Gurdjieff on Lamaism

Among the esoteric tapestries woven in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff’s portrayal of Lamaism—or as he terms it, the Lamaist religion—stands as a poignant emblem of fragile sanctity. Emerging as the fifth great religion, it embodies the final, most localized echo of divine intervention on Earth: a teaching tailored for the rugged psyches of Tibetan beings, preserved in high-altitude isolation until shattered by imperial hubris and ritual misstep.

Yet, like his double-edged reflections on Islam, Gurdjieff’s gaze upon Saint Lama is laced with reverence for its unadulterated core—a practical path of inner transubstantiation against the residues of the organ Kundabuffer—and a cosmic sorrow over its utter annihilation. In this, Lamaism mirrors the fate of Christianity, that archetype of all religions, where the pure Logos of Jesus Christ was likewise entombed in fairy-tale distortions.

Both revelations, sent from Above to liberate humanity from mechanical existence, falter not through inherent flaw but through the inexorable grind of human wiseacring and external violence. As Beelzebub laments, these teachings might have kindled enduring hearths of transformation, had not the bobtailed reason of humans reduced them to children’s tales (pp. 732–33).

Gurdjieff’s narrative, delivered through the exiled angel’s tales to his grandson, unfolds Tibet not as mere geography but as a metaphysical refuge: a land where the Himalayan projections—those abnormal growths divinely dispatched to shield sacred labors (p. 264)—fostered a rare seclusion from the planet’s descending abnormal conditions. Here, Saint Lama, the last of five Sacred Individuals intentionally actualized among three-brained beings, arrives as a full-of-faith messenger, his instructions a refined synthesis of prior revelations.

To grasp Lamaism’s tragedy, we must first survey its place in Gurdjieff’s pentad of authentic religions, each a merciful concession to humanity’s devolving consciousness.

The Five Pillars of Divine Pity

In Chapter 38, Beelzebub enumerates the five religions that, in recent centuries, have flickered as hundreds of peculiar independent religious teachings, all rooted in the survived totalities of indications from Above (p. 699). These are no arbitrary faiths but targeted interventions against the maleficent organ Kundabuffer, implanted in primordial humans to thwart paradise-awareness, leaving crystalline scars of vanity, suggestibility, and mutual destruction. Gurdjieff’s list is a cosmic genealogy:

• Buddhistic: Born of Saint Buddha in ancient Gemchania (India), a call to dissolve illusion through disciplined inquiry.

• Hebrew: Forged by Saint Moses in Egypt, offering normality-loving counsels for ethical existence, soon spiced with fantasies from the poppy-chewing king Konuzion (p. 700).

• Christian: The incarnate Logos of Jesus Christ, demanding metanoia—conscious transformation—in the land of Canaan.

• Mohammedan: Saint Mohammed’s full-of-hope ethic for Arabian nomads, a bridge of moral hygiene amid tribal chaos.

• Lamaist: Saint Lama’s pragmatic esotericism for Tibet’s dwellers, emphasizing work upon themselves in communal isolation (p. 701).

Lamaism, the capstone, inherits and adapts: from Krishnatkharna (Krishna) via Buddha, it refines instructions for a psyche hardened by altitude and solitude. Unlike Christianity’s universal theosis—the divine-human union that elevates all three centers of being—Lamaist teaching thrives on geographical conditions, its inaccessibility a divine bulwark (p. 715). Beings there, little in touch with lowland depravities, entered into their essence the path to decrystallize Kundabuffer’s poisons, grouping by degrees of inner transubstantiation (pp. 715–16).

Certain souls attained deliverance; others trod the path; all nurtured hopeful momentum. Tibet, in Gurdjieff’s vision, became a living laboratory of the possible: proof that conscious evolution could flourish, unhindered, in a world otherwise spiraling toward desolate existence.

Yet this sanctuary’s purity—its very strength—invited doom. As with Christianity’s betrayal by institutional spices, Lamaism’s isolation bred complacency, blinding its guardians to the uninvited guests slouching upward from the valleys.

The Isolated Sanctuary and the Shadow of Invasion

For centuries, Tibet’s inaccessibility—those projections of mountains, now divinely stabilized by Archangel Looisos (pp. 264–65)—nurtured a definitive turn toward productive self-work. Beings organized existence by need to work upon themselves, actualizing Saint Lama’s counsels without the hindrance of external contagions (p. 716).

Gurdjieff’s admiration shines through Beelzebub’s voice: here, at last, was a revelation taking root in practice, where many were hopeful of one day also reaching the way of this achievement. No grand cathedrals or schismatic creeds; just the quiet alchemy of essence, shielded by stone and snow.

Enter the charming military expedition—Gurdjieff’s ironic nod to the 1904 British incursion under Younghusband, a sorry day for the planet (p. 720). Power-possessing beings from Europe, swollen with Ksvaznell (secret influences) and new inventions for reciprocal destruction, covet this unattainable realm. Their advance, quietly but against great difficulties, costs pounds and casualties, yet meets no resistance. Why?

The Tibetan chiefs, heeding the plea of a future Saint—the chief of the esoteric Group of Seven—eschew violence. “The existence of every being is equally precious and dear to our COMMON CREATOR GOD,” he declares; slaughter would give no small grief to the All-Gracious Endlessness (p. 723). In this peaceably and courteously resolve lies Gurdjieff’s ethical scalpel: non-resistance, noble in intent, becomes the Trojan horse for calamity.

Compare this to Christianity’s early trials: Jesus, too, preaches turning the other cheek, his Sermon on the Mount a balm against Kundabuffer’s vengeful furies. Yet where Christ’s teaching ignites a global flame—distorted into Crusades and Inquisitions—Lamaist serenity invites literal invasion. Both reveal Gurdjieff’s Law of Three: the affirming force of revelation meets denying violence, reconciled (or ruined) by human choice. In Tibet, choice yields no opposition anywhere, allowing the mob to penetrate the heart of that unique country (p. 723). The hearth dims; the end looms.

Ritual Hubris and Cosmic Backlash

The invasion’s true horror unfolds not in gunfire but in a desperate sacrament gone awry. The Group of Seven—perfected guardians, initiated across millennia from Krishnatkharna through Buddha to Lama—lose their chief to a stray bullet (p. 724). This octet of three-brained beings, sworn to transmit secret instructions via the chief alone, faces oblivion: without initiation, Lama’s deepest verities vanish. In terror, the six invoke the sacred Almznoshinoo—a ritual to materialize the body Kesdjan (astral form) of the deceased, forging communion with its Reason at the level of being-Mirozinoo (p. 726).

Gurdjieff unveils this process with cosmological precision: it demands Hanbledzoïn (Kesdjan “blood”) preparation—a threadlike connection blending essences beforehand, sustained by Aiësakhaldan—to draw the risen body back via Vallikrin injection (pp. 727–30). Absent this, their three-day inpouring of Hanbledzoïn over the corpse accumulates chaotically, igniting a Sobrionolian contact amid atmospheric Okidanokh storms. The result? Noughtounichtono: instantaneous evolution to Etherokrilno, obliterating all within a Shmana (kilometer)—bodies, books, Legominisms preserving the triad of Krishnatkharna, Buddha, and Lama (pp. 731–32).

This great misfortune echoes Christianity’s post-mortem rite: the Lord’s Supper, far from mere memorial, prepared the Almznoshinoo for Jesus’s Kesdjan Body, enabling unfinished cosmic truths amid his violent interruption (p. 737). Judas, reviled as traitor, was the most faithful apostle—leaping to orchestrate arrest, buying time for Hanbledzoïn blending (pp. 740–41). His wise, onerous service ensured the hearth of tranquillity endured two millennia, slandered only by criminal wiseacring (p. 736).

Lamaism’s botched rite, lacking such fidelity, yields no such grace: all the spiritualized formations evaporate, the last remnants of pure esotericism destroyed with a crash (p. 733). Where Christ’s ritual, distorted, still whispers through allegories (Podobnisirnian similitudes), Lama’s explodes into void—literal and symbolic.

Lamaism, Christianity, and the Planetary Doom

Gurdjieff’s lament crescendos in a survey of revelation’s ruins: Lamaism perishes by invasion; Mohammedanism by fez-abolishing Junkers; Hebraism by policy-fueled envy; Buddhicism by mental perversity of theosophists; Christianity by Jerusalem’s university for Jewish youth—a sly barb at secular Zionism eroding the Holy City (p. 733). All, once supports for inner moral motives, devolve into fairy tales, their crumbs of truth lost to Chainonizironness—automatized, fragmented mentation (pp. 738–39).

Yet Christianity lingers as pinnacle: not the Church’s husk, but Jesus’s Divine Reason, demanding Partkdolg-duty (conscious labours and intentional suffering) for being-mentation. Lamaism, nobly localized, offered communal transubstantiation; Christ’s universal call pierces the feeling center, restoring divine incarnation where Tibet’s heights could only approximate.

In this cosmic autopsy, Gurdjieff honors Saint Lama as a last Sacred Individual, his teaching a faint hope deferred (p. 716). Like Mohammed’s hearth of reconciliation, it conceded to the psyche’s limits—practical work for hardy souls. But as with Islam’s dervish extinction, Lamaism’s guardians falter: hubris in ritual, naivety in peace.

Christianity alone, in its esoteric marrow, transcends: the Way of conscious participation, where Judas’s shadow-service births not catastrophe but quiet resurrection—not of flesh, but of soul-body. For Gurdjieff, these falls are no mere history but diagnostics of our sleep: without self-remembering, even Himalayan fortresses crumble.

Awakening Amid the Ruins

Beelzebub’s tales end mid-breath, the ship Karnak nearing Purgatory’s sour-bitterish aura (pp. 742–43), a reminder that revelation’s interruptions mirror our own. Gurdjieff, ever the provocateur, leaves us not in despair but in summons: recover these original teachings through sacred processes of inner labor. Lamaism’s crash warns of isolation’s peril; Christianity’s distortions, of literalism’s curse. Yet in their shared aim—to free us from Kundabuffer’s chains—lies the Trogoautoegocrat of hope: reciprocal maintenance through conscious friction.

Saint Lama’s flame, though quenched, illuminates the path Christ blazed: not fairy tales, but the materialization of divine Reason within. In an age of further expeditions—digital, ideological—may we, three-brained wanderers, guard our inner Tibet with the fidelity of a redeemed Judas. For only then does the ENDLESS UNI-BEING’s pity find its echo in us.