Krishnamurti: That Rare Mortal

K. KRISHNAMOORTHY

The passing away of J. Krishnamurti brings to a close the longest and the most original chapter in the history of religious philosophy. A legendary figure from boyhood and hailed variously as Buddha, Christ and Socrates, he has been a sage, mystic, world teacher, philosopher, writer, poet, orator, dialectician and educationist – a solitary pilgrim who has gone about the world for over 75 years pointing out to those who are willing to listen to the need to be a light to oneself.

Jiddu Krishnamurti was born on May 11, 1895 in the town of Madanapalle in Andhra Pradesh to Telugu-speaking middleclass Brahmin parents. The mother, Sanjeevamma, sensing that her baby was one day to become a great soul, insisted on delivering the baby in the Puja-room of her house, which was against orthodox Hindu custom. And as the baby was the eighth in the family, he was named after Lord Krishna.

The boy’s father, Narayaniah, later moved to Madras and took up employment in the Theosophical Society, which was at that time led by eminent figures like Mrs. Annie Besant and Bishop Leadbeater. Basic to the tenets of theosophy was the belief that Lord Maitreya, the World Teacher – Christ in the West and Bodhisattva in the East – manifests himself from time to time, and that he was soon to take a human form.

The “discovery” of that form took place in 1909 when Leadbeater spotted on the beach behind the Theosophical Society at Adyar the ragged and undernourished Krishnamurti, who was then 13 years old. A clairvoyant, Leadbeater saw that the boy had the most luminous aura without a trace of selfishness in it, and he soon proclaimed that the boy would be the future Messiah. This surprised many, for the boy, apart from being sickly, was so dull-witted that he was constantly beaten at school and sent out on the verandah, from where he would keep watching the trees and birds around.

When Mrs. Annie Besant came to India, she made herself the legal guardian of Krishnamurti and his younger brother Nitya, and took them to England to be educated. But Krishnamurti never passed a single examination, and Oxford turned him down on the ground that it had no competence to educate Messiahs.

However, by the age of 15, he had written his first book At the Feet of the Master, which has been translated into 27 languages and has run into 40 editions. At the age of 16 he had made his first speech. In 1911 in order to prepare the way for the coming of the World Teacher, a global organisation called the Order of the Star in East was formed within the Theosophical Society with Krishnamurti as its head. Mrs. Besant went about giving wide currency to the belief that Krishnamurti was indeed the chosen vehicle, and urged her followers to love him “because only once in thousands of years is such a life lived among mortal men.”

With his chiselled features, enormous dark eyes and elegant manners, the shy, young man drew a lot of attention. But he grew up uncontaminated by all the affluence and adoration that surrounded him. Despite his deep loyalty to Mrs. Besant, whom he called his mother, he was slowly revolting against the religious hierarchy and his own role in it.

In 1922 while he was in California, Krishnamurti underwent an intense spiritual experience that altered his consciousness completely. “I have seen the Light ... I have touched the compassion which heals all sorrow and suffering: it is not for myself but for the world,” he wrote later. The sudden death of his brother Nitya was a shattering event in his life, but it also served as a catalyst of his inner life.

The Order had by then grown in money and property and following. A Dutch baron made over to Krishnamurti his 18th century home, Castle Eerde, with 5,000 acres of woodland, which became the headquarters of the Order. Meanwhile, Krishnmurti’s teachings were becoming highly revolutionary: “In order to be happy need we have religious, in order to love need we build temples? Truth cannot be found in the dark sanctuary of temples nor in the well-lit halls of organised societies; neither can it be found in books, nor in ceremonies.” The foundations of Theosophy began to totter.

The final blow came in 1929 when Krishnamurti dissolved the Order, resigned from the Theosophical Society and returned all the enormous wealth–buildings, estates, endowments–that had poured in.

Since then, he accepted from people neither their worship nor wealth, and though four International Foundations sprang up around him he always insisted that they were purely for administrative purposes and were in no way missionary institutions vested with the authority to interpret his teachings. He founded in India, England and the U. S., six international schools with the aim of enabling children to grow up without identifying themselves with any religion, nation or ideology and with a great deal of feeling for man and nature.

Till his last days, Krishnamurti kept up a hectic schedule of talks and personal interviews as well as discussions with teachers and students. The personal charm of the man, the silence of his presence and the clarity and cadence of his utterances cast a spell on his listeners, but the challenges he threw were hardhitting and were addressed to every field of human activity.

Last year, for instance, he told a gathering at the United Nations Organisation that nations could never be united and that organisations could never ensure peace. He asked scientists what would happen to the human brain when the computer and the entertainment industry took over. He told parents and teachers that cruelty had many forms and its “ultimate expression is examinations.” He showed children how competition and the desire for success would make them insensitive. To a young woman who had lost her husband, he suggested gently that she was crying not out of love for her husband but out of self-pity. He told intellectuals that knowledge is the enemy of love.

Krishnamurti’s message of self-knowing remained essentially the same over the years, though he had been continuously altering his expression to meet the challenges of a rapidly-changing world. He felt that the answer to any human problem, social or personal, could never be found in religions or ideologies or mass movements, because all these, in fact, created the problem by dividing man from man. What was required was not social reformation but a radical transformation in the deepest recesses of human consciousness. “Society by itself is non-existent. Society is what you and I in our relationship have created; it is the outward projection of our psychological states. So, if you and I do not understand ourselves, merely transforming the outer has no significance whatsoever.”

–Courtesy: INDIAN EXPRESS

Back