PROFILE: What happened to the boy god

by Danah Zohar

FIFTY YEARS ago, to the horror of his devoted followers, Jeddu Krishnamurti announced that he was not a god. Turning his back on the vast fortune which had been accumulated in his name, and the organisation which firmly believed in him to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and thus the new Messiah, he set off to teach his own philosophy of life.

Fifty years later, now aged 85, Krishnamurti is still teaching, drawing crowds in their thousands to listen to his lectures. For the past week 4,000 people have been camping in a Hampshire field, often in heavy rain, to hear his annual public talks at Brockwood Park, and they have not been disappointed.

Krishnamurti speaks simply but with extraordinary authority. But he offers his followers no easy messages. He belongs to no sect, shares no dogma and presents himself wholly without ceremony. Unlike the average Indian guru there are no saffron robes, processions or mantras. And no charge.

Instead, dressed simply in corduroy slacks and an open-necked shirt, and seated on a wooden folding chair, he tells his audience that all such things are deceptions—a hindrance in the search for truth rather than an aid to it.

Which is not at all what Krishnamurti’s original followers had in mind. The story of his early life is as bizarre as his present appearance is ordinary. Hew was “discovered” in 1909 at the age of 14 playing on a beach in the Madras province of southern India by the flamboyant socialist and suffragette Annie Besant and her companion Dr Charles Leadbeater of the Theosophical Society.

The Theosophists believed that a new Messiah would emerge in the East at the turn of the century as the next incarnation of the Lord Maitreya, last seen on earth as Christ. The young Krishnamurti, who was the eighth child of a retired district magistrate, lived with his Brahmin family in desperate poverty, but Leadbeater claimed to detect in this thin, scruffy child an “aura of unselfishness” which showed that he was the chosen one.

He was adopted by Mrs Besant and brought back to England in 1911 to be groomed for this role. He was raised among the aristocracy—Lady Emily Lutyens was his surrogate mother and Lady De La Warr a constant companion—educated privately, and then sent to the Sorbonne. The Theosophists had wide influence among the educated and wealthy all over the world, and a great sense of expectation (as well as a great fortune) awaited the day Krishnamurti would be “given” to the world. Yet when that day came, he renounced it all.

In August 1929 at Ommen in Holland, in the grounds of castle Eerde which with its 5,000 acre estate, had been given to him by Baron Philip van Pallandt, an elaborate ceremony had been planned to initiate him as the World Teacher, and to appoint his disciples. But when Krishnamurti rose to address his followers, he told them:

“You can form other organisations and expect someone else. With that I am not concerned, nor with creating new cages... My only concern is to set men absolutely, unconditionally free.” With that he dissolved his organisation and gave away the vast fortune accumulated in his name. He has refused all such temptations ever since.

“I neither agree nor disagree with what Mrs Besant thought about me in those days,” he said last week. “It is irrelevant. I could see that any religious organisation is like any other and they all lead to mutual corruption. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organise it.”

Since leaving the Theosophists, Krishnamurti has gone his own way. In the last 20 years he has founded eight coeducational boarding schools like the one at Brockwood Park in Hampshire, where he now spends six months each year, and he devotes much of his energy to education the young.

“You go off to your psychologists and your gurus for help in solving your problems,” he says. “You are probably sitting here now hoping that I will solve them, give you enlightenment. But no. Truth cannot be given to you by somebody. You have to discover it.”

By truth he means a constant awareness of life, both within and without, an awareness of self-deception, prejudice and parroted dogmas which can blind us to the wholeness of reality and the oneness of humanity.

“A problem only arises when life is seen fragmentarily, when thought arbitrarily divides the ‘me’ and the ‘not me’, the observer and the observed. A mind unfettered by belief, ritual and superstition can be free of the conflict to which they give rise ... it becomes extraordinarily quiet, absolutely silent. Do you see the beauty of that?”

Yet nothing that Krishnamurti says is especially new. The great teachers of the past, Christ, Socrates, Buddha have said much the same thing, and lesser men have been repeating it for 2,000 years. So why do people in their thousands flock to hear him speak?

“It’s because of what he is,” said a London psychiatrist who had just met him for the first time. “I’ve never before met anyone who so clearly lives what he says. He talks of the ending of conflict with the same simple factuality that I might say ‘It’s raining.’ Once you’ve heard him say something, it’s no longer a theory—it becomes real.”