BY DR. P. T. RAJU, PH. D., SASTRI

J. Krishnamurti is a religious genius discovered by Mrs. Annie Besant and introduced by her to the world as an incarnation. But of late he has severed his connections with the Theosophical Society altogether. Now, not only does he claim to be no incarnation, also that he is no theosophist. He proclaims that he is a human being like any other human being, but has been able to realise the Truth through individual effort, a realisation that can be had by any man who is seriously after it.

Mr. Krishnamurti tells us that he is regarded by the West as teaching oriental philosophy and by the East as teaching the Western, but that he does neither, and only gives out what he individually felt and experienced. He is so iconoclastic in his statements, attacking tradition, authority, and the ideas of heaven, Church, etc., that he is taken by some for an atheist, an individualist and so forth. But if one tries to understand his talks as a whole, one finds that it is unfair to call him by any such name. And the real significance of his statements cannot be understood unless the philosophy underlying them is understood. Unfortunately neither Mr. Krishnamurti nor any of his disciples has given us a systematic account of his thought. Still it is not impossible to get a connected picture of his ideas from his speeches and talks. It is true Mr. Krishnamurti is trying to strike a new course of thinking and of understanding reality. But the world is many centuries old, and reality and man are the same. And we can best appreciate Mr. Krishnamurti’s ideas when we are able to notice their similarity and dissimilarity to others. Mr. Krishnamurti is opposed to thinking in ways traditional, because his conception of reality, as we shall see, does not allow it. And his is one of the most systematically developed of the philosophies of anti-traditionalism. Except for a few outbursts against tradition and traditionalism, there is, in India, no philosophy of anti-traditionalism; and so far as my knowledge goes, Mr. Krishnamurti’s is the only philosophy in India which we may call anti-traditionalism.

He says: "Then there are those who come here to compare what I have to say with the many schools of thoughtlessness. (Laughter). No please, this is not a smart remark. From letters I have received and from people who have talked to me, I know there are many who think that by belonging to special schools of thought they will advance and be of service to the world. But what they call schools of thought are nothing but imitative jargons which merely create divisions and encourage exclusiveness and vanity of mind. These systems of thought have really no validity, being founded on illusion. Though their followers may become very erudite and defend themselves with their learning, they are in reality thoughtless."¹ This teaching of Mr. Krishnamurti reminds us of the teaching of the Zen sect of Japan, from one of the writings of which we shall quote a fairly long passage, for that will elucidate much that Mr. Krishnamurti says.

"O you disciples who aspire after truth, if you wish to obtain an orthodox knowledge of Zen, take care not to deceive yourselves. Tolerate no obstacles, neither interior nor exterior, to the soaring of your spirit. If on your way you meet Buddha, kill him. (The Zen is a Buddhist sect!) If you meet the patriarchs, kill them! If you meet the saints, kill them all without any hesitation! That is the only way of reaching salvation.

"Do not allow yourselves to be entangled in any arguments whatsoever. Place yourselves above them and remain free. So many men come to me pretending to be disciples of Truth, who are not even freed" from the vanity of a goal, of a prejudice that dominates them. Therefore when I see them I strike them down. Such a one has confidence in his arms? I strike him off. Another counts on his eloquence? I make him hush. Yet another believes in his foresight? I blind him.

"I have never seen one who was completely free–who was the unique. Most of them have filled their minds very uselessly with the farces of old masters. What have I to give them? Nothing. I try to remedy their evil by delivering them from their slavery.

"O you, disciples of truth, strive to make yourselves independent of all objects . . . . Do you believe yourselves worthy of being called a monk of the Zen doctrine if you possess such an erroneous idea of it? I tell you: No Buddha! No teaching! No discipline! No demonstration!…..Renounce this error. There is no exterior truth. And now you attach yourselves to the literal sense of my word so that it is much preferable that we should end this discourse, and that you should be nothing at all."

This passage is quoted from Rinzairoku by Steinilher-Oberlin in his Buddhist Sects of Japan,² And he wonders at the idea of a Buddhist killing the Buddha. At last understanding the significance of the passage, he writes. "At last its meaning became clear to me. This is what Rinzai meant to say: let he who aspires to the light of Zen shake off and discard all borrowed values–scholastic formulae, prejudices and modes with which he encumbered himself and which blind him, even were they to be presented to him under the features of Buddha. All that you have not found yourself, in your inner consciousness, by a personal and intuitive act, is but a vestment of hypocrisy with which you clothe your conscience. It is not Buddha. First liberate your spirit. Open your eyes, O moles! Buddha is within you.³ He is not external to you, you cannot meet him."

Just similarly, even according to Krishnamurti, to think in terms of those systems is not the true search for truth. "True search begins only when there is release from those reactions which are the result of division."⁴ The division between the I and the You, which is made in Reality, does not actually belong to it. When the division is made, the individuality or uniqueness of the I appears. Where there is duality, there must be conflict and mutual adjustment, which develops into patterns of thought and action. These become our thought-mechanism and behavior-mechanism and hold true only within the sphere of duality. They are in principle incapable of revealing Reality which is beyond duality. So the I or the ego, institutionalised religion, tradition, authority, and everything that belongs to duality is an illusion; it is due to ignorance. "All strife is one of relationship, an adjustment between two resistances, two individuals. Resistance is a conditioning, a limiting, or a conditioning of that energy which may be called life, thought, emotion, This conditioning, this resistance, has had no beginning. It has always been, and we can see that it can be continued, There are many and complex causes for this conditioning.

"This conditioning is ignorance, which can be brought to an end.

"Ignorance is the unawareness of the process of conditioning, which consists of many wants, fears, acquisitive memories, and so on.

"Belief is part of ignorance. Whatever action springs from belief only further strengthens ignorance.

"The craving for understanding, for happiness, the attempt to get rid of this particular quality and aquire that particular virtue, all such effort is born of ignorance, which is the result of this constant want.

"So in relationship, strife and conflict continue." ⁵

"So, what is one to do, discerning that whatever action, whatever effort one makes only strengthens ignorance? The very desire to break through the circle of ignorance is still part of ignorance. Then what is one to do?

"How is this an all-important vital question to you? If it is, then you will see that there is, no doubt, no positive answer. For a positive answer can only bring about further effort, which but strengthens the process of ignorance. So there is only a negative approach, which is to be integrally aware of the process of fear or ignorance. This awareness is not an effort to overcome, to destroy or find a substitute, but is a stillness of neither acceptance nor denial, an integral quietness of no choice. This awareness breaks the circle of ignorance from withhin, as it were, without strengthening it." ⁶

Here we seem to be reading a Buddha delivering a sermon. All this duality, Mr. Krishnamurti tells us, is ignorance. And ignorance is dissolved by awareness. But what is the result attained? It is a stillness of "neither acceptance nor denial, an integral quietness of no choice." Reality is pure life running its course; our individuality is created in it through ignorance. When it is dissipated, we become absolutely one with pure life, and the strife of the individual ends.

Can we have any idea of the nature of this life and its process? "Life–which is all things and which is eternally renewing itself–is passing from unconscious perfection in the lower kingdom of nature, through conscious imperfection in the present ‘I’–conscious stage, to perfection, that is, to an entire, perfect realisation of itself. In this and in this alone, the very process of perfection consists: that the forms of life, at a definite stage–the human stage–will, by and by, actualise and realise their latent perfection entirely and freely." ⁷ the stage of the ego is imperfect, because it makes the distinction between itself and reality. "At the ‘I’–conscious stage, men think themselves separated from Reality, ‘Life’, ‘Truth’, which they consider to be something objective, something outside themselves, something they worship and which they call ‘God.’" ⁸

Mr. Krishnamurti believes that it is natural for man to become one with this life which is beyond dualism. "As a river must make its way to the sea, so must the individual make his way to reality".⁹ Nay, nature itself sees that man finally dissolves his individuality as if universal salvation is a predetermined fact. "It is impossible that humanity in the long run will be able comfortably to settle down and remain under any illusion whatever. Nature herself, in her own mighty, irresistible process of perfecting, urges man beyond any illusion towards an increasingly clear realisation of actual facts, of the one, immortal, perfect Life within us, which, in the fullness of time will disperse all illusions and eventually all forms of ‘I’–consciousness."¹⁰ This is like believing in some divine destiny of evolution, that the forces of evolution themselves can bring about universal salvation. But elsewhere he says that the whole destiny and function of Nature is to create the individual who is self-conscious, who knows the pairs of opposites, who knows that he is an entity in himself, conscious and separate."¹¹ Here, whether the individual attains his salvation or not depends on himself and not on nature. And this seems to accord more with the general teaching of Mr. Krishnamurti who says "realisation of Truth, of Life, can only be achieved through your own strength,"¹² and who discourages thinking in terms of some system or institutionalised religion.

This reality, Mr. Krishnamurti says, is infinity. "There is a movement, a process of life, without end, which may be called infinity. Through authority, limitation born of fear, mind creates for itself many false reactions and thereby limits itself. Identifying itself with this limitation, it is incapable of following the swift movement of life."¹³ This sounds Bergsonian.

The illusory ‘I’ is dissolved through what Krishnamurti calls self-consciousness. That is, when we try to look within ourselves and analyse our own egos, they disappear. "We find that what fundamentally matters is thoroughly to grasp certain basic facts in existence–the only immortal life, the supreme Reality; what fundamentally matters is: to be fully awake, tirelessly, in one’s whole conduct of life. We find that it is this attitude which frees the individual from all limitations."¹⁴ "To come back to the point with which I started, you cannot realise Truth along any path, through any system, through any learning or teacher, but only through the flame of self-consciousness."¹⁵ This does not mean that reality is self-consciousness; it is beyond self-consciousness. "Consciousness is of the ego, and when we are rid of our consciousness there is Reality that is free of self-consciousness."¹⁶ That is, to be self-conscious is only a method of realising truth. Did not many Buddhists preach that reality is beyond vijnana even? This j dissipation of self-consciousness is not annihilation. "I am not preaching total annihilation. You cannot destroy life, but that which is separate can become the whole. That is not annihilation, that is not destruction; but is true living, true being, true action, true love, and spontaneity of conduct; it is that perfect balance of love and reason which is the essence of experiencc." ¹⁷

In self-consciousness what is really the root cause of our individuality, namely, the sub-conscious, is brought to the threshold of consciousness, and when so brought it dissolves. So we are not always fully conscious of ourselves. That part of our self of which we are not conscious remains in the sub-conscious and has to be brought to the light of consciousness. This requires strenuous effort.

So far Mr. Krishnamurti’s teaching is mainly of religious interest. We may now raise the question whether ignorance is prior to the ‘I’ and is its cause, or whether it is the ignorance of the individual, and therefore requires the individual as a locus on which to exist. We do not get a definite answer to this enquiry from Mr. Krishnamurti’s talks. He says: "The ‘I’ process is the result of ignorance, and that ignorance like the flame that is fed by oil, sustains itself through its own activities, That is, the ‘I’ process, the ‘I’ energy, the ‘I’ consciousness, is the outcome of ignorance, and ignorance maintains itself through its own self-created activities; it is encouraged and sustained through its own action of craving and want. This ignorance has no beginning, and the energy that created it is unique to each individual, which creates in its self-development, its own materials, as body, discernment, consciousness, which become identified as the ‘I’."¹⁸ But in another place he says: "Ignorance is the lack of comprehension of oneself."¹⁹ He speaks of ignorance also as conditioning, as the mechanism of thinking and acting that results from the adjustment between the divisions that arise out of the one Reality; in which case ignorance is posterior to the’ I’ and is a sort of a quality of the’ I’, The division between the’ I’ and the’ You’ does not seem to be caused by ignorance, but ignorance itself seems to be the result of the division, We come across a similar difficulty while interpreting Buddhism, and probably we have to adopt a similar interpretation here too. That is, the creation of division will have to be regarded as the same as the activity of ignorance; and this ignorance will gain strength through the habit-mechanisms of thought and action, which will be formed through mutual resistance and adjustment of the divisions. Further, the appearance of the divisions is not the same as the appearance of the egos. The divisions assume the form of the egos after becoming conscious "through sensation, perception, and discernment."²⁰

Mr. Krishnamurti accepts neither the mechanistic view of life according to which man is a product of the environment, nor the view that the human ego is something divine and eternal.²¹ For, as we have seen, the ‘I’ is really the supreme Reality become finite through certain limitations or conditionings, and so is not a product of mechanical processes. Yet it is not eternal, because the ‘I’-sense, though without beginning, vanishes when we analyse it.

In this account of Mr. Krishnamurti we find that he is an absolutist, a monist and an idealist. True, he tells us that Reality is beyond consciousness and self-consciousness, and that in it both these are dissipated and lost. But he repeatedly says that there is one supreme Reality, Truth, which he sometimes calls God,²² sometimes Life and other times energy. But like Buddha he cannot describe it further. To describe it is to use concepts, which belong to the mechanism of thought, which is a result of the mutual adjustment between the divisions in reality, and which is therefore unreal and illusory. The concept of the ‘I’ is a product of ignorance and is therefore not adequate to reality. To understand reality in terms of concept is to understand it in terms of the ‘I’, a bubble which is to be pricked. To long for immortality itself is a false desire, for it is the desire to perpetuate the ‘I’. Similarly to enquire whether the soul lives after death is motived by this false desire. Reality is inexplicable; none can explain it. It is beyond the ‘I’ and thought that belongs to the ‘I’. It has to be directly experienced by us.

It is no wonder that, with this metaphysics, Mr. Krishnamurti preaches against traditions, authority, systems of philosophy and institutionalised religion. He is not an individualist, because the individual is not ultimately real for him; yet he appears to be an individualist only because he preaches against all the above. In his thought we get one of the best metaphysical bases for the revolt against tradition, authority and established modes of thought. His metaphysics may not be absolutely new. But the way he connected it with the revolt he preaches and the self-dependence he emphasises seems to be his own. Did not Buddha long ago preach that reality lies beyond all samscaras and exhorted his disciples to go beyond them? The samscaras are the mechanisms of thought and action, the universal habits of thinking and doing. Even the so-called categories of thought may be interpreted as the cardinal habits of thinking. The samscaras include not only these categories but also the biases and the customs of people and the habits and idiosyncrasies of the individuals. Tradition may be not only the traditions of a people but the tradition of creation. The latter are the samscaras that are beyond the ego and are the condition of the ego. And Mr. Krishnamurti like Buddha preaches against the tradition of even these samscaras.