Jiddu Krishnamurti

Jiddu Krishnamurti: The Messiah Who Resigned

On 3 August 1929, at the annual Star Camp in Ommen, Holland, a thirty-four-year-old man stood before roughly three thousand people who believed he was the World Teacher and told them he was dissolving the organisation built to receive him. It had some sixty thousand members. He gave back the money and the property that had been donated to it. "I maintain that Truth is a pathless land," he said, "and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect." It is the only recorded case of a manufactured messiah firing himself in public, and everything he did for the next fifty-seven years followed from it.

The Boy at Adyar

He was born on 11 May 1895 in Madanapalle, in south India, the eighth child of a Brahmin family, and named after the god Krishna. His mother died while he was young. The family lived near the Theosophical Society's headquarters at Adyar, and there, some time around 1909, C. W. Leadbeater — a senior Theosophist with a professed capacity to read auras — saw the boy and identified him as the vehicle for the coming World Teacher.

By the standards of the household he was an unremarkable, dreamy child in poor health. By the standards of the Theosophical Society he was the most important person alive.

Manufacturing a Messiah

Annie Besant, the English social reformer, campaigner and president of the Theosophical Society, took over. He and his brother Nityananda — Nitya — were placed in her care, and in 1911 she arranged for Krishnamurti to be taken to England for training. That same year the Society founded the Order of the Star in the East, an organisation whose sole purpose was to prepare the world for him. He was made its head. He was sixteen.

What followed was an education in being an object. He was groomed, tutored, presented, and worshipped. He was declared to be the vehicle of Lord Maitreya. The Order grew into a worldwide body with tens of thousands of members, its own magazines, its own estates, its own camps. He spoke at the Hollywood Bowl in 1928 to sixteen thousand people.

He was, at the same time, quietly dismantling the whole edifice in his own mind. In Paris in 1927 he described the Masters — the hidden adepts central to Theosophical belief — as "only incidents." In 1928: "I have no disciples. There is no understanding in the worship of the personality."

Nitya

The break has a private cause as well as a philosophical one. In 1925 Nitya died of tuberculosis in Ojai, California, while Krishnamurti was travelling to India for the Theosophical Society's Jubilee Convention. The brothers had been inseparable through the whole strange ordeal of their Theosophical upbringing, and Krishnamurti had been assured by the Society's authorities that Nitya would not die.

He did. Every claim made on the boy's behalf for fifteen years now had a counterexample attached to it.

Ommen, 3 August 1929

The argument he made at Ommen was not that the Theosophists had picked the wrong man. It was that the entire category was a mistake. Truth, he said, is "limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever" and therefore "cannot be organized." No organisation could lead a person to spirituality; the attempt only produces "a crutch, a weakness, a bondage." Truth cannot be brought down to the seeker — the seeker must ascend to it. His members had been preparing for eighteen years and still wanted an external authority to do the work for them.

"I have only one purpose," he said: "to make man free, to urge him towards freedom, to help him to break away from all limitations."

He resigned from the Theosophical leadership and cut his ties with religious organisations altogether. Besant died in 1933; Leadbeater in 1934. In 1934 George Bernard Shaw called him "the most beautiful human being I have ever seen."

Fifty-Seven Years of Talking

From the early 1930s until his death he travelled the world and spoke — in India, Europe, America, Australia — without notes and without preparation, refusing every title and every role of guru. He taught, as one summary puts it, "not as an authority but as an investigator," and the format he preferred was not the sermon but the question examined out loud in front of an audience.

His subjects were consistent and narrow: fear, conditioning, the nature of thought, the observer and the observed, why the self is the source of conflict, why organised religion and nationalism and ideology are forms of violence. He never softened it. The archive runs to more than six hundred video recordings, over two thousand five hundred audio recordings, and more than eighty published books in some sixty languages — among them *Freedom from the Known*, *The Awakening of Intelligence*, *Think on These Things*, *Krishnamurti's Notebook* and *Education and the Significance of Life*.

The Schools and the Physicist

He believed education was the only leverage that mattered, and he built schools. Rishi Valley came first, at the end of the 1920s, on land near his birthplace. Rajghat, Uttar Kashi in the Himalayas, Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai followed in India; Brockwood Park in England in 1968; Oak Grove in California in 1975. They were designed to produce students who were not conditioned, which is an almost absurdly difficult brief and remains the schools' working proposition.

From the 1960s he held sustained dialogues with David Bohm, the theoretical physicist, on consciousness, time, the function of the brain and the possibility of human transformation. Bohm was a serious scientist taking Krishnamurti seriously as an investigator, and the recorded exchanges — *The Ending of Time* among them — are the closest thing to a peer review his thought ever received.

Why Jiddu Is Called a Genius

The specific quality is negative and very rare: an almost total immunity to his own authority. Krishnamurti was handed, at sixteen, the most complete apparatus of adulation ever assembled for a living person — an international organisation, sixty thousand followers, a theology in which he was the central figure — and he examined it, found it hollow, and destroyed it at thirty-four, giving back the money. The insight that followed was equally unsentimental: that any system for reaching truth becomes a substitute for reaching it, and that the seeker's dependence on a teacher is the thing being sought after. He then spent five decades stating this to audiences who kept trying to make him their teacher anyway, and never once accepted the role.

The counter-case deserves stating. He founded no philosophical school and left no argued system; his method was assertion and inquiry rather than demonstration, and academic philosophy has largely ignored him. He renounced organisations and then presided over foundations, schools and a publishing operation that now spans sixty languages — a contradiction his critics have never stopped pointing at. His prose can be repetitive across eighty books; the same handful of insights recur for fifty years. And Shaw's line about the most beautiful human being he had ever seen was, notably, about how he looked. Whether the achievement is philosophical genius or an extraordinary act of psychological independence is a genuine question, and the second is not a small thing.

Legacy

He died on 17 February 1986 in Ojai, California, aged ninety. He was cremated and his ashes scattered, deliberately, so that no shrine could be built.

The schools continue and the archive keeps growing, which is precisely the irony he was never able to escape. But the instruction at the centre of it has not changed since Ommen: do not follow me, do not join anything, look for yourself.

Achievements

• United Nations Peace Medal — 1985
• Notable work: Freedom from the Known
• Notable work: The First and Last Freedom
• Notable work: Commentaries on Living
• Notable work: Krishnamurti Foundation
• Fields: philosophy