It's hard to compare ancient books whose influence is clearly enormous -- e.g. analects of confucious and the new testament -- to more recent books whose influence is hard to estimate, especially in the longer term, so it's necessarily a silly but interesting exercise. And, is a book influential for being famous or having an impact or simply acting as a standin for influence that clearly exists? E.g. I doubt Einstein's influence stems from his book on relativity.

But it would be easy to make a long, long list of other works and of important people who were influenced by the Analects or by the New Testament. Or indeed, by most of the books on this list. A list of works and people influenced by Gurdjieff would not be very long. I would be curious to see his reasoning here, because without an explanation it brands the whole list as personal opinion.

There's no doubt that many of these books are standins for personal influence. It's sort of a convention for lists like that.

"Beelzebub's tales to his grandson" is probably the only book I've found that I really, really, couldn't read. I'd love to know what it means though.

IIRC, he deliberately wrote it to make it hard to read. Out of curiosity, why did you try to read it?

I was fascinated by what I'd heard about him and wanted to understand his philosophy. I don't think I realised he'd deliberately made it obscure!

I found its inclusion incomprehensible. I purchased the book and got as far as the third chapter. I learned more from researching the book itself than I did from trying to actually read the thing.

Gurdjieff existed in a time before personal development really became a thing. He did not believe in books as an effective method for change. His technique was primarily interpersonal, he thought one needed a guru to tell them what to do, much as we would today hire a personal trainer to help us work out more effectively.

He survived a terrible automobile accident later on in life and turned his attention to his legacy. He wrote three books, Beelzebub was his first. The intention was to provide a 'textbook' of sorts. Because it was so hard to read, the seeker would be driven to seek out someone to interpret the work for them.

The actual content of the book, when you strip out the intricate allegory and dense terminology, is actually pretty simple. It basically states Gurdjieff's ideas concerning the human condition. The default status of man is waking sleep, one needs inner spiritual work to rouse themselves out of that state.

That's a good observation. Seymour-Smith was (I seem to recall) a fan, and he certainly would have been around lots of people who were into that work. On the other hand, from Seymour-Smith's perspective, which was literary- and 20th century-centric, Gurdjieff may well belong on the list. He really did have a surprising influence on literary and artistic circles. His movement was fascinating and I don't think it has been properly studied or understood; all the good writing about it is by followers. But yes, surely nowhere near Marx or Mao.