Jiddu Krishnamurti

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Jiddu Krishnamurti was a teacher and speaker, born in southern India in 1895 and active until his death in California in 1986, who spent some sixty years arguing that no teacher, scripture, method, or organization can deliver a person to truth — a position made stranger by the fact that he had been raised, deliberately, to be exactly such an authority.

He was a boy of about thirteen, the son of a Theosophical Society clerk at the order’s headquarters near Madras, when Charles Leadbeater noticed him on the beach and judged his aura remarkable. Leadbeater was already a controversial figure: his conduct toward boys in his care had been the subject of scandal within the Society — charges over which he had resigned in 1906 before being readmitted. The Society’s president, Annie Besant, took the child into her care and proclaimed him the likely vehicle for the World Teacher — the returning Maitreya whose coming the Theosophists expected. An order was built around him, the Order of the Star in the East, with tens of thousands of members awaiting the moment he would speak in the master’s voice. In 1912 Krishnamurti’s father sued Besant to recover custody of his sons — Krishnamurti and his younger brother — resting his case partly on the charges against Leadbeater; Besant prevailed on appeal, and the boys remained in her charge. He was educated in England, surrounded by expectation, and groomed for two decades for a single role.

In 1929, at the order’s annual gathering in the Netherlands, he dissolved it. The speech is the hinge of his life: he told the assembled members that truth is a pathless land, that it cannot be approached by any road, any religion, any sect, and that he wanted no followers — that the moment one follows another, one ceases to follow truth. He returned the properties and money given for the cause and walked away from the apparatus that had been constructed around him.

What he taught afterward refused systematization, and he resisted being called a philosopher in any technical sense. The recurring claim is that the human mind is conditioned — by culture, belief, memory, the accumulated past — and that this conditioning, not any outward circumstance, is the root of conflict and sorrow. Freedom, in his account, is not arrived at by effort or discipline, which only substitute one form of bondage for another; it appears in a direct, unmediated seeing of what is, a “choiceless awareness” in which the observer is not separate from the observed. He held that such insight cannot be taught, sold, or organized, and he was consistent enough to refuse the trappings of guruhood that his audiences repeatedly pressed on him.

He spoke publicly, in plain and often austere language, into the 1980s, and held recorded dialogues with scientists — among them the physicist David Bohm — on the nature of thought and attention. Schools founded on his ideas operate in India, England, and the United States; his talks and conversations were transcribed into many volumes. Assessments of him divide sharply. Admirers regard him as one of the twentieth century’s most uncompromising religious thinkers; critics note the gap between his rejection of authority and the devotion he in fact attracted, and the foundations and institutions that grew up around a man who said he wanted none. He left no doctrine to inherit, which was the point, and a large body of words about why none could be left.

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