Steve Jobs
1955 – 2011
His passing away has thrusted him into the circle of “over-analysed characters”.
Most of us do not know him personally. Neither did I.
Most of us cannot mind-read. Neither can I.
We sometimes cannot even remember or understand our own words or actions in the past, yet we try to analyse, criticise or rationalise what someone we do not even know, did, said or think.
Some people say that he was a Buddhist, some say he wasn’t because he didn’t donate to charity and even barred charitable orgs from Apple Appstore.
Frankly, I don’t really care if he was a Buddhist or otherwise. I benefited from coding on the Apple II/IIe PCs back in the 80s in the little computer ‘lab’ (more like storeroom stashed between two metal-workshops in my secondary school). The numerous books on Graphical User Interface back then were for the Apple Macintosh platform, and so in a way, I drew inspiration from their design.
I never bought a single Apple product in my whole life, but I developed on the older Apple Ii/IIe PCs and the newer Apple iOS devices (iPhones, iPads, iTouch). As the founder of Apple and designer of many compelling products and gadgets, Steve Jobs was a technopreneur and visionaire, and I think he did both very well.
Do we need him to be a Buddhist or be charitable? Why should he be? Why should we need him to be?
It would be nice if he was a Buddhist, compassionate et al. Heck, it would have been swell if he liked prata and thosai at that! But I don’t know him enough to comment.
I think he did well. He pursued his life’s passion, did good and enjoyed himself in the process, without hurting anyone (not that I know of).
But I still don’t understand why Apple must make it so convoluted to copy a string in their NSString class! grrrr …
Let’s learn what we can from him and his work. And leave it at that.
Reference
Picture from apple.com
There are 2 points to elaborate :
Point 1 : Public views that “Buddhists should be charitable to be recognised as Buddhists?”.
This is a wrong view which needs to be clarified.
Point 2 : Is Steve Jobs a Buddhist?
The key point is how buddhism had helped Steve Jobs to cope with his different cycles of lives.
He was sent for adoption since birth. At 17, he chose to drop out from college as he was spending all of the life-long savings of his adopted parents.
“I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that,” Jobs said in a statement in 2011 to promote his authorized biography.
That youthful indiscretion came before Jobs turned to Buddhism and karma.
He is a legendary character who had believed in Karma & reflected on impermanent of life daily.
If the question is “Did Steve Jobs comes into contact with Buddhism?”, the answer is a definite “YES”.
Reference :
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/05/tech/innovation/steve-jobs-philosophy/index.html