Krishnamurti (The Man, The Mystery & The Message)

Krishnamurti was an enigma. He was ‘discovered’ on an Indian beach at the age of 14 and, fulfilling Theosophy’s messianic expectations, he was brought up to be a ‘World Teacher’. When he died in 1986 at the age of 90, Krishnamurti had spent over 60 years expounding a revolutionary and totally original philosophy through his books and talks. Major writers, statesmen and scientists were among his admirers, and many set him on a par with the great religious teachers of history.

This book is an in-depth exploration of the life and work of this remarkable man. Incorporating material from his earlier book, The Quest of the Quiet Mind one of the few books that Krishnamurti read about himself and approved — the author offers a clear and elegant summary of Krishnamurti’s teaching. Further, he discusses the way in which the indisputable logic and lucidity of the teaching confronts us with the challenge to change.

In library catalogues Krishnamurti is generally listed as a philosopher. He would have demurred at the title, and few academic philosophers would have applied it to him, if only because he had read none of their books. In fact he professed to have read hardly anything, except thrillers and P. G. Wodehouse novels for entertainment, and in all his work there is scarcely a reference to any other writer. Yet what else do you call aman who, for more than half a century, explored and discussed such subjects as freedom, truth, fear, death, suffering, ethics, the purpose of life and the nature of intelligence? These are some of the perennial subjects of philosophy, and Krishnamurti expounded original ideas on all of them; ideas derived entirely from his own life experience.

What an extraordinary life experience it was; so extraordinary indeed that the teaching that emerged from it is perhaps too demanding and austere for the majority of people. In 1929 he declared it his purpose in life ‘to set man free’. His prescriptions for the attainment of freedom and the conquest of fear and suffering are simple to comprehend, but for most people difficult in the extreme to practise. His ideal of the human condition was that described in the lines of the poet T. S. Eliot :

Krishnamurti himself was prepared to pay the cost, and in his early life he was quite singularly situated to be able to do so, being provided for and protected from the harsher realities and the beguiling temptations of life in a manner befitting the young god chat he was believed by many to be. His mode of life and a temperamental tendency towards mysticism combined to give him a number of religious experiences which at once enhanced his authority with his following and, paradoxically, caused him to repudiate that following. These experiences also served to lay the foundation of his philosophy.

Krishnamurti expounded this philosophy, in books and talks for some seventy years, and its lucid and challenging concepts have come to the notice of millions. If he had accomplished his declared aim, human beings would be fundamentally changed; so some may say that the aim was misconccived by a young man who was naive to certain realities of life and human nature. But if he was not a world-changcr he was certainly a world-influencer. Although he declared himself ‘rather allergic to gurus’, and insisted that nobody could learn anything of significance from anybody else, his patent distinction as a human being and a philosopher was such that over some three or four generations young people flocked to listen to him. When he died in 1986 his world-wide influence was certainly more profound than that of more flamboyant and well-publicized guru-figures who emanated from points East in the 1960s and 70s, who gencrally were in the business of marketing some nostrum or technique for the alleviation of human malaise and the attainment of that spiritual growth that all but the most benighted of human beings come to conceive as the purpose of life. Krishnamurti had no nostrums or techniques to sell, or even to recommend. Philosophy, he said, ‘means the love of truth, not love of words, not love of ideas, not love of speculations, but love of truth. And that means you have to find out for yourself where reality is. Let us begin, then, by seeing how this remarkable man found out for himself ‘where reality is’.