Apple, Steve Jobs, Zen Practice and 間

Zen Buddhists really don't have any tricks. Maybe that's our greatest trick.  I, for example, missed this article when it first came out:

The secret of Apple's success lies in its embrace of a Zen Buddhist principle that expresses the power of nothingness, according to consumer trend strategist Jeff Yang.

In an article for SFGate today, Yang explores how Steve Jobs "out-Japanned Japan," but the article really focuses on how Apple beat Sony.

Jobs was obsessed with Sony -- he apparently kept a collection of Sony letterhead -- and he understood that the company's success lay in its ability to create iconic products that did one thing really well.

Trinitron -- not the first color TV, but the brightest. Walkman -- listen to music anywhere. PlayStation -- games with immersive graphics.

Yang notes that the Zen Buddhist concept of ma, loosely translated as "space," expresses this concept perfectly, and Jobs has been a student of Zen since the 1970s.

But somewhere along the way, Sony lost sight of this concept. It now follows trends like 3D TV as quickly as it can and tries to be everything to everybody -- movie company, record company, computer company. 

Looking at Yang's article:

That ability to express by omission holds a central place in Jobs's management philosophy. As he told Fortune magazine in 2008, he's as proud of the things Apple hasn't done as the things it has done. "The great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products," he said. "We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas." (Jobs sometimes says this even more bluntly: Nike CEO Mark Parker likes to recount the advice Jobs gave him shortly after Parker's promotion to the top spot: "You make some of the best products in the world -- but you also make a lot of crap. Get rid of the crappy stuff.")

Other companies fail to do things because they've overlooked potential openings or are cutting corners to save money; under Jobs, however, every spurned opportunity is a conscious, measured statement. It's why the pundits who give Apple products poor reviews for not including industry-standard components -- for instance, the iMac's lack of a floppy drive -- just aren't getting it: Apple products are as defined by what they're missing as much as by what they contain.

To understand why, one has to remember that Jobs spent much of the 1970s at the Los Altos Zen Center (alongside then-and-current Gov. Jerry Brown) and later studied extensively under the late Zen roshi Kobun Chino Otogawa -- whom he designated as the official "spiritual advisor" for NeXT, the company he founded after being ejected as Apple's CEO in 1986, and who served as officiant when he wed his wife Laurene in 1991.

Jobs's immersion in Zen and passion for design almost certainly exposed him to the concept of ma, a central pillar of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Like many idioms relating to the intimate aspects of how a culture sees the world, it's nearly impossible to accurately explain -- it's variously translated as "void," "space" or "interval" -- but it essentially describes how emptiness interacts with form, and how absence shapes substance. If someone were to ask you what makes a ring a meaningful object -- the circle of metal it consists of, or the emptiness that that metal encompasses? -- and you were to respond "both," you've gotten as close to ma as the clumsy instrument of English allows.

While Jobs has never invoked the term in public -- one of the aspects of his genius is the ability to keep even his most esoteric assertions in the realm of the instantly accessible -- ma is at the core of the Jobsian way. And Jobs' single-minded adherence to this idiosyncratically Japanese principle is, ironically, what has allowed Apple to compete with and beat Japan's technology titans -- most notably the company that for the past four decades dominated the world of consumer electronics: Sony.

I'm sure I've heard this before - but I can't remember where.  The fact that a) Apple designs great products and b) Steve Jobs has studied Zen doesn't figure into either my personal or professional lives, except, yes, I do have some Apple products.

But there are far more fundamental ways in which Apple has "out-Japanned" Japan which Yang doesn't mention, and I won't either - they're not at all central to the point of this post or the topic of this blog.  

I will say that if you're interested in Zen because of Steve Jobs or Apple I'd find that hard to believe it's enough to keep anything resembling a sustaining practice.    In my tradition,  ma  (間) doesn't really figure prominently into practice, except insofar as it is an expression of nonduality or the fact that understanding is never completed.  In fact, I have absolutely no recollection of the concept of 間 being presented as somehow central to the practice in and of itself, except what I've already mentioned. On the other hand, yeah, 間 is central to the notion of an esthetically pleasing 書道 enso (円）, but it's more wabisabi (侘寂) to me - and far more personal than the smooth curves of Apple's designs.

In summary - Apple's iPhone is not your practice. And neither is Steve Jobs' triumphs nor foibles.