kundabuffer were seriously obstructing the normal exchange of cosmic substances.

The Tragic Distortion Through Wiseacring

Yet even during Buddha’s own lifetime, the seeds of distortion were present. After his premature death—through the sacred Rascooarno common to all terrestrial bodies—the process of wiseacring began almost immediately. By the second and third generations, his exact counsels were “superwiseacred” beyond recognition.

The most consequential misunderstandings were three:

1. The counsel to endure the displeasing manifestations of others was transformed into a requirement for solitude. Beings fled society to practice “suffering” in isolation, giving rise to monasteries and the famous sectarian colonies where one could “save one’s soul” apart from the very conditions that alone make conscious endurance possible (pp. 242-3).

   
   

2. Buddha’s explanation of the sacred Prana—the All-embracing substance from which spiritualized particles return to the Prime Source—was misinterpreted as something already present in every arising being. This eliminated the need for Partkdolg-duty, turning potential esoteric striving into passive self-satisfaction (pp. 244-6).

   
   

3. Even the word Kundabuffer was altered. The material remnant at the base of the spinal column—destined to disappear naturally through right existence—was reimagined as a latent force (Kundalini) to be awakened through invented techniques, giving rise to countless “occult” and “secret” sciences that explain nothing (p. 250).

Beelzebub's own interventions in Pearl-land illustrate both the depth of the distortion and the lingering power of Buddha’s name. To end the practice of animal sacrifice, Beelzebub invents the teaching that all planetary beings—down to insects—contain a particle of the Most Sacred Prana.

The misunderstanding that Prana was already fully present in humans made this extension psychologically plausible, and it rapidly ended the sacrificial offerings (pp. 247-8). Yet even this positive result soon degenerated into new excesses: beings walking on stilts, wearing veils, refusing water—anything to avoid harming “little beings like themselves.”

The Extreme Consequences in Tibet

The most harrowing expression of distorted Buddhism appears in the chapter “Beelzebub for the First Time in Tibet.” There, in the isolated settlement of Sincratorza (later Tibet), a sect called the “Self-tamers” had carried the misunderstood counsel of solitary suffering to its logical extreme.

Certain “deserving” monks were voluntarily immured for life in tiny, sealed cells with only a small aperture for daily bread and water. They remained there, motionless and half-starved, until death—believing this to be the highest form of intentional suffering required for liberation from Kundabuffer’s consequences (pp. 260-1).

Gurdjieff describes entering one such monastery with visceral horror, calling these cells “monstrous” and the entire practice a sacrifice to the very organ whose consequences Buddha had come to destroy. The wives of the sectarians had rebelled against this practice, causing schisms, yet the “Orthodox” faction persisted in what Gurdjieff clearly regards as fanaticism rather than sacred striving.

Later still, the final remnants of genuine transmission in Tibet—secret instructions preserved by a small brotherhood initiated in the lineages of Krishnatkharna, Buddha, and Saint Lama—were catastrophically destroyed in a cosmic accident triggered by an ill-fated attempt at the sacred Almznoshinoo (materialization of the Kesdjan body) without proper preparation (pp. 731-2).

Parallel with Christianity: The Same Cosmic Tragedy

The fate of Buddhism mirrors precisely the fate of every sacred teaching on Earth, including that of Jesus Christ. In both cases, a genuine Messenger appears with exact indications for conscious transformation; in both cases, the teaching is wiseacred by subsequent generations until only fragments remain.

Yet Gurdjieff’s evaluation is not entirely symmetrical. As he states elsewhere in assessing the five surviving religions, the original teaching of the Divine Jesus Christ—had it been preserved in full conformity with its primary arising—would be “not only the best of all existing religions, but even of all religions which may arise and exist in the future” (p. 1009).

The superiority lies in its completeness: Christianity in its essence provided for both soul and body, integrating the moral severity of earlier revelations with the ontological mystery of divine incarnation and conscious love. Where Buddha’s teaching emphasized the enlightenment of Reason and intentional suffering amid others, Christ’s revelation actualized the possibility of full being-Partkdolg-duty through participation in Divine Being itself—the rebirth of objective conscience in the midst of ordinary life.

Buddhism, adapted to a psyche already weakened by Kundabuffer’s consequences, became in practice a path of withdrawal and mechanical asceticism. Christianity, as originally given, was the consummate synthesis: the way of conscious labor and voluntary suffering in life, without monastic isolation—identical in aim to what Gurdjieff himself called the Fourth Way.

From Enlightenment to Pseudo-Teaching

In the end, Gurdjieff’s view of Buddhism is one of tragic respect. Saint Buddha was a genuine Sacred Individual whose indications, if followed exactly, would have freed many from the mechanical consequences of Kundabuffer. Yet the psychic need to wiseacre—rooted in the absence of objective conscience—transformed a teaching of conscious endurance among others into solitary fanaticism, and a call to perfect the particle of Holy Prana into passive delusion.

Today, Gurdjieff notes, the surviving fragments of Buddha’s teaching chiefly serve as raw material for contemporary pseudo-teachings: Occultism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, Psychoanalysis—“means only for the obscuring of their already, without this, obscured psyche” (p. 249).

To recover the essence of Saint Buddha’s message is thus to return, not to monastic withdrawal or invented techniques, but to conscious labor in the midst of life—precisely the same aim as the original teaching of Jesus Christ. Both Messengers pointed to the same cosmic necessity: the restoration of objective Reason and conscience through intentional suffering and faithful Partkdolg-duty.

Only in the full actualization of such conscious striving—beyond all religious forms—may terrestrial beings finally fulfill the hope placed in them by the genuine Messengers from Above.