Mary Lutyens - 3. Krishnamurti. The Open Door

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...