Jiddu Krishnamurti(జిడ్డు కృష్ణమూర్తి in Telugu) (May 12, 1895 Madanapalle, India–February 17, 1986 Ojai, California), often written as J. Krishnamurti, was discovered as a teenager by C.W. Leadbeater in India on the private beach at the Theosophical headquarters at Adyar in Chennai. He was subsequently raised by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater within the world-wide organization of the Theosophical Society, who believed him to be a vehicle for a prophesied World Teacher (see Second Coming; Maitreya Buddha). As a young man, he disavowed this destiny and also dissolved the Order established to support it, and eventually spent the rest of his life travelling the world as an independent speaker and educator on the workings of the human mind. Aged 90, he addressed the United Nations on the subject of peace and awareness, and was awarded the U.N. 1984 Peace Medal. He gave his last talk a month before his death, in January 1986, in India where he had been born.

His supporters, working through charitable trusts, founded several independent schools across the world—in India, England and the United States—and transcribed many of his thousands of talks, publishing them as educational philosophical books.

Biography

Youth

Jiddu Krishnamurti was born in a small town about a hundred and fifty miles north of Madras, India. He came from a family of Telugu-speaking Brahmins. His father, Jiddu Narianiah, graduated from Madras University and then became an official in the Revenue Department of the British administration, rising by the end of his career to the position of rent collector and District Magistrate. His mother, Jiddu Sanjeevamma, died when Krishnamurti was ten years old. Krishnamurti, of course, was named after Krishna - the eighth reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. He was the eighth child in his family.

His father Narianiah joined the Theosophical Society in 1881, while Helena Blavatsky was still its head in India. In 1909, the family came to live at the Theosophical Society headquarters in Adyar. It was a few months after this last move that he was discovered by Leadbeater, who believed him to be the awaited vessel.

Krishna, or Krishnaji, as he was often known, and his younger brother Nitya were educated at the Theosophical compound and later taken to England to finish their education. His father, pushed into the background by the swirl of interest around Krishna, ended up in a lawsuit against the Society to try to protect his parental interests. As a result of this separation from his family and home, Krishnamurti and his brother Nitya became extremely close and in the following years they often travelled together.

A philosophical awakening

His biographer Mary Lutyens wrote a book about Krishnamurti's early life in India, England, and finally in Ojai, California, entitled Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening. She was a relatively close associate of his in the order, from the early days until the end of his life. This book contains many insights into this period of his life, about which he rarely spoke. The book states that there came a time when Krishnamurti fully believed that he was to become the World Teacher. The death of his brother Nitya in 1925 from tuberculosis, however, shook his fundamental belief in the masters, the leaders of the Theosophical Society and the whole idea of the world teacher (Lord Maitreya) project . He had prayed for his brother's life to be spared and it was not. The experience of his brother's death shattered his remaining illusions.

from The Song of Life (1931):

My brother died; We were as two stars in a naked sky. He was like me, Burnt by the warm sun..

He died; I wept in loneliness. Where'er I went, I heard his voice and his happy laughter. I looked for his face in every passer by and asked each if he had not met with my brother; But none could give me comfort. I worshipped, I prayed, But the gods were silent. I could weep no more; I could dream no more. I sought him in all things, in every clime. I heard the whispering of many trees Calling me to his abode. And then, in my search, I beheld Thee, O Lord of my heart; In Thee alone I saw the face of my brother. In Thee alone, O my eternal Love, Do I behold the faces Of all the living and all the dead.

From 1925 onward things were to never be the same again.

..An old dream is dead and a new one is being born, as a flower that pushes through the solid earth. A new vision is coming into being and a greater consciousness is being unfolded. ..A new strength, born of suffering, is pulsating in the veins and a new sympathy and understanding is being born of past suffering---a greater desire to see others suffer less, and, if they must suffer, to see that they bear it nobly and come out of it without too many scars. I have wept, but I do not want others to weep; but if they do, I know what it means. (from The Herald of the Star, January 1926)

This new vision and consciousness reached a climax in 1929, when Krishnamurti rebuffed attempts by Leadbeater and Besant to continue with The Order of the Star, the section of the Theosophical Society devoted to the coming of the World Teacher. Krishnamurti subsequently disbanded the Order, whose head he was. In his speech disbanding the Order, he stated:

You may remember the story of how the devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, 'What did that man pick up?"" He picked up a piece of the truth," said the devil. "That is a very bad business for you, then," said his friend. "Oh, not at all," the devil replied, "I am going to help him organize it."

I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor

After disbanding the Order and drifting away from the Theosophical Society and its belief system, he spent the rest of his life holding dialogues and giving public talks on his observations on the nature of truth, sorrow and freedom. Krishnamurti did not accept followers, because he saw the relationship between a guru and a disciple as essentially exploitative. He asked people to explore together with him and "walk as two friends". He accepted gifts and support given to him (his main residence being on donated land in Ojai, California) and continued with lecture tours and the publication of books for more than half a century.

Later years

In his later years, J. Krishnamurti spoke at the United Nations in New York, on the 11th April 1985, where he was awarded the United Nations 1984 Peace medal. ()

Aged 90, in November 1985, he revisted the places he had grown up in India, holding a last set of talks between then and January 1986, in farewell. The final talks were on fundamental principles of belief and lessons. Krishnamurti commented that he did not wish to invite Death, but was not sure how long his body would last, he had already lost some 6 kg (13 lb) and once he could no longer talk or teach, he would have no further purpose. He said a formal farewell to all four points of the compass, the so-called 'elephant's turn', on the Adayar shore where he had long ago come to the attention of others. His final talk, on January 4, 1986, invited his co-participants to examine with him the nature of inquiry, the nature of life, and the nature of creation. It ended:

"So we are inquiring what makes a bird. What is creation behind all this? Are you waiting for me to describe it, to go into it? .. Why? Why do you ask ? Because I asked? No description can ever describe the origin. The origin is nameless; the origin is absolutely quiet, it's not whirring about making noise. Creation is something that is most holy, that's the most sacred thing in life, and if you have made a mess of your life, change it. Change it today, not tomorrow. If you are uncertain, find out why and be certain. If your thinking is not straight, think straight, logically. Unless all that is prepared, all that is settled, you can't enter into this world, into the world of creation."

"It ends." (these two words are hardly audible, breathed rather than spoken)

"This is the last talk. Do you want to sit together quietly for a while? All right, sirs, let us sit quietly for a while."

(quotes in this section from "The Last Talks")

Teachings

A brief summary of his teachings is contained in "The Core of the Teachings", a five paragraph text which says in part:

"Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever-limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution."

"When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind."

In "The Last Talks", Radhika Harzberger comments,

"He had set his face against the whole paraphernalia of organized religion - its dogma, churches, rituals, sacred books and gurus - since 1929 when he had written: 'When Krishnamurti dies, which is inevitable, you will set about forming rules in your minds, because the individual, Krishnamurti, had represented to you the Truth. So you will build a temple, you will then begin to have ceremonies, to invent phrases, dogmas, systems of belief, creeds, and to create philosophies. If you build great foundations upon me, the individual, you will be caught in that house, in that temple, and so you will have to have another Teacher come and extricate you from that temple. But the human mind is such that you will build another temple around Him, and so it will go on and on.'

A tremendous volume of material exists documenting the philosophical investigations of Krishnamurti (or simply "K" as he is sometimes referred to) mostly in the form of recorded conversations and talks, although K also wrote several series of short essays and kept a personal journal at least twice in his life. He had dialogues and personal meetings with a wide variety of people from all kinds of backgrounds. An example of the far-ranging and probing dialogues he had is a series of conversations recorded in 1980 with theoretical physicist David Bohm that resulted in the publication of The Ending of Time and The Future of Humanity. These conversations are also available on audio tape and a subset of them on video and DVD as well.

Observation without reward

Questioner: "I have listened to you for many years and I have become quite good at watching my thoughts and being aware of every thing I do, but I have never touched the deep waters or experienced the transformation of which you speak. Why?"

Krishnamurti: I think it is fairly clear why none of us do experience something beyond the mere watching. There may be rare moments of an emotional state in which we see, as it were, the clarity of the sky between clouds, but I do not mean anything of that kind. All such experiences are temporary and have very little significance. The questioner wants to know why, after these many years of watching, he hasn't found the deep waters. Why should he find them? Do you understand? You think that by watching your own thoughts you are going to get a reward: if you do this, you will get that. You are really not watching at all, because your mind is concerned with gaining a reward. You think that by watching, by being aware, you will be more loving, you will suffer less, be less irritable, get something beyond; so your watching is a process of buying. With this coin you are buying that, which means that your watching is a process of choice; therefore it isn't watching, it isn't attention. To watch is to observe

I am going to take an example and work it out, and you will see. Let us say I am violent, as most people are. Our whole culture is violent; but I won't enter into the anatomy of violence now, because that is not the problem we are considering. I am violent, and I realize that I am violent. What happens? My immediate response is that I must do something about it, is it not? I say I must become non-violent. That is what every religious teacher has told us for centuries: that if one is violent one must become non-violent. So I practise, I do all the ideological things. But now I see how absurd that is, because the entity who observes violence and wishes to change it into non-violence, is still violent. So I am concerned, not with the expression of that entity, but with the entity himself. You are following all this, I hope?

Now, what is that entity who says, `I must not be violent'? Is that entity different from the violence he has observed? Are they two different states? Do you understand, sirs, or is this too abstract? It is near the end of the talk and probably you are a bit tired. Surely, the violence and the entity who says, `I must change violence into non-violence', are both the same. To recognize that fact is to put an end to all conflict, is it not? There is no longer the conflict of trying to change, because I see that the very movement of the mind not to be violent is itself the outcome of violence.

So, the questioner wants to know why it is that he cannot go beyond all these superficial wrangles of the mind. For the simple reason that, consciously or unconsciously, the mind is always seeking something, and that very search brings violence, competition, the sense of utter dissatisfaction. It is only when the mind is completely still that there is a possibility of touching the deep waters.

6th public talkOjai, 21st July 1955from the booklet "Surely, Freedom From the Self is the True Function of Man"

Other Themes

Choiceless Awareness

The liberating process must begin with the choiceless awareness of what you will and of your reactions to the symbol-system which tells you that you ought, or ought not, to will it. (Foreword to The First and Last Freedom)

The Problem

If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help others out of this chaos--not in the future, not to-morrow, but now. (The First and Last Freedom, p25)

Revolution

Real revolution is not according to any particular pattern, either of the left or of the right, but it is a revolution of values, a revolution from sensate values to the values that are not sensate or created by environmental influences. (The First and Last Freedom, p43) To bring about a fundamental revolution in oneself, one must understand the whole process of one's thought and feeling in relationship. (p49, The First and Last Freedom.)

Creativeness

The state of creativeness comes only when the self, which is the process of recognition and accumulation, ceases to be because, after all, consciousness as the 'me' is the centre of recognition, and the centre of recognition, and trecognition is merely the process of the accumulation of experience. (p40, The First and last Freedom.) The creative release comes only when the thinker is the thought -- but the gap cannot be bridged by any effort. (p140, The First and Last Freedom.)

Thought

Anything that springs from thought is conditioned, is of time, of memory; therefor it is not real. (p139, The First and Last Freedom.)

Belief

If we had no belief but goodwill, love and consideration between us, the there would be no wars. (p183, The First and Last Freedom.)

Peace

To live peacefully means not to create antagonism. (p184, The First and Last Freedom.)

Love

Love is not different from truth. Love is that state in which the thought process, as time, has completely ceased. Where love is, there is transformation. Without love, revolution has no meaning, for the revolution is merely destruction, decay, a greater and greater ever-mounting mystery. Where there is love, there is revolution, because love is transformation from moment to moment. (p288, The First and Last Freedom.)

A good "first book" to gain an understanding of his teachings is Freedom From the Known, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1969, ISBN 0060648082.

Quotations

• "The pursuit of authority only breeds fear." (p75, The First and Last Freedom.)
• "Thought is nothing else but reaction." (p117, The First and Last Freedom.)
• "Freedom is always at the beginning and not at the end." (p118, The First and Last Freedom.)
• "If we are to discuss this question of a fundamental change in ourselves and therefore in the world, and in this change to awaken a certain vision, and enthusiasm, a zeal, a faith, a hope, a certainty which will give us the necessary impetus for action--if we are to understand that, isn't it necessary to go into this question of consciousness?" (p136, The First and Last Freedom.)
• "Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection."
• "If one can really come to that state of saying, 'I do not know,' it indicates an extraordinary sense of humility; there is no arrogance of knowledge; there is no self-assertive answer to make an impression. When you can actually say, 'I do not know,' which very few are capable of saying, then in that state all fear ceases because all sense of recognition, the search into memory, has come to an end; there is no longer inquiry into the field of the known."
• "Obviously what causes war is the desire for power, position, prestige, money; also the disease called nationalism, the worship of a flag; and the disease of organized religion, the worship of a dogma. All these are the causes of war; if you as an individual belong to any of the organized religions, if you are greedy for power, if you are envious, you are bound to produce a society which will result in destruction. So again it depends upon you and not on the leaders – not on so-called statesmen and all the rest of them. It depends upon you and me but we do not seem to realize that. If once we really felt the responsibility of our own actions, how quickly we could bring to an end all these wars, this appalling misery! But you see, we are indifferent. We have three meals a day, we have our jobs, we have our bank account, big or little, and we say, 'For God’s sake, don’t disturb us, leave us alone'."
• "the description is not the described"
• "Freedom from the Known is death, and then you are living."
• "To divide anything into what should be and what is, is the most deceptive way of dealing with life."
• "If I see very clearly the label 'poison' on a bottle, I leave it alone. There is no effort not to be attracted to it. Similarly - and in this lies the greatest difficulty - if I realize that any effort on my part is detrimental, if I see the truth of that, then I am free of effort." (p47, On God.)
• "It is no measure of good health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

Influence

It is important to view Krishnamurti in the context of his legacy. Throughout his long life, Krishnamurti exerted a great influence at the confluence of educated philosophical and spiritual thought. Because of his ideas and his era, Krishnamurti has come to be seen as an exemplar for modern spiritual teachers - particularly those who disavow formal rituals and dogma. His conception of truth as a pathless land, with the possibility of immediate self-realization, is mirrored in New Age teachings as diverse as those of est, Bruce Lee, Da Free John, and even the Dalai Lama.

Krishnamurti was close friends with Aldous Huxley. Huxley wrote the foreword to The First and Last Freedom.

Criticism of Krishnamurti

Due to his radical ideas, Krishnamurti has been criticized. A number of people who knew him through the years pointed out that—despite having lived a large share of his life in Europe and America, and despite having a European education—Krishnamurti’s life expresses something of the Indian Brahmin lifestyle, for he was supported, even pampered, through the years by devoted followers and servants. The questions then arise as to whether his attitudes were conditioned by indulgence and privilege, and whether he was in a unique position to transcend conflict or time.

Krishnamurti occasionally commented on the atypical circumstances of his life. He said that continuous exposure to the spiritually ambitious did not sway him.

Regarding his unique position, he offered a metaphor of Thomas Edison. He would argue that we do not all have to possess the inventiveness of an Edison to benefit from the lightbulb, but that our task was to simply learn how to switch the light on.

According to Radha Rajagopal Sloss, the daughter of his editor/business manager D. Rajagopal, Krishnamurti kept certain aspects of his private life concealed; including a love affair of many years between himself and Rajagopal’s wife, Rosalind. However, Sloss' allegations have been contradicted by Mary Lutyens in her book 'Krishnamurti and the Rajagopals'.

Partial list of published works

• The First and Last Freedom, ISBN 0060648317
• Education and the Significance of Life
• Life Ahead
• Beyond Violence
• Truth and Actuality
• The Wholeness of Life, Harper & Row, 1978, ISBN 0060648686
• Exploration into Insight
• Meditations
• From Darkness to Light
• Krishnamurti on Education
• You are the World
• Commentaries on Living, ISBN 0835603903.
• Think on These Things, ISBN 0060916095.
• Freedom from the Known, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1969, ISBN 0060648082.
• Light in Oneself, The, ISBN 1570624429.
• The Awakening of Intelligence, ISBN 0060648341.
• Meeting Life: Writings and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society, ISBN 0062505262
• The Ending of Time (with David Bohm), San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985, ISBN 0060647965
• The Future of Humanity (with David Bohm), ISBN 0060647973
• Limits of Thought: Discussions. (with David Bohm) London: Routledge, 1999. ISBN 0-415-19398-2
• Krishnamurti's Notebook, San Fransciso: Harper & Row, 1982. ISBN 0060648414, LoC B5134.K765A34 1982 . personal journal, 1973-1975, is one of the few books that Krishnamurti actually wrote himself (the majority of titles actually being transcripts of talks and discussions). Written as a diary, which ends as suddenly as it begins, it describes Krishnamurti's world from the inside - in particular his experience of the manifestations of a state which he refers to as 'the otherness'.
• Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal 2
• Krishnamurti's Journal
• At the Feet of the Master

References

• Pupul Jayakar, Krishnamurti: A Biography, San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986
• Mary Lutyens, Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening, London: John Murray, 1975
• Mary Lutyens, Krishnamurti: The_Years of Fulfilment, London: John Murray, 1983
• Mary Lutyens, The Life and Death of Krishnamurti, ISBN 0-900506-22-9
• Mary Lutyens Krishnamurti and the Rajagopals, Ojai, CA: Krishnamurti Foundation of America, 1996
• Helen Nearing, Loving and Leaving the Good Life, White River Jct., VT: Chelsea Green, 1992
• Radha Rajagopal Sloss, Lives in the Shadow with J. Krishnamurti, London: Bloomsbury and Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991

See also

• Annie Besant
• David Bohm
• U. G. Krishnamurti
• Aldous Huxley

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