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Introduction

The bare facts of Krishnamurti’s early life are too well known to warrant more than the briefest outline here. Born on May 11, 1895, in the small town of Madanapalle, 180 miles west of Madras, he was the eighth child of strictly vegetarian Brahmin parents. His father, Jiddu Narianiah, was a minor government official. Krishnamurti’s mother died when he was ten, and early in 1909 his father retired and moved with his four surviving sons to the international Headquarters of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, Madras, where he was given a secretarial job.

At this time, the majority of Theosophists believed in the near coming of the Lord Maitreya, the World Teacher, and the leaders of the Society had for some years been looking for a body whom the Lord might occupy when he came, as he was said to have occupied the body of Jesus and, two thousand years earlier, that of Sri Krishna.

Soon after Narianiah came to Adyar, Krishnamurti was picked out by Charles Webster Leadbeater, one of the chief lecturers for the Society, who claimed clairvoyance. Leadbeater saw Krishnamurti on the beach at Adyar and declared that his aura was without a trace of selfishness. Leadbeater wrote to his colleague, Mrs Annie Besant, President of the Society, who was then in Europe, to tell her that he believed he had found the ‘vehicle’ for the Lord. When Mrs Besant returned to India later in the year she endorsed Leadbeater’s ‘discovery’, and not long afterwards obtained Narianiah’s consent to adopt Krishnamurti and his younger brother Nitya, from whom he refused to be parted.

In 1911 an organisation was founded by Mrs Besant and Leadbeater called the Order of the Star in the East, of which Krishnamurti was made the Head. This was to prepare the members of the Society for the coming of the Lord Maitreya. In 1912 Mrs Besant took the boys to England and left them there to be educated by Theosophical tutors. They remained in Europe until the end of 1921 when Mrs Besant summoned them back to India for Krishnamurti to begin his mission as a lecturer for Theosophy and the Order of the Star in the East. Krishnamurti returned reluctantly. By that time Nitya, who earlier in the year had contracted tuberculosis, was said by a specialist in Switzerland to be cured. After two months in India the brothers went on to Sydney where Leadbeater had been living as the head of a Theosophical community since 1917. On the voyage to Australia Nitya had a recurrence of his illness so, after a few weeks’ stay in Sydney, it was decided that the brothers should return to Switzerland via America.

While breaking their journey at San Francisco, they accepted the loan of a cottage in the Ojai Valley, 1,500 feet above sea level and some eighty miles north of Los Angeles—a valley that was recommended as being particularly beneficial to consumptives.

The brothers remained there at Pine Cottage, as it was called, for the next eleven months. In August 1922, not long after they arrived at the cottage, Krishnamurti underwent a spiritual experience that completely transformed his life. This experience was followed by excruciating pain in his head and spine, which came to be known as ‘the process’ and which continued on and off for many years when he was not travelling or giving talks. In October 1922 the cottage and six acres of land and a larger house, which they called Arya Vihara, were bought for the brothers by a trust set up by Mrs Besant. In June 1923, when the brothers at last returned to Europe, Nitya was again pronounced cured, but he was to have a relapse the following year and to die in November 1925—an overwhelming grief for Krishnamurti.

Nevertheless, Krishnamurti continued to pursue his mission—with enthusiasm now since his transforming experience—travelling, giving talks in Europe, India, Australia and America, and holding gatherings at Castle Eerde at Ommen in Holland, an eighteenth-century castle and large estate given for his work by Baron Philip van Pallandt. All the while he was gradually evolving his own philosophy. In April 1927 Mrs Besant declared to the press: ‘The World Teacher is here.’

It was a great shock to all the leaders of Theosophy and to most of Krishnamurti’s followers when in August 1929 at the Ommen Gathering, Krishnamurti, in the presence of Mrs Besant and 3,000 Star members, dissolved the Order of the Star.^* He never actually denied being the World Teacher; he said, ‘I do not care if you believe I am the World Teacher or not. That is of very little importance. ... I do not want you to follow me. ... You have been accustomed to being told ... what your spiritual status is. How childish! Who but yourself can tell you if you are beautiful or ugly inside?’¹

Krishnamurti told me, when I was writing the second volume of his biography, ‘If I was writing the life I would begin with the vacant mind.’ Is ‘the vacant mind’ the clue to the understanding of K (as I shall call him hereafter), both as a man and as a teacher? This vacancy and lack of memory in K has proved a great drawback in recording his life. When writing of a living person there is the handicap of criticism from his friends and contemporaries who all have their own vision of him, but there is usually the counterbalance of his own recollections, whereas in K’s case, when he did come out with some memory, one could never be sure whether it was his own or merely something somebody had told him. On the other hand, can any religious or philosophical teacher ever have had his public utterances made so abundantly available in books and on audio and video tapes?

In one of the two books K wrote himself (in contrast to his other books which are edited versions of his talks or discussions or were dictated, as were his Letters to the Schools), he gave two memories of his boyhood and childhood that seem utterly authentic: ‘He [he almost invariably spoke of himself in the third person, usually as K] was standing there [by the river] with no one around, alone, unattached and far away. He was about fourteen. They had found his brother and himself quite recently and all the fuss and sudden importance given to him was around him. Standing there alone, lost and strangely aloof, was his first and lasting remembrance of those days and events. He doesn’t remember his childhood, the schools and the caning.’

And again: ‘As a young boy he used to sit by himself under a large tree near a pond in which lotuses grew; they were pink and had a strong smell. From the shade of that spacious tree he would watch the green snakes and the chameleons, the frogs and the water snakes.’

In the same book he wrote about himself: ‘He has never been hurt, though many things happened to him, flattery and insult, threat and security. It was not that he was insensitive, unaware: he had no image of himself, no conclusion, no ideology.’²

There is, however, another and more important source of personal memories. In the summer of 1913 in Normandy he was set to write an essay by one of his tutors on ‘Fifty Years of my Life’. He made it autobiographical, intending to add to it year by year. All that was actually written was some 3,500 words giving a sketch of his life up till 1911. This firsthand account is very valuable since it shows that at eighteen his memory seems to have been as clear as anyone else’s. It also shows that at the time of his mother’s death in 1905 he was clairvoyant. This was confirmed by his father.³

The death of his mother when he was ten must have caused K bewildered grief for he was particularly close to her, having been so often prevented from going to school by recurrent bouts of malaria. The move to Adyar might not have affected him much since his father’s job as a rent collector had necessitated several moves from one place to another. But the change in his life when Leadbeater took him up was dramatic. It has often been emphasised that Leadbeater ‘discovered’ him from the beauty of his aura and not from his appearance because with Leadbeater’s homosexual predilections (he had been involved in a homosexual scandal in 1906) the ‘discovery’ of a beautiful young boy would not have been remarkable. According to contemporary accounts K was under-nourished and scrawny, with lice even in his eyebrows, mosquito-bites all over him and crooked teeth. (His teeth were still being straightened after he went to England in 1912.) With his head shaved in front to the crown and falling to his knees in a pigtail at the back, he could not have been a prepossessing figure in spite of his wonderful eyes. A slatternly aunt looked after the household. K had had two sisters but one had died before his mother and the other was married and lived with her husband’s family. K himself said that if he had not been taken up by Leadbeater he would almost certainly have died. If K was indeed the eighth child of his parents, four other children must have died as well as his sister, for he had only his married sister and one older brother living. His other two brothers were younger.

A photograph of K taken in January 1910 shows what an extraordinary change must have taken place in his appearance in the eleven months since he was ‘discovered’. It is the picture of a boy of perfect beauty. But by then his hair had grown and his physical strength had been built up by very long bicyle rides, swimming, tennis, exercises on parallel bars and what was considered to be nourishing food, with a great deal of milk, most unsuitable for an Indian body accustomed to milk only in the form of curd. (In consequence of having so much milk and porridge forced down him, K suffered agonies of indigestion right up to 1916.)

Mrs Besant was on a seven-month tour of America and Europe at the time K was ‘discovered’. It was not until November 27, 1909 that she arrived back in Madras and met K for the first time. By then he and his brother Nitya, three years younger, on whom K was deeply dependent, had been taken away from school, where K was beaten almost every day because of his inability to learn, and were being taught by two Englishmen, an Indian and an Italian as well as by Leadbeater himself. (Later on another Indian, B. Shiva Rao, became an extra tutor.) The emphasis was on English in the hope that K would be able to speak to Mrs Besant in that language when she arrived. Although it was necessary for K to learn English if he was to become the World Teacher, it seems a great pity that he was allowed to forget his native Telegu and taught no other Indian language beyond a smattering of Sanskrit. When Mrs Besant read aloud to the two boys it was English books. The Jungle Books and The Scarlet Pimpernel were two K remembered in his essay and ‘enjoyed very much’. The Shakespeare plays she also read to them were not commented on.

From the moment Mrs Besant, then aged sixty-two, first saw K on the station platform at Madras she loved him and continued to love him until her death, a feeling that was reciprocated. She was the only person he never forgot throughout his life, even though she died in 1934; he always spoke of her with reverence and devotion. (He referred to her always as Dr Besant although she had only an honorary degree conferred on her by the Hindu University at Benares in 1921.)

The statement in Pupul Jayakar’s recent memoir of Krishnamurti that Leadbeater ‘certainly demanded a Brahmin body’ for the ‘vehicle’ is not borne out by the facts.⁴ Mrs Besant in a public lecture in Chicago in 1909 on her favourite subject, ‘The Coming Teacher’, had announced, ‘We look for him to come in the Western World this time—not in the East as did Christ two thousand years ago.’ Indeed, the Western vehicle had already been chosen by Leadbeater. This was a good-looking American boy, Hubert van Hook, son of Dr Weller van Hook of Chicago. Leadbeater had picked him out while on a lecture tour of America a few years before and had brought him to Europe where Mrs Besant had met him. When Mrs Besant saw him again in Chicago in 1909 she was so struck by him that she persuaded his mother to leave her husband and take him to Adyar to be trained by Leadbeater for his stupendous role. At the very time K was ‘discovered’, Mrs van Hook and Hubert were on their way to Madras, never dreaming that Hubert had been supplanted.

What poor Hubert’s feelings were can be imagined. Nevertheless, he and his mother remained at Adyar for five years. He was allowed to share K’s lessons and play tennis with him but forbidden by Leadbeater to touch K’s tennis racquet or bicyle for fear of contamination. When interviewed in later life Hubert expressed great bitterness.⁵ It is doubtful whether K was aware at the time that there had been a prior choice. Hubert was a very clever boy and it is possible that Leadbeater considered that K’s ‘vacant mind’ would be more malleable than Hubert’s.

In the first volume of my biography of K, I gave a detailed account of his life up to 1929 when at the age of thirty-four he dissolved the Order of the Star and resigned from the Theosophical Society. The story was told largely in his very personal letters to my mother who, during the years of his education in England, was the person he loved most and the only one he wanted to be with. The second volume, which brought his life up to 1980, was concerned with the flowering of his teaching, the new friendships and relationships he formed and his travels practically all over the world, giving public talks in order to pass on to others the solution he had found for the ending of sorrow and the conflict of mankind.

K saw the outer conflict in the world as being inseparable from the inner conflict in man. Society was the result of the individual and the individual the result of society; therefore we are, each one of us, responsible for all the horror and sorrow in the world and, because every human being on earth suffers from the world’s suffering, we share a consciousness with the rest of humanity and are not really individuals at all except superficially. No ideologies, no religions, no authorities, no social reforms can ever end conflict and sorrow; the only thing that can is a complete mutation of each human psyche, a stepping out of the river of human consciousness, a change in the very brain cells themselves. And the mutation has to be instantaneous; it is useless trying to change, for what we are today we will inevitably be tomorrow.

It was to discover how this mutation could be brought about that people came to K’s talks year after year, read his books, listened to his audio tapes and watched him on video. What he had to say was sometimes so difficult to express in words that he could only attempt to say what it was by saying what it was not. For instance, in trying to come upon what love is, he wrote:

... fear is not love, dependence is not love, jealousy is not love, possessiveness and domination are not love, responsibility and duty are not love, self-pity is not love, love is not the opposite of hate any more than humility is the opposite of vanity. So if you can eliminate all these, not by forcing them but by washing them away as the rain washes the dust of many days from a leaf, then perhaps you will come upon this strange flower which man always hungers after.⁶

However, he had no difficulty in finding words for the nature of in-loveness. Someone confessed to him, ‘I have fallen in love, but I know there is no future in this relationship. It is a situation I have experienced many times before, yet I am desperately unhappy without this person. How can I get myself out of this state?’ K’s response was:

The loneliness, the bleakness, wretchedness you feel without this person existed before you fell in love. What you call love is mere stimulation, the temporary covering-up of your own emptiness. You escaped from loneliness through a person, used this person to cover it up. Your problem is not this relationship but rather it is the problem of your own emptiness. ... It is because you have no love in you that you continually look for love to fill you from the outside.⁷

The nearest one will probably ever come to K’s consciousness is in the extraordinary document he wrote in 1960–62. One or two of the people close to him were opposed to the publication of this manuscript, fearing that it would dishearten his followers since it showed that he was not like other men; he seemed to live in a different dimension, so how could ordinary people hope to become like him, hope to bring about a transformation in themselves? He answered this question when he said, ‘We do not all have to be Edisons to turn on the electric light’ and ‘Christopher Columbus went to America in a sailing ship; we can go by jet.’⁸

What we gather from this manuscript, published under the title Krishnamurti’s Notebook, is that what K called ‘the benediction’, ‘the immensity’, ‘the sacredness’, ‘the vastness’ and, most often, ‘the otherness’ or ‘the other’, was with him almost continuously. What was ‘the other’? He always had a sense of being protected. Was it ‘the other’ that protected him? Did he come to ‘the other’ or did ‘the other’ come to him? In the same way it had been asked in 1927: did K’s consciousness blend with that of the Lord Maitreya or did the Lord’s consciousness blend with K’s? At any rate, ‘the other’ was not personalised. Was it a power from a source from which all genius is drawn?

As for ‘the vacant mind’, already referred to, it was not difficult to believe in as I first remember him in about 1914. At times he was so vague and dreamy that he would start violently if suddenly spoken to; he seemed miles away just standing there; he hardly ever sat down except at meals. Yet in some moods he and Nitya would laugh and joke and generally play the fool, moods in which we children delighted. He would sometimes read P. G. Wodehouse or Stephen Leacock aloud to us, laughing so much that he could hardly get his words out. I can recall him so clearly, standing leaning against the bookcase in our drawing-room reading aloud ‘Gertrude the Governess’ (a particular favourite from Nonsense Novels), most of the story lost in his gales of laughter.

His love of laughing never left him, but the extreme vagueness did not last after his experience at Ojai in 1922 except in the sense that he never carried over from one day to another the burden of the past, and that often immediately before addressing an audience he had not the least idea what he was going to say. In the summer of 1924, when he first started talking privately to four girls of whom I, just sixteen, was the youngest, he was tinglingly alive and enthusiastic, telling us that we must change radically, what ‘fun’ it was to change. The motive for change was different in those days; it was in order to become a pupil of the Master^* so that we would be better fitted to serve the World Teacher when he came, whereas in later years it was in order to save the world from sorrow and self-destruction; but the need for a total transformation was just as urgent. We were staying with Nitya, my mother and a few other friends of K’s in a castle-hotel on the top of a mountain at Pergine near Trento. K was twenty-nine then and Nitya twenty-six. K would talk to us all in the mornings in a field below the castle after we had played a game of rounders or volley-ball, but he spoke privately to the four girls in the afternoons because it was these four who were to go to Sydney in a few months’ time, at K’s wish, to be ‘brought on’ along the Path of Discipleship by Leadbeater.

K spoke of the need for passionate feeling. An intellectual concept merely of the World Teacher was useless. It was ‘the power to fall in love, to give oneself completely’ that he found so lacking, especially in older people. We must not suppress feeling but sublimate it. ‘Say to yourself’, he told us, ‘that I have every feeling in the world but they are all subservient to my will.’ We must put aside all personal desires. Cleanliness, both physical and mental, was essential if we were to become pupils of the Master, but above all ‘greatness in thought and feeling’. The worst thing was to be mediocre. You could rise to the highest position in the land and still be mediocre—it was a matter of being, not accomplishment. This horror of mediocrity ran through K’s teaching all his life. (A month before his death he was telling the children at Rishi Valley, the oldest of his Indian schools, what the world mediocre meant and explaining to them that even if they became Prime Minister they could still be mediocre.)

It was much harder for the young people around K in those early days than it was for his young devotees later on. He told us that although it was only human nature to want an ordinary life with a husband, children and a home of our own we could not have any of those things and serve the Lord Maitreya too. These young girls were being urged to lead a celibate life outside a nunnery.

K’s attitude to sex changed as time went on. In 1969 he was writing:

Why have you made sex a problem? Really it doesn’t matter at all whether you go to bed with someone or whether you don’t. Get on with it or drop it but don’t make a problem of it. The problem comes from this constant preoccupation. The really interesting thing is not whether we do or don’t go to bed with someone but why we have all these fragments in our lives. In one restless corner there is sex with all its preoccupations; in another corner there is some other kind of turmoil; in another a striving after this or that, and in each corner there is the continual chattering of the mind. There are so many ways in which energy is wasted.⁹

And three years later he was saying to a group of his followers: ‘They used to tell me in my youth, you must be a perfect instrument, in what you do, what you say and how you write. Then only can the teacher use it [the body]. And you are saying exactly the same thing in a different way: “You must show that you lead a perfect life” ... You’re prejudiced, you’re conditioned. You say, “He must not sleep with somebody. He must not tell a lie. He must be vegetarian. He must be etc. etc.” That’s your conditioning. Concern yourself with your own conditioning.’ It was the teaching that K was concerned with, not the personality of the teacher. ‘Why do you bother whether the teacher is this, that, blue-eyed, purple-eyed or long-haired? When the house is burning you don’t enquire into the colour of the man that set it on fire.’¹⁰

Given below are some extracts copied verbatim from the diary I kept at Pergine; they show what the pressure from K was like on young people in those early years:

September 1 [1924]. Today I went over to rest at the Square Tower and there had over an hour’s conversation with Krishna. He began as he always does, ‘Well, Mary,’ repeated at intervals while I remain inarticulate and look stupid. He wanted then to know why I wished to become a pupil of the Master. He wanted to make quite sure that it was not because everyone around was trying to become one and I wanted to have a shot at it. I tried to convince him that this was not so. I must say he seemed to understand wonderfully—and he has the great power of making things appear almost ludicrously simple. He said that one of the first things was to have an open mind—which I had not got—for it was almost disgraceful that I had so many prejudices and fixed opinions which formed terrible barriers. He said I had an over-developed mentality but that I had altogether left behind my emotional development. He then asked me a blank question: I desired something, knew what was in the way, was positive of my power to get over the obstacles—so why didn’t I get there? A question I have asked myself many times. In the end he answered it himself—because I had not yet decided it was worth while giving up my whole life. That I did not feel it sufficiently. He said that I had never yet discovered anything strong enough to take me out of myself. He said that I must feel so acutely that I should be able to jump out of the window. He said I was too damned calculating—and like an iceberg.

He said many more things that I cannot remember—but nothing can portray the enthusiasm with which he brought out his similes—the fire which lit up his eyes. I could see the effort he was making to drum his own eagerness into me—I know quite well, as he said, he would give his very life to help (’to make you happy for the rest of your life in whatever you do—I would honestly—I’m not joking—give my life’) and yet it was quite impossible for me to respond. September 5. This afternoon I had another long talk with Krishna and I am going to do my best to put it into words. He was delighted to hear I was feeling beastly—and took it as a good omen. He began as always by saying, ‘Well, how’s the iceberg getting on?’ He pointed out the disadvantages of being unfeeling—and all the selfishness of it. He said I must get rid of the layers of brick I had plumped on the top of my natural instincts—that it was disgraceful to be so lethargic—especially at my age—that I had a heavy body that was in the way—that I gave myself away at every movement—when I played games, walked or talked. The reason for this state of affairs was quite evident. I had seen Betty^* getting into tempers etc. and instinctively I had said, ‘Well, I shan’t let myself be like that.’ And now he could see every day I had a feeling of irritation, of affection which was gone in a minute. That this ‘self recollectedness’ could be of marvellous utility if used in the right way. He said that if I once made up my mind to change—and I must change at once—that I could beat them all—get along with great strides—that he felt this in his bones. He said—‘supposing someone comes to you and says they are in love with you, ready to go to the other end of the earth for you—to worship you, what would you do? You’d take it quite calmly and say, “Alright—go on then”.’ He said that from morning to night he was thinking of me—that even two years ago when he had woken up to all this, he had thought—will Mary come to it? He said that if only it was assured that we could all be together working in the future that he would be happy—that if I turned from it like Barbie and Robert^† it would drive him mad—that he had been fond of me ever since I was a baby but I must, must, must change. He sat there drumming his enthusiasm into me. None of us realise how truly great he is—how that every minute he is sacrificing himself, working, working, working.

September 25. I have had more wonderful talks with Krishna—in one of which he made me weep—urging on me the need for immediate effort in case the vision of the mountain top should fade away. In the last talk it was I who nearly made him weep—and he finished by saying that no one will ever love me as much as he does—that none of us know what real love, real devotion is. That he wanted to see me great, happy and beautiful—and if his had been an ordinary life he would have asked me to marry him long ago.

K was mistaken in thinking I was unfeeling. I was in truth devoured by a secret, very human love for Nitya. From 1926 to 1929 I was very close to K. We had been drawn together by Nitya’s death. While I was with him I could live in an ecstasy of sublimated love. My devotion, however, was not able after three years to withstand the temptations of the world during his long absences in India and America, although he wrote frequently, very beautiful letters. When I became engaged to be married in 1929 he was hurt—maybe for a day or two and then for my sake more than for his own—whereas I inflicted on myself a deep injury that lasted for sixteen years. I never, however, lost touch with K; I saw him whenever he came to London and never stopped loving and revering him. It was to be forty years, though, from the time of my first marriage before I started working for him again.

_______________

^* The annual report of the Order of the Star in the East for 1926 gave the total number of members as 43,000 in forty countries. Only about two-thirds of these were also members of the Theosophical Society.

^* Most Theosophists at that time believed in the Masters, the Mahatmas, who had chosen to remain in human incarnation in order to help humanity along the path to perfection instead of passing into Nirvana. They were said to live in a valley in Tibet and could be visited in one’s astral form on the astral plane. Two of these Masters, Kuthumi and Morya, held the Theosophical Society under their special protection and were willing to accept pupils if of sufficient spiritual development. Only Leadbeater could tell one when one had been accepted by a Master.

^* Elisabeth, the sister next to me in age who became a composer. She was one of the four girls at Pergine. The other two were Ruth Roberts and Helen Knothe, an American, who was K’s favourite at that time.

^† My only brother and my eldest sister whom Nitya had loved. They had reacted against Theosophy in 1914.