A Life

He was born on May 12, 1895, in Madanapalle, a small town in southern India, the eighth child of a Telugu Brahmin family. His father worked as a British colonial official. His mother died when he was ten. He was, by most accounts, a dreamy, vague, gentle child — not academically promising, frequently ill, thought by his teachers to be possibly slow. He failed his entrance exams repeatedly.

His father, Narayaniah, was a member of the Theosophical Society, and after his retirement he moved the family to Adyar, Madras, the site of the Society's international headquarters. It was there, in 1909, that a man named Charles Webster Leadbeater saw the boy on the beach and declared him to be, in his clairvoyant estimation, an extraordinary soul — perhaps the vehicle for the coming World Teacher prophesied in Theosophical doctrine.

Krishnamurti was fourteen years old. He had no opinion on the matter.

Annie Besant, president of the Theosophical Society and one of the most formidable women of the early twentieth century, took Leadbeater's assessment seriously. She became Krishnamurti's legal guardian, effectively separating him from his father, and arranged for him and his younger brother Nityananda to be educated in England.

He was a poor student. He failed his exams at Oxford. He spoke haltingly, moved through English life with a certain bewildered grace, and did not particularly strike his acquaintances as a candidate for World Teacher. But around him, an organization called the Order of the Star in the East was growing — founded in his name, gathering tens of thousands of members who believed he was the coming Christ, the new Buddha, the avatar of the age.

He participated. He gave talks. He wrote pamphlets. He was, for years, a willing — if uncertain — participant in the project of his own mythologization. Something in him resisted it quietly, for a long time, before it broke through all at once.

At the annual camp of the Order of the Star, held at Ommen in Holland, before an audience of three thousand members, Krishnamurti dissolved the organization built around him. He was thirty-four years old.

He said:

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 it absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path.

He also said: "I have only one purpose: to make man free, to urge him towards freedom, to help him to break away from all limitations, for that alone will give him eternal happiness, will give him the unconditioned realization of the self."

And then he resigned, as the text puts it, from the Order. He returned all the money and property settled on him. He asked only one thing — that people not make a new organization around what he had just said.

Annie Besant, who was eighty-two years old and whom he deeply loved, sat in the front row. He did not look at her while he spoke.

For the next fifty-seven years, until his death in 1986, he gave talks. He talked in India, in England, in Switzerland, in the United States, in Australia, in South America, in every place people would gather to listen. He talked to presidents and peasants, to scientists and students, to the deeply religious and the deeply skeptical. He charged nothing. He affiliated himself with nothing.

He also founded schools — in Rishi Valley in India, at Brockwood Park in England, at Ojai in California — schools built around the idea that education might do something other than produce efficient workers and consumers. He was not, in these schools, trying to produce students who agreed with him. He was trying to create conditions in which students might actually think.

His brother Nityananda died of tuberculosis in 1925, in Ojai, while Krishnamurti sat with him. This loss marked him deeply and permanently. He spoke of it rarely, but when he did, you could feel the rawness of it still present, decades later.

He did not marry. He had a long, complex relationship with Rosalind Williams, which was only made fully public — against his wishes — after his death. He was not, by most accounts, emotionally simple. He was capable of great warmth and also of a kind of distant unreachability.

He returned, again and again, to Ojai, California — a valley in the hills northeast of Los Angeles, warm and golden, with orange groves and oak trees and the particular quality of light that the valley channels from the west in the late afternoon. He called it his home, though he barely had one. He lived out of a suitcase for most of his adult life.

He walked every day in Ojai. He noticed the birds with the attention of a naturalist. He noticed the quality of the air, the temperature of the light, the small changes in the landscape from week to week. This attentiveness was not metaphorical. It was what he actually did.

He died in Ojai on February 17, 1986, of pancreatic cancer. He was ninety years old. In his final weeks, he continued to speak — to his caretakers, to visitors, to whoever would listen. He was still asking questions. He was still, at the very end, not sure he had answers.

He asked that no organization be formed in his name after his death. Several were formed anyway. He had anticipated this.