Steve Jobs nearly ordained as a monk — and his teacher told him not to
Summary
Steve Jobs, who built the iPhone, seriously considered leaving everything behind to ordain as a monk at Eihei-ji in Japan. His teacher — Kōbun Chino Otogawa, a priest of the Sōtō Zen school — told him not to. He did not need to go anywhere: the practice was available in the work he was already doing.
The talk draws out two Japanese words hidden in the design of the iPhone. The first is kanso, the simplicity that comes from taking away — which in dharma is letting go. The second is ma, deliberately preserved empty space: the tea bowl works because the inside of it is empty.
From that emptiness it reaches the Suñña Sutta, where the Buddha says the world is empty because it is empty of self.
Key points
The teacher’s advice was that he need not go anywhere
What was refused was not ordination but the idea that practice had to happen somewhere other than the work in front of him.
Kanso is simplicity arrived at by removal
Not designing to look minimal but actually cutting what is unnecessary — which is letting go, in dharma terms.
Ma is deliberately preserved empty space
The gap is not the part where nothing was put yet. It is the part that makes the whole thing usable.
The tea bowl works because it is empty inside
The image that joins design to dharma most directly: the usefulness is in the emptiness, not in the material.
The Suñña Sutta means emptiness at another level
Empty in design means space. Empty in the sutta means empty of self — different layers that arrive at the same place.