Jiddu Krishnamurti (Telugu: జిడ్డు కృష్ణమూర్తి) or J. Krishnamurti (May 11, 1895–February 17, 1986), was born in Madanapalle, India and discovered, in 1909, as a teenager by C.W. Leadbeater on the private beach at the Theosophical headquarters at Adyar in Chennai, India. He was subsequently raised under the tutelage of 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. 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 individual speaker and educator with essentially the following message:"Truth is a pathless land", humans cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. At age 90 he addressed the United Nations on the subject of peace and awareness, and was awarded the 1984 UN Peace Medal. He gave his last talk in India a month before his death, in 1986, in Ojai, California.
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.
His official 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 close associate of his from the Order of the Star, and knew him 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. Lutyens wrote three additional volumes of biography: The Years of Fulfillment (1983), The Open Door (1988), and Krishnamurti and the Rajagopals (1996). Additionally, she published an abridgement of the first three volumes, The Life and Death of Krishnamurti (1991). Other published biographies of Krishnamurti include: Krishnamurti, A Biography (1986), by associate Pupul Jayakar and Star In the East: Krishnamurti, The Invention of a Messiah (2002), by Roland Vernon.
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Jiddu Krishnamurti 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 parents were second cousins, having a total of eleven children, only six of whom survived childhood. They were strict vegetarians, even shunning eggs, and throwing away any food that the "shadow of an Englishman crossed". (Lutyens, Awakening, p 1)
He was born in a small town about 150 miles (250 km) north of Madras, India. His birthdate has been also stated as May 12, however Mary Lutyens, points out, that the Brahmin day is calculated from dawn and he was born at 12:30 AM, so therefore on May 11. It's only the Western world who would state this was May 12. "As an eighth child, who happened to be a boy, he was, in accordance with Hindu orthodoxy, called after Sri Krishna who had himself been an eighth child."[1]
In 1903, the family moved to Cudappah and Krishna contracted malaria, a disease with which he would suffer recurrent bouts over many years. In 1904, his eldest sister died, aged twenty. In his memoirs, he describes his mother as "to a certain extent psychic" and how she would frequently see and converse with her dead daughter. Krishna also states that he saw his dead sister on some occasions. In Dec 1905, his mother, Jiddu Sanjeevamma, died at Cudappah, when Krishnamurti was ten years old. Krishna says: "I may mention that I saw her [my mother] after she died" (Lutyens, p 5)
"Narianiah, though an orthodox Brahmin, had been a member of the Theosophical Society since 1881 (Theosophy embraces all religions)." (Lutyens, p 7). This was while Helena Blavatsky was still its head in India. Narianiah had retired at the end of 1907 and wrote to Annie Besant to recommend himself as a caretaker for the 260-acre Theosophical estate at Adyar. He had four boys and Annie thought they would be a disturbing influence and so turned him down. He continued his requests and finally was accepted as an assistant to the Recording Secretary of the Esoteric Section. His family which included, himself, his four sons, and a nephew moved there on Jan 23, 1909.[2] It was a few months after this last move that Krishna was discovered by C.W. Leadbeater, who believed him to be the awaited vessel for Maitreya.
This discovery created a bit of a problem, as there was already a conflicting claim made for Hubert van Hook (b 1896), son of Dr Weller van Hook, a surgeon in Chicago, and the General Secretary of the Theosophical Society in the United States. Hubert was also chosen by Leadbeater and after she left her husband, his mother brought him to India for special training. After Krishna was found, Hubert was soon dropped. (Lutyens, p 12)
Leadbeater had a history of being in the company of young boys, and gossip about that was vehemently denied by Annie Besant. The gossip erupted into a scandal in 1906 and led to Leadbeater's resignation from the Theosophical Society, however at the end of 1908 he was re-instated on a vote. (Lutyens, p 15)
Hubert and Mrs Van Hook, his mother, also arrived at Adyar and stayed there for some time.
Krishna (or Krishnaji as he was often called) 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.
Lutyens states that there came a time when Krishnamurti fully believed that he was to become the World Teacher. The death of his brother Nitya on November 11, 1925 at age 27 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):
From 1925 onward things were to never be the same again.
In 1925, he was expected by Theosophists to enter Sydney, Australia walking on water, but this did not eventuate and he visited Australia the following year by ship.[1]
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. On the opening day of the annual Star Camp at Ommen, Holland, August 2, 1929, in front of several thousand members, he gave a speech disbanding the Order, saying:
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.
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. (Talk and Q+A session transcript)
In November of 1985, he revisited the places in which he had grown up in India, holding a last set of "farewell talks" between then and January 1986. These last 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:
J. Krishnamurti passed away one and a half months later at the age of 90 from pancreatic cancer. His remains were cremated and scattered by friends and former associates in the three countries where he had spent most of his life, India, England and United States of America.
"The Core of the Teachings" contains the essence of Krishnamurti's work. It was written in London on October 21, 1980, and states in its entirety:
The core of Krishnamurti's teaching is contained in the statement he made in 1929 when he said: '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. Man has built in himself images as a fence of security — religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these images dominates man's thinking, his relationships and his daily life. These images are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man. His perception of life is shaped by the concepts already established in his mind. The content of his consciousness is his entire existence. This content is common to all humanity. The individuality is the name, the form and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all mankind. So he is not an individual.
Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not a choice. It is man's pretence that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence. In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity. 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 experience and the experiencer. 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.
Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence.
In "The Last Talks", Radhika Herzberger comments,
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.
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 without choice, to see yourself as you are without any movement of desire to change, which is an extremely arduous thing to do; but that doesn't mean that you are going to remain in your present state. You do not know what will happen if you see yourself as you are without wishing to bring about a change in that which you see. Do you understand?
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 talk Ojai, 21st July 1955 from the booklet "Surely, Freedom From the Self is the True Function of Man".
A good "first book" to gain an understanding of his teachings is Freedom From the Known, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1969, ISBN 0-06-064808-2.
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, and even the Dalai Lama.
Krishnamurti was close friends with Aldous Huxley. Huxley wrote the foreword to The First and Last Freedom. Krishnamurti was also friends with, and influenced the works of, the mythologist Joseph Campbell and the artist Beatrice Wood.
Live's album Mental Jewelry is based on Krishnamurti's philosophies.
Krishnamurti has been criticized, sometimes as to whether he practiced what he preached. A number of people who knew him through the years pointed out that 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.
In her 1991 book, Lives in the Shadow with J. Krishnamurti, Radha Rajagopal Sloss, the daughter of Krishnamurti's associates, Rosalind and Desikacharya Rajagopal, wrote of Krishnamurti's relationship with her parents including the secret affair between Krishnamurti and Rosalind which lasted for many years. The public revelation was received with surprise and consternation by many individuals in the Krishnamurti community, and was also dealt with in a rebuttal volume of biography by Mary Lutyens (Krishnamurti and the Rajagopals, 1996).
Sloss's allegations were centered around the notion that the secret liasion indicated that Krishnamurti had lead a deceptive double life in that he was believed to be celibate by his public following. A later biographical volume by Roland Vernon (Star in the East: Krishnamurti, the Invention of a Messiah), questions the ultimate impact of the revelations when compared to Krishnamurti's body of work as a whole.
Krishnamurti's once close relationship to the Rajagopals deteriorated to the point that Krishnamurti in his later years, took Rajagopal (head of Krishnamurti Writings, Inc.) to court in order to recover certain rights, manuscripts and personal corespondence being withheld by Rajagopal. The resulting litigation and cross complaints continued for many years, and were not resolved until after the death of Krishnamurti in 1986. Krishnamurti's biographer Mary Lutyens placed the preponderance of responsibility for the acrimony of the lawsuits and resulting damage to Krishnamurti's reputation on the personal animosity of the Rajagopals resulting from their loss of influence in Krishnamurti's life. (see Lutyens below).
Perhaps the harshest critic of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the way he operated, the things he taught (such as "choiceless awareness" and "the art of listening"), is U. G. Krishnamurti.
Except for a few noted exceptions - see especially the first three works - Krishnamurti's books are transcripts of his talks and discussions. (Title, year of first publication, different editions: ISBN, notes)
Following works ordered by year of publication:
Principal Biographies
Other Biographies/Memoirs/Reminiscences