Robert Thurman, the Columbia University scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, remarks in his introduction to Jack Kerouac’s book Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha that Kerouac’s Catholicism was a decisive factor in whether Kerouac sided with the Beat Generation’s Zen or with the orientation of Tibetan Mahayana and its closer analogies to Christianity.

Kerouac was attracted to the close parallels between the life of Jesus and of Gautama. He found the hierarchy of spiritual beings in Tibetan Buddhism compatible with his Catholic familiarity with angels, saints, and demons. He was comforted by the high status afforded to the mother of Jesus as a figure of compassion and mercy. He found the analogy between “Church” and sangha reassuring. Writes Thurman:

In spite of the insistence by Christians that their teachings are sui generis and come down only from God and have no connection with any other movement on the planet, Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity have very strong “family resemblances.” It is likely that Kerouac understood the deeper, broader dimensions of Mahayana Buddhism better than his peers, either those like myself, who were strongly motivated to break away from their Christian background, or those who were receiving their knowledge through the prism of East Asian Chinese and Japanese culture, and especially through the Chan/Zen connection, where meditation and samurai-like hardball “no-thought” are emphasized.

This weighty paragraph by Thurman refers to the ultimate complex of intellectual ferment in first-century Asia and the Middle East, which we can see evolving in gnostic Christianity especially. The possibility that interrelations between Christians and larger religious and spiritual movements in the era from Jesus through the next centuries suggests a spiritual world richer than what is left today as doctrine and style. But the sentiment of the open heart in Christian and Mahayana Buddhist thinking immediately launches both on a similar trajectory.

Personal experience can play into this identification of religious or psychological style. Kerouac was close to his mother, and that opened him to identification with other persons with whom one relates through emotions, not only to the other potential “Dharma bums” but spiritually to Jesus, Buddha, Mary, saints, Bodhisattvas, human-like and spiritual beings and hierarchies of all sorts in both religious traditions.

Indeed, the core of religious sentiment may well be in the degrees of identification with personifications. This would be so because this identification is a profound expression of the conditions of nurture. The person who has received close affection in the crucial formative years of life will more readily identify with the ying, female, and the compassionate side of a given religion. Many years of work alone can bring a person with a harsh upbringing to express affection for others — but towards spiritual beings it may be easier.

Thurman contrasts the Tibetan Buddhism that attracted Kerouac with “meditation and samurai-like hardball ‘no-thought’” characterizing Zen. Historically in Japan, many former samurai came to Zen in order to change their lives, and a discipline as strong as their former one was virtually a necessity to gain their respect and transformation.

But the evolution of Zen is foreshadowed in Taoism and in Chinese culture, which greatly contrasts with the sensual imagery of the rich culture of Indian Hinduism. The tradition of meditation is too universal in the East to apply as a difference between traditions, although one senses that meditation is a tool in the West and not integral to psychology as it is in the East.

The diverse cultural manifestations of Christianity in different parts of the West were likewise reflected in the different cultural manifestations of Buddhism in the East. Just as the pomp and pageantry of a Mediterranean Holy Week differs from the austerity of a Scandinavian Lutheran counterpart, so to does the Hindu or Tibetan Buddhist festival contrast with the austerity of the Taoist or Zen temple, regardless of doctrinal differences. Indeed, the doctrinal differences may themselves have been engendered by the climate, geography, and cultural environment.

The picture is further complicated by the intermediate expressions of both religions. Where does Theravada Buddhism or Pure Land Buddhism fall, or Orthodox or evangelical Christianity? All are eventually to be measured by their proximity to the “founder” or their authenticity in capturing the spiritual quest.

Kerouac calls Gautama “the blessed hermit.” Like Jesus, one cannot simultaneously understand the spiritual person, the human being, and extrapolate that core experience into that of a “founder.” Ultimately, the actions of the “founders” are the immediate source of spiritual inspiration, and the concentric circles rippling from them represent the various contexts wherein their message, flowing outward, is diluted.

One must return to the center, to the font, to the source, however much we enjoy the embellishments of culture, history, and creativity. For Kerouac, both Jesus and the Buddha have the same message: “Wake up!”

G. I. Gurdjieff proposed a new way he called the “fourth way,” which requires examining the three assumed ways and the question of whether there are not still more ways.

The three ways are the way of the fakir, of the monk, and of the yogi. The way of the fakir corresponds to control of the body and senses; that of the monk to the emotions or feelings, the heart; that of the yogi to the mind. Gurdjieff proposes the image of concentric circles or squares, with the way of the fakir as the outermost. The problem is that no way intersects or allows the individual to work on integrating all three. Someone at the periphery, who must start with the body, will not have time or strength to attain to control of the heart, let alone the mind. This is the situation for all of us.

Gurdjieff’s alternative is the fourth way, but as with all of his writings and narratives, no firm details are ever revealed. Gurdjieff preferred to work with people directly rather than have them read something. This is a characteristic of modern gurus, as Anthony Storr points out. So we are left with the summaries of P. D. Ouspensky to try to fathom what the “fourth way” could possibly be, though we have an inkling.

First off, Gurdjieff insists, the fourth way differs from the other three in that

it is never a permanent way. It has no definite form and there are no institutions connected with it. It appears and disappears governed by some particular laws of its own.

Schools to follow the fourth way appear, says Gurdjieff cagily, and people do work within them. But when the work is done, the school closes, for it is not a school for instruction or information. However, those who learn of the schools may attempt to follow its content. Such people then create new schools, which, however, are only imitations, and take on a “pseudo-esoteric” character, purporting to carry out work but are themselves “a lie” in respect to the truth of the real work. Such is the history of thousands of years, where ossified institutions and structures still extant carry on with only a grain of truth, representing only their perpetuation of power and control.

Yet concealed within such traditional organizations are surely those who know. Gurdjieff places them in Tibetan monasteries and Indian temples, where visitors or aspirants only pass through the circles corresponding to their adeptness. Most will not penetrate the inner sanctum of their selves, nor of the monasteries or temples — or equivalent institutions.

The fakir will know something about the body and its energies; the monk will know something, too, about fasting, deprivation, sacrifice, and bodily control, plus the feelings of his spiritual tradition; the yogi will know still more, of the body, of the stirrings of the spirit, but also mental exercises and control of thoughts. “In this way a yogi spends on the same thing only one day compared with a month spent by the fakir and a week spent by the monk.”

Gurdjieff insists that the fourth way offers the aspirant a manner of integrating all of the strengths of the fakir, the monk, and the yogi.

When a man attains will on the fourth way, he can make use of it because he has acquired control of all his bodily, emotional, and intellectual functions. And besides, he has saved a great deal of time by working on the three sides of his being in parallel and simultaneously.

The fourth way is sometimes called the way of the sly man. The “sly man” knows some secret which the fakir, monk, and yogi do not know. How the “sly man” learned this secret — it is not known. Perhaps he found it in some old books, perhaps he inherited it, perhaps he bought it, perhaps he stole it from someone. It makes no difference. The “sly man” knows the secret and with its help outstrips the fakir, the monk, and the yogi.

There are “proper and legitimate ways” to attain the fourth way, but, Gurdjieff notes, there are also “artificial ways which give temporary results only.” And there are wrong ways that give permanent but wrong results. And there may be a skeleton key to the fourth room, but with it the user may discover the room to be empty.

These threads, made unnecessarily exotic and abstruse by the sly man Gurdjieff himself, are perfectly legitimate perceptions of the inadequacy of historically dominant thinking and controlling. Gurdjieff was horrified by the limitless capacity for evil in the modern world (in this case, thinking of World War I, when Ouspensky interviewed him), and the need to disengage from it. What his model fakir, monk, and yogi have in common is that they all do find methods of disengaging from the world, but they are incomplete.

While a fourth way would seem to promise a breakthrough, Gurdjieff never develops this “way” and leaves it to his work with individuals, outside the realm of verification and publicity. As to the bulk of Gurdjieff’s known thinking on physics, astronomy, biology, psychology and the like all of it is too far afield from the goal of a fourth way, too irrelevant to a cogent philosophy of self-realization and disengagement.

A philosophy of solitude would include the work of the fakir, the monk, and the yogi, and would — as with Gurdjieff’s “work” — offer those in the world some understanding while they necessarily had to continue to work in the world — those less fortunate than the hermits and solitaries who would not have to continue to work in the world.

A true fourth way might be the way of the hermit, at least in the symbolic or archetypal sense. But that would require a new search for the mechanics of how it would be presented. It would seem to be cheating to take the route of the “sly man” and steal it from some other thinker or philosopher or poet or hermit. After all, as Gurdjieff owns, “He who wants knowledge must himself make the initial efforts to find the source of knowledge. … Knowledge cannot come to people without effort on their part.” Much less a way.

Systems and schools can indicate methods and ways, but no system or school whatever can do for a man the work that he must do himself. Inner growth, a change of being, depend entirely upon the work which a man must do on himself.

Simplicity is a qualitative application of principles, whether aesthetic or ascetic. Simplicity represents a conscious attempt to reduce the complexity of objects and appearance in some function of life. Nature is the model of simplicity because it represents functionality, efficiency, effectiveness, and a discrete harmony. Nature is as simple and as complex as anything we can conjure. That very wide-ranging activity challenges us in trying to make nature a model, but functionality and not functions is the focus of simplicity.

On the other hand, poverty is a material condition or setting which evolves with the individual into a physical and mental condition. Poverty is deprivation of functionality, absence of harmony, and the breakdown of the natural relations of one object to another.

For individuals, simplicity is a goal and opportunity to take on as a project involving self or just an external like art, design, or environment. Thus simplicity can apply to diet, exercise, dwelling, thought, or spirit. Simplicity can be principles for self-expression in literary forms.

Simplicity is optional, embraced voluntarily, pursued freely. It is hard to imagine society insisting on simplicity, except where the individual happens to be aware of other cultural styles — which, just because they are foreign to a culture will be seen as threatening, decadent, unethical, or complex. The Amish will insist on simplicity — when aware of society outside itself. And there are many other anthropological examples.

Simplicity usually begins with the level of material and emotional culture and is taken by the individual to a deeper level of purification. As the world shrinks and globalization exposes every small or private culture to the ways and vices of other societies, the individual is increasingly overwhelmed. To become simple and retain simplicity in daily life and thought becomes virtually radical and anti-social. Yet there are always opportunities to implement simplicity.

Simplicity movements in the West begin with a given level of material and cultural premises. Art, style, public thought, and technology are already given, are already forced upon the awareness. There is nowhere to go confronting the world (or society) with simplicity except to deconstruction. Deconstruction is always perceived by social authority as threatening. Yet for the individual, the elimination of superfluities and dysfunctions that harm life and spirit — the dysfunctional complexities that all advanced societies inevitably create — simplicity is healthy and refreshing.

Here simplicity is not contrarianism or a kind of agnosticism. Simplicity is not a lack of faith or hope, but it is a reduction that will be perceived as either naive, soulless, or threatening.

Simplicity is not minimalism, which is almost quantitative but projects a qualitative value after the fact. Often, minimalism is a crude eviceration rather than a simplification, the removal of interrelations by cutting rather than unraveling. Simplification is not a rescue from complexity but a dropping-away or disengagement from dysfunction. Complexity is not the “enemy” but rather dysfunction. By identifying what does not work, what can be shown to be a superfluity that does not work, the complexity can be understood and even accepted. The complexity of the human body, for example, or of microbes, soil science, hydrology, meteorology, cosmology, etc., is not offensive, and does not affect simplicity as a model of philosophy and ethics.

This is the wonderful irony of, for example, modern diet. By removing the imagined gist of, say, a fruit rich in vitamins, a pill is manufactured and presented as superior to the original food. Only after the fact is it discovered, many years later and after illnesses, that the original food contained countless complex products that make it more rich and healthy than the pill, product of expensive labs, research, and profit.

Poverty is a human condition but can be understood as a condition of nature, too — nature that is deliberately harmed by conscious intent, human intent. Human intent is not necessarily individual culpability. Why some peoples are poor is not the direct action of a given individual, but the result of generations of social conditions. However, if recognized as a deprivation or dysfunction, then poverty is the moral equivalent of malevolent cells in a physical body, a body which also supports the far-off individual. (The pill that replaced the fruit is poverty, deliberate or not.)

Poverty is a deprivation even of what is salutary. But what is salutary for the person embarked on implementing simplicity? Where do the two paths intersect? Is the path to simplicity pursued by the ignorant or immature in fact a dangerous direction towards poverty? The ignorant or immature person actually embarks on a path to poverty when not understanding the qualitative character of simplicity, when psychologically coerced to believe that simplicity is deprivation. (This is why ascetic traditions have a feedback loop to a sage or elder who can counsel the ways of fasting, etc.) Deprivation is poverty because deprivation means lacking in the salutary, which the individual must define and comprehend before even the first step of the journey.

How many people in search for themselves have failed to carry this careful distinction? Solitude is a grand field of nuance, and many who enter it are fleeing introspection in fear, are involuntarily whirled or thrown into a psychological abyss. Hermits who disappear, or starve themselves, may be equivalent to the many people who suffer involuntary solitude, those described by Sue Halpern in her book Migrations To Solitude: imprisoned, addicted, depressed, lonely, ill, etc. Eremitism must be informed and conscious, scrupulously honest to self in motive and method. Simplicity is an excellent tool for provisioning daily life.

Only the totality of a person’s life will reveal the nature of their solitude and decisions. Only the totality of their lives will reveal the nature of simplicity, and whether they lived or died simply or “poorly.”