Jiddu Krishnamurti

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In 1929, before some three thousand people gathered in a wooded camp at Ommen in the Netherlands, a man of thirty-four dissolved the organization that had been built to receive his voice. He had been the awaited one — the vehicle, an order of tens of thousands had been told, through which a coming World Teacher would speak. He stood at its head and told it that it must cease to exist, because truth is a pathless land and no path, no organization, no teacher could lead anyone to it. Then he gave back the lands and the money, and walked into fifty-seven more years of speaking to crowds about why none of it could be done on their behalf. The whole of his life turns on that contradiction, deliberately arranged and then deliberately undone.

Krishnamurti photographed in the 1920s by the Los Angeles studio of Albert Witzel — Albert Witzel (1879–1929), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The boy on the beach

Jiddu Krishnamurti was born on 11 May 1895 at Madanapalle, an inland town of the Madras Presidency in southern India, into a Telugu-speaking Brahmin family of modest means. His father, Jiddu Narayaniah, was a civil servant and a member of the Theosophical Society; on retirement he took a clerk’s post at the Society’s international headquarters at Adyar, the riverside estate near Madras, and moved his family into a cottage at the edge of the compound. Krishnamurti was a sickly, dreamy, frequently caned child, thought by his teachers to be slow.

The house at Madanapalle where Krishnamurti was born in 1895, now a Krishnamurti Foundation India study center — via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

In 1909, walking on the beach below the estate, the English clairvoyant Charles Webster Leadbeater — one of the Society’s most prominent and most divisive figures — saw the boy among others and declared that he possessed an aura without a particle of selfishness in it, the most remarkable he had ever encountered. Leadbeater identified him as the likely body the coming Maitreya would use. In the modern Theosophy shaped by Helena Blavatsky and her successors, Maitreya — the future Buddha of Buddhist expectation — had been recast as a World Teacher, a great spiritual instructor periodically overshadowing a human vehicle to renew the wisdom of the age. The Society’s president, Annie Besant, the formidable orator and reformer who had succeeded to leadership of its Adyar wing, took the two Jiddu boys — Krishnamurti and his beloved younger brother Nityananda, called Nitya — under her protection, and proclaimed Krishnamurti the probable vehicle. A boy who had failed at school was now the center of a worldwide expectation.

Leadbeater carried weight, but he carried scandal with it. Accusations concerning his conduct toward boys in his charge had forced his resignation from the Society in 1906; he had been readmitted in 1908, over the objections of many members, and the controversy never wholly subsided. That it was Leadbeater who “found” the new vehicle gave the discovery a shadow it never lost, and it would soon move from rumor into a courtroom.

The order built to receive him

Around the chosen boy an apparatus rose with extraordinary speed. Early in 1911 a small body called the Order of the Rising Sun was formed in India to prepare for the Teacher’s coming; within months Besant expanded it into an international movement, the Order of the Star in the East, with Krishnamurti installed as its head and a star-shaped emblem, a journal, and national sections. At its height it counted tens of thousands of members across dozens of countries — Theosophists and others who had bound their religious hope to the appearance of a living saviour and to the youth being prepared to embody him. He was tutored privately, dressed in fine clothes, taken to England, and groomed across two decades for a single function.

His father did not consent to where this was going. In February 1910 Narayaniah had signed over guardianship of his sons to Besant and given permission for them to travel abroad; in July 1912 he revoked both, demanding the boys’ return, his alarm fed in part by the proximity of Leadbeater. The dispute became one of the most widely reported lawsuits of British India. Narayaniah filed suit in October 1912; the case moved to the High Court at Madras, where in April 1913 Justice Bakewell declared the boys wards of the court and ordered their custody restored to the father, and a first appeal upheld that right. Besant carried it onward, and on 25 May 1914 the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London — the empire’s highest court — allowed her appeal, holding that the lower courts had failed to weigh the wishes and interests of the boys themselves and that, the boys being then in England, no Indian court could compel their return. The case is reported as Besant v. Narayaniah. Krishnamurti remained where the Society had placed him.

The Ojai years and the cracking of the frame

In 1922, traveling for the sake of Nitya’s failing health — he had tuberculosis — the brothers settled at Ojai, a quiet valley north of Los Angeles whose climate was thought to help him. There, in August, Krishnamurti underwent the sequence of states his circle came to call simply “the process”: days of acute pain centered at the back of the neck and along the spine, intervals of semi-consciousness, and what he afterward described as an extraordinary opening into a sense of identity with all living things. The episode recurred, on and off, for years. Theosophical readers around him interpreted it through the vocabulary of an awakened kundalini, the latent serpent-energy of Indian yoga said to rise along the spine; Krishnamurti himself spoke of it in plainer terms, and never settled it into a doctrine. Whatever it was, it marked the beginning of a center of his own forming inside the role designed for him.

The frame that held his life cracked in 1925. Nitya — whose survival the Masters had reportedly been assured of — died at Ojai on 13 November, aged twenty-seven. The grief was annihilating, and with it went much of Krishnamurti’s trust in the predictions, the clairvoyant pronouncements, and the leaders who had made them. He did not rebel at once. For four more years he continued to play, ambivalently, the part of the vehicle, even as his talks drifted further from anything the Society had scripted. By the late 1920s those who listened closely could hear a man dismantling, sentence by sentence, the expectation that had created him.

The dissolution

On 3 August 1929, at the opening of the annual Star Camp at Ommen, he made it explicit. Speaking to the assembled members with Besant present, he declared that truth is a pathless land and cannot be approached by any path whatsoever, by any religion or any sect; that being limitless and unconditioned it cannot be organized, and that no organization should be formed to lead or coerce people along a road toward it. He told them he did not want followers — that the moment one follows someone, one ceases to follow truth — and that his sole concern was to set people unconditionally free. Then he dissolved the Order of the Star in the East, the body of which he was the head, and arranged the return of the estates, endowments, and gifts that had been amassed for the cause, including the castle at Ommen and its grounds.

Castle Eerde near Ommen in the Netherlands, given to the Order of the Star in the East and the site of its annual camps, returned by Krishnamurti after the 1929 dissolution — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The official text of the dissolution address is preserved by the Krishnamurti Foundation at kfoundation.org/dissolution-speech. It cost him the institution, much of the wealth, and a portion of the devotion that had surrounded him; Besant, who loved him, accepted the decision with a grace that did not heal the wound to the movement. He resigned from the Theosophical Society itself in 1930, returned other properties, and set about a way of working he would hold to without serious deviation for the rest of his life: no organization claiming to convey his teaching, no ritual, no successor, no authority vested in him beyond that of a man describing what he saw.

What he taught, and why it could not be a method

The teaching that occupied his remaining decades is easier to state than to practice, and Krishnamurti insisted that stating it was nearly the whole danger. Its starting point is that the human mind is conditioned — shaped through and through by culture, nationality, religion, language, belief, and the accumulated residue of personal and collective memory, which he summarized as “the past.” This conditioning, in his account, is not a layer over an otherwise free self; it constitutes the ordinary self, the thinker who seems to stand behind thought. And it is the root of human conflict and sorrow: division into believer and infidel, us and them, the perpetual measuring of what is against an image of what should be.

Freedom, on this view, cannot be reached by effort, discipline, or method, because every method is itself a product of the conditioned mind and merely substitutes one bondage for another — exchanges a worldly ambition for a spiritual one, a secular authority for a guru. What he pointed to instead he called choiceless awareness: a direct, unmediated attention to “what is,” without the intervening screen of judgment, comparison, condemnation, or the wish for it to be otherwise. In such seeing, he held, the apparent gap between the observer and the observed collapses — the watcher discovers that it is not separate from what it watches, that the one who is angry is not other than the anger. Where that division ends, he argued, the very mechanism of conflict ends with it, not by suppression but by understanding. Thought, useful and necessary in its place, is shown to be incapable of producing this; it can only repeat the known.

Because the insight cannot be transferred, taught, sold, or organized without becoming its opposite, he refused on principle every apparatus that would package it. He declined the title of guru and the deference that came toward him; he warned audiences against making an authority of him as they had of others; in his later years he often spoke of himself in the third person as “the speaker,” a small grammatical device for refusing the cult of the personality. The self-cancellation was not a pose adopted late but the through-line of the whole project, the same gesture as the 1929 dissolution carried out daily in language.

Dialogues, schools, and the long late work

For more than half a century he gave public talks — in India, England, the United States, and across Europe — in plain, unornamented, often austere speech, and held hundreds of recorded conversations. The most sustained were with the physicist David Bohm, whose theoretical work on the undivided wholeness of the quantum world, set out in Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), drew him into long dialogue with Krishnamurti on the nature of thought, time, and the fragmentation of mind. Their exchanges of 1980 — eight at Ojai in April, five at Brockwood Park in June — were published as The Ending of Time (1985), among the densest records of his thinking. He spoke with Buddhist scholars, scientists, and psychologists in the same spirit, treating the meeting of minds as itself the inquiry rather than a route to a conclusion.

Convinced that conditioning is laid down earliest, he gave great care to education, founding or inspiring a network of schools meant to cultivate intelligence and sensitivity rather than mere achievement. The first, Rishi Valley School, opened in southern India in 1926; others followed there, together with Brockwood Park School in Hampshire, England, founded in 1969, and the Oak Grove School at Ojai, opened in 1975 on the grounds where he had lived since the 1920s. After the dissolution he had refused organizations, but he allowed foundations to exist for limited, custodial ends — the Krishnamurti Foundation Trust in England, the Krishnamurti Foundation of America, and the Krishnamurti Foundation India — charged with the schools and with preserving the archive of his talks, and explicitly forbidden to interpret or propagate a doctrine.

His friendships and readers ran wide. The novelist Aldous Huxley, a neighbor at Ojai from the late 1930s, became a close friend, urged him to write, and supplied the foreword to The First and Last Freedom (1954), the book that carried his name to a far larger public. His insistence on direct, unmediated knowing — a transformation worked in the knower rather than a belief acquired — places him, however obliquely, in the long company of those for whom gnosis is an event and not a creed, even as he would have refused the genealogy along with every other.

Scholarship and sources

The indispensable record of his early life is the three-volume biography by Mary Lutyens, daughter of the architect Edwin Lutyens and herself raised within the Theosophical world that surrounded him: Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening (1975), The Years of Fulfilment (1983), and The Open Door (1988). Written with access to Krishnamurti himself and to the inner circle, they document the discovery, the process, and the dissolution from close range while remaining candid about the contradictions. Roland Vernon’s Star in the East: Krishnamurti, the Invention of a Messiah (2000) supplies a more detached, investigative treatment of how the World Teacher was manufactured and how he came apart from his makers. The Privy Council judgment that decided his childhood is summarized, with its citations, at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Besant_v._Narayaniah. The Order of the Star in the East, its founding, emblem, and dissolution, is documented at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Star_in_the_East. His own corpus runs to scores of volumes — talks, dialogues, notebooks, and journals — most of them transcriptions rather than written compositions, faithful to a man who distrusted the fixing of insight on a page nearly as much as its fixing in an institution.

Assessments of him divide sharply, and the division tracks the same paradox that organized his life. To admirers he is among the twentieth century’s most uncompromising religious thinkers, a man who refused, at real cost, every consolation of belonging and every shortcut of belief, and who held a single demanding note for sixty years. Critics observe that a teacher who denounced authority nonetheless drew lifelong devotion, accumulated foundations and schools and audiences of thousands, and lived under the care of wealthy patrons; that the private life recorded in later memoirs was less seamless than the public one; and that an insistence on freedom from method can become its own subtle method, a discipline of refusing discipline. He would have regarded the objection as fair and beside the point, since the contradiction was never one he hid.

He left no doctrine to inherit, which was the point, and a large body of words about why none could be left.

→ Related: Theosophy · Theosophical Society · Maitreya · Helena Blavatsky · Adyar · Aldous Huxley · Reincarnation · Gnosis · P D Ouspensky