The philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti rejected every spiritual institution he was groomed to lead. Four decades after his death, can his singular vision and teachings still resonate with us?
It was, inadvertently, one of the most portentous walks a young boy ever took. One April day in 1909, Theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater spotted a poor 13-year-old Brahmin boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti, walking along the shore at Adyar, Madras, and was struck by his aura, which he said had no trace of selfishness about it. The boy, in storybook style, with a dose of spiritual colonialism thrown in, was chosen and groomed as the vehicle for the coming World Teacher. He was sent, along with his younger brother, Nitya, to England to become a proper English gentleman in Indian skin. A gentleman who, twenty years later, was to break free of the cage the Theosophists built for him in the form of the Order of the Star, which he dissolved with his famous words: “I maintain that truth is a pathless land. You cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.” He went on to say, “The moment you follow someone you cease to follow the truth.”
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Krishnamurti’s death in Ojai, California, from pancreatic cancer. A man with followers in many countries, he was brilliant and compelling. For numerous Indians, he was also a confounding and controversial spiritual figure who said things such as “God is created by thought” and “There is no right Guru, there is only a wrong guru, because nobody can teach you anything except for yourself.”
Throughout the last century, the market for Indian spiritual teachers in the West was robust and contradictory. Different from Muktananda, a Bhakti who taught “God dwells in you as you”— or Meher Baba, a self-proclaimed avatar known for his many years of silence — Krishnamurti insisted in his public talks that listeners question what the speaker was saying and push with all their might against conditioning, societal or spiritual. Still, he was relegated to the same sticky netting of truth-dispensing guru as all the Indian teachers he disparaged.
K. Ramesh, a physics teacher at Pathashaala KFI in Tamil Nadu, one of the six Krishnamurti schools in India, observes: “I have come across many people who were turned off by K because he never gave solutions. He wanted people to question and find the answers for themselves. (Ramesh, an outstanding haiku poet, was drawn to Krishnamurti for exactly that reason.) Only a small number of people were interested in exploring his teachings. Those who read his teachings and stayed with them were not bothered by his notion that god was created by thought. But others wanted a guru who would help them get enlightened.”
Krishnamurti managed to accomplish that to some extent despite himself. His wisdom and insights made him the perfect seed sower for those willing to journey inward. In one of his dialogue sessions at Ojai, a student quietly challenged him about his claim that religions are not “sacred,” saying, “in a sense, all reli- gions are supposed to point beyond themselves.” In going beyond, Krishnamurti mused, “I must start with where I am. To go very far I must start very near. I am very near, so I must understand myself. I am the rest of humanity. I am not an individual. There is the book of humanity in me. I am that book. If I know how to read it from the beginning to the end, I will find out if there is really something that is immense, sacred.”
The teacher may not have believed in god or guru, but he believed in the sacred, a word that connected him to India, and by which he meant anything perceived clearly, with wonder, without self-centered intrusion. What is sacred, he maintained, can be realized only by a mind that is silent. Terry O’Connor, an American who spent nine years at Ojai, mainly organizing dialogues, likens his teacher’s transformative effect on him to a scene in Tolkein’s The Hobbit: “There was a part in the book where Frodo Baggins was going through a dark forest, and he was lost. And there were spiders. He climbed to the top of a big tree to see where he was. Everywhere he looked, he saw the big blue sky and butterflies. It was like that. Krishnamurti showed me that what was going on was part of something vast and unseen.” He also showed him where Krishnamurti’s own edges were. He might urge listeners to question everything, but he could also ridicule with a cruel laugh the unsuspecting questioner who asked if there were “such a thing as a true guru.”
“He could be offensive,” O’Connor admits. “Let’s face it — he was a human being. He had a personality. It wasn’t all pretty. He didn’t mince words, but his talks had the depth of truth.”
They extended to our mental conditioning: “You are memories. You are remembrances. You are the past.” Krishnamurti’s popularity in the West in the ’50s and ’60s, which coincided with the popularity of Buddhism, may have dovetailed in part with the rise of psychotherapy among well-educated professionals looking for positive solutions with spiritual underpinnings. Krishnamurti had outspoken admirers among followers of Vipassana, Zen, and Tibetan Buddhism. David Shainberg, a New York psychiatrist, who sometimes dialogued with Krishnamurti, notes: “The problem with K’s teachings — oftentimes the problem with K and the problem of people involved with him… the trap they fell into… was that the whole thing was so much constructed in thought.”
But the depth and clarity of his thought worked as a kind of superpower. When Ronald King, an addict who grew up in the rough Ft. Greene section of Brooklyn, New York, was introduced by his AA sponsor to Krishnamurti’s talks, he connected immediately. “He wrote about the need to observe our thoughts,” King says. “With addiction comes the thoughts. In my case, thoughts about having enough money for drugs. Thoughts about having a place to go to use the drugs. Thoughts about not wanting to get arrested because there would be articles in the newspapers. That was my prison. K made me see that these were just thoughts — just a program in my mind. That’s what the main problem was, even more than the drugs. Once I saw that, I was able to see my way out of addiction. But it took time.”
Working later as a counselor at Phoenix House in Brooklyn, King took a daring leap by employing Krishnamurti’s methods of dialogue and observation in his interaction with addicts. “At first, it didn’t register much,” he points out. “But after a while, you would see observation beginning to change people. Not everyone, but a few. They were aware there was a new energy present.” Krishnamurti once gave the example of a blade of grass that grows in the cracks of a city: “There is a path there, and you see a blade of grass pushing, pushing, pushing. If it has life, it goes through.”
New York-based Robert Hirschfield is a widely published freelance writer and poet. His latest poetry collection will be released by Red River in India.