In 1981 during a walk in Ojai, Krishnamurti turned to me and said, “What do you think is wrong with India?” By that time, I had learned the futility of trying to argue with him; I was more interested in his insights which emerged from a level of clarity far subtler than mine. I kept silent and looked at him, willing to hear. He said, “The trouble with India is that the Brahmins have forgotten the tradition.”
There is a strong tendency among the adherents of K’s teaching as well as others that he was against tradition. There is some truth to it as K was fond of pointing out that the etymological roots of the words ‘tradition’ and ‘treason’ are the same; as the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, a traditor is a betrayer. Much depends on what one emphasizes under the label ‘tradition.’ If by tradition one means what the priests and ministers keep saying we must believe in without engaging in any serious search, that will certainly betray what the Buddha or the Christ, or Patañjali,1 or Vivekananda, or Ramana or Krishnamurti lived and taught as the heart of the spiritual traditions. It is in general true that the finesse of all spiritual traditions is betrayed by the official keepers of the tradition. K was not against the living core of the tradition, but he was strongly against the betrayal of it through belief.
It would be surprising if, by the word Brahmin, K meant any specific caste. Almost certainly for him a Brahmin is one who is internally called to explore real Truth without adherence to any particular caste, dogma or religion. I am convinced that K was one of the very few Brahmins who had not forgotten the heart of any serious spiritual tradition, which is that of a passionate and tireless search for the Real and an impartial and deep self-inquiry. This alone can lead to the Truth about one’s real nature, its place in the cosmos, and an experience of the Oneness of all there is.
It is important to comment that a serious tradition succeeds when it assists a searcher to be free of the tradition. Any description of, or path to, the Ultimate is at best like a finger pointing to the moon. Those who get very attached to the finger can never get to the moon. This, of course, applies to the followers of Krishnamurti’s teachings as well. The Ultimate remains beyond description, as emphasized by neti, neti in the Upanishads or in K’s own often repeated remark that “Truth is a pathless land”. A very helpful reminder by the great Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, is “If there were a God of whom I had any idea, it will not be worth having Him as God.”
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, many volumes were published under the overall series called World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest. In this many-volume series there are two volumes on Hindu Spirituality. The first one is titled Hindu Spirituality: Vedas Through Vedanta and the second one, Hindu Spirituality: Post classical and Modern. Whatever K himself or his followers may say, it was only a volume on Hindu spirituality, the second one, which could carry an article on Krishnamurti. It would be surprising that any volume on any of the religions in the Abrahamic tradition—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—would include an article on K. A volume on Buddhism possibly could. As far as I am aware, the only person other than Annie Besant (whom K referred to as Mother) for whom K seemed to have an unmitigated respect, was the Buddha. However, it is highly unlikely that the Buddhist scholars would include K as an example of the flowering of the Buddhist tradition. K’s own life, including his fondness for chanting some traditional mantras, practising yoga and other tendencies closely connect him to the religious tradition of his parents, namely Hinduism.
The editor of the second volume on Hinduism invited me to write an article on J Krishnamurti.2 I prepared and made extensive notes. Since K was still alive, I arranged a special meeting with him to make sure that what I had written reflected his thought accurately. I asked him whether “intelligence beyond thought” was the central thing that he spoke about. He agreed, but without much feeling. Suddenly, he was animated. “Take the risk, sir. Say what you wish. If you speak from the heart, whatever you say I said, I’ll agree. Take the risk.” I was deeply touched by his own sense of freedom and the implied trust in me.
Many years ago, a new journal had invited me to write an article about Krishnamurti. I decided to write this as a letter3 to him which I mailed to him. But I was certain that he would not have seen it simply because all sorts of people were likely writing to him and he may not have even received the letter. During one of my visits to Ojai, I gave K a copy of the letter and asked if he would read it and respond to me. He said he would do so next morning at breakfast. Next morning, he prepared breakfast for both of us. Afterwards we had an extended conversation. The last remark in my letter to K was, “I am troubled because I do not know how to reconcile the call I hear from your distant shore with the realities where I am. It is clear that a bridge cannot be built from here to There. But can it be built from There to here?” Krishnaji said, “What you say in the last sentence of your letter is what I have been teaching for the last sixty years.” If I understood what he said, it surely meant that a bridge can be there, but not from here to There; it is from There to here and that what K was teaching is the bridge from his level of being to my level.
Listening to K was like listening to celestial gandharva music, but if I wish to play a musical instrument, where do I go to learn to play the scale? I can hardly begin from where K is; I have to begin from where I am—self-occupied and ego-driven like most of humanity. I did not doubt the veracity of what K said; my difficulty lay in wondering about the practical steps needed to connect with the level of reality from where K spoke. Beginning with an increasingly impartial self-inquiry, I can even hope that at some stage my journey will connect me to the bridge extending from his side. I need to see the way I am, even suffer the fact that that is what I am, not pretending to be free like K, by quoting him, or even wishing to be like him.
Based on my own experience, it is clear to me that awareness is the mechanism of transformation. Engagement in an impartial and sustained self-awareness, without hankering for this or that result, naturally leads to self-transformation. K himself had said, “If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.”4 A good example of this is in what K told me in a conversation towards the end of his life. “I am still very shy, but I used to be much worse. I would stand behind the platform from where I was supposed to speak to an audience, and shake. One day I saw the total absurdity of it, and the shaking left me. I was free of it forever.”
Once, during a walk with K in Ojai, he stopped and turned to me and said, “Sir, never take a public-speaking course.” I was surprised by his remark because it had never crossed my mind to take such a course. K continued, “If you know something, it will ooze out of you.”
For K, as for almost all the sages in the spiritual traditions of India, the right action oozes out of the right quality of being. Therefore, his remark, “Be totally attentive and do nothing.” Laura Huxley, the wife of the well-known writer Aldous Huxley reported that on one occasion in a small gathering at her place, K was saying that one should not go about doing good. She reminded him that he goes around the world doing good. He responded, “Not intentionally!” To use an expression used by K himself, a rose does not decide to smell like a rose; it is from the fragrance that we conclude that it is a rose. Similarly, a sage does not decide to do good or to be compassionate; these kinds of behaviour are a natural outcome of their quality of being. The good do good by merely being good. The needful and the true action will flower from the soil of clear and selfless insight.
Quality of being very much depends on the degree of freedom from the me-I-mind. Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita highly recommends the state of naishkarmya—actionlessness or freedom from action or actorless action—but this state is not arrived at by inaction (BG 3.4–5). This state is possible only when the action is not initiated by my will or my aim or in self-service. The yoga taught by the Bhagavad Gita is a science par excellence of self-transformation and Krishna says, “No one becomes a yogi without renouncing selfwill (sankalpa)” (BG 6.2). The action is done by the accomplished yogi who becomes an instrument of the Divine will initiating the action. “Steadfast in yoga, the knower of truth realizes ‘Truly I do nothing at all’” (BG 5.8).5
What is needed is an impartial and sustained self-awareness, without hankering for this or that fruit, however spiritual sounding. That naturally leads to self-transformation. In a different terminology, coming from a different tradition, we have this remarkable statement of Meister Eckhart: “A man must become truly poor and as free from his own creaturely will as he was when he was born. And I tell you, by the eternal truth, that so long as you desire to fulfil the will of God and have any hankering after eternity and God, for just so long you are not truly poor. He alone has true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing.”
The ancient text Shatapatha Brāhmana says, “Only those may enter the Sun door who can truly respond to the question ‘Who are you?’ with ‘Nobody.’” (SB III.8.1.2–3.) Real transformation results from seeing that one is nothing and not trying to be something. K said, “To be absolutely nothing is to be beyond measure”.6 My heart and my mind agree with this. But I cannot try to be nothing or try to be beyond measure. Can I see what I am—limited and limiting—and stay with seeing? If transformation takes place, it does; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Truth cannot be forced; it can only be wooed, primarily by suffering the fact of the absence of truth.
Everything can be abandoned—scriptures, traditions, books, ideas, knowledge, even one’s love for Krishnamurti—but we cannot abandon direct perception of the way it is, inside me as well as outside. In seeing for oneself directly is real living and inquiring. While seeing, one is not occupied with apprehension or approval, nor is one concerned with humility or vanity. One is independent, free, but not isolated. One loves because what loves is not me but something that passes through me; and that something cannot not love.7
Krishnamurti’s emphasis on being rather than doing is very much in harmony with the classical teaching of Krishna, emphasizing the importance of the state of naishkarmya. K’s emphasis in letting the right action result from the right quality of being— which is essentially freedom from the ‘me’ or from asmitā (separate self), a major obstacle in the journey to real Freedom6—sometimes resulted in some remarks of his such as “effort is an abomination” being misunderstood that nothing is required from my side for the Truth to descend on me. The sort of effort to be avoided is the egodriven effort insistent on acquiring this or that benefit for myself even when expressed in very spiritual sounding language. K said, “That which is eternal cannot be sought after; the mind cannot acquire it. It comes into being when the mind is quiet, and the mind can be quiet only when it is simple, when it is no longer storing up, condemning, judging, weighing. It is only the simple mind that can understand the real, not the mind that is full of words, knowledge, information. The mind that analyzes, calculates, is not a simple mind” (Collected Works, Vol. VII, 27).
We can see how close Krishnamurti’s teaching is to the real spiritual tradition of India. As Patañjali says in the Yoga Sutras, “Yoga is stopping all the movements of the mind…Yoga is for cultivating samādhi and for weakening the hindrances (kleshas)… The kleshas are a sense of separate self, attraction, aversion, addiction to the status quo, all arising from ignorance (avidyā)…Samādhi is the state when the self is not” (Yoga Sutra 1.2, 2.2–4, 3.3). The sort of knowledge (vidyā) the tradition speaks of, “is knowledge beyond thought… This knowledge is different from the knowledge obtained by testimony or by inference …Sacred knowledge (jñāna) born of discernment (viveka) is liberating, comprehensive, eternal, and freed of time sequence” (Yoga Sutra 1.43, 1.49, 3.54)8.
I am convinced that K was one of the few Brahmins who did not forget the tradition. Krishnamurti’s teaching is not his in any personal sense. It is the Real speaking through him.
Of course, reading the Upanishads or the Bhagavad Gita and becoming very knowledgeable does not lead one to the Freedom that the tradition or K speak about. Krishnamurti made many strong remarks such as “thought denies love”, the “observer is the observed”, “if I am, love is not”, and the like. To merely repeat his words and insights can be a betrayal of K. I need to ask, “Is this true for me? When was the last time I actually saw that the observer is the observed?” Otherwise, it is a nice slogan, like ‘Atman is Brahman’ repeated by the Hindu priests. It may be true for someone, but is it true for me? It is necessary to find the sharp razor’s edge of impartial self-inquiry, not an agreement or disagreement with K. There can be no value in imitating him or repeating his conclusions as slogans. If one says something like ‘the observer is the observed,’ one ought to do this with a trembling heart, when one’s lips have been cleansed by a burning coal, as the prophet Isaiah said. Otherwise we simply cheapen K and betray him by repeating these slogans. As long as ‘I’ exists, it is not true that the observer is the observed. Only in dying in love does the truth of unity dawn and make its dwelling in me.
Nor is it particularly helpful to become an expert on K; what is needed is to know myself. As one of the Upanishads says, “When a Brahmin is done with learning, he returns to himself.” Truth is going to be seen in my own heart, not in any books, videos and compact disks, even of K. Of course, we could learn from K, be inspired by him and be helped by him even in looking at ourselves.But the real understanding which is needed is not of K’s teaching but of truth. And the absolute and fundamental requirement for that understanding is a heart which is aflame with the passion for truth. That flame may be lit or enlarged by the teaching of K, as a new flame is lit by a burning flame. Those of us who love and admire K cannot but take the risk and try to speak from our hearts. Then, as K himself said, he would agree.
Endnotes
1 In this connection see an article of mine titled ‘The Wisdom of Patañjali and Krishnamurti,’ published in the journal Integral Yoga in June 2010. An enlarged version of this article was published in The Theosophist, Vol. 133.11, pp. 18–23.
2 ‘J. Krishnamurti, ‘Traveller in a Pathless Land,’ published in a volume devoted to contemporary flowering of Hindu Spirituality, edited by KR Sundararajan. This is Vol. 7 of World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest, Crossroad Publishers, New York, 1994. This article was included in my book J. Krishnamurti: Two Birds on One Tree, Quest Books, Wheaton IL, 1995.
3 ‘Letter to J. Krishnamurti’, published in the Journal of Our Time by the Traditional Studies Press, Toronto,1977 (reprinted in S. Patwardhan and P. Jayakar, eds. Within the Mind: On J. Krishnamurti; Krishnamurti Foundation India, Madras, 1982). Also included in my book J. Krishnamurti: Two Birds on One Tree, Quest Books, Wheaton IL, 1995.
4 The Little Book on Living: J. Krishnamurti. Ed. RE Mark Lee, New Delhi, India: Penguin Books, 1999.
5 For the translation and discussion of the shlokas in the Bhagavad Gita, please see R. Ravindra, The Bhagavad Gita: A Guide to Navigating the Battle of Life, Shambhala Publications, Boulder Co, 2017. Also published under the same title in India by Jaico Publications in 2018.
6 The Little Book on Living: J. Krishnamurti. Ed. RE Mark Lee, New Delhi, India: Penguin Books, 1999.
7 Some of these remarks were published in R. Ravindra, Centered Self without being Self-centred: Remembering Krishnamurti, Morning Light Press, Sandpoint ID, 2003. This book was later published under the same title by the Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Chennai in 2011. The book is a transcript of a talk given in Ojai in 2002 under the aegis of the Krishnamurti Foundation of America.
8 The various obstacles (kleshas) mentioned in the Yoga Sutras are discussed in detail in R. Ravindra, Wisdom of Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras, Morning Light Press, Sandpoint ID, 2009. Also published under the same title by the Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Chennai in 2012. Happy is the Man who is Nothing