|
Literary Review
Biography
Not your regular sage
S. RAMACHANDER
|
The book is refreshingly free of any sentimentality, and its objectivity is welcome.
|
A paradox of Krishanmurti's life was that, people closest to him were dismayed simply because they could not take what he said to be entirely true.
Krishnamurti: A Life, Mary Lutyens, Penguin India, 2005, p.753, Rs. 695.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI'S was, by any reckoning, an extraordinary life. One of the greatest religious thinkers of the 20th Century, whom many ranked alongside Ramana Maharishi, his well-documented life was awe-inspiring, yet a mixture of the miraculous and the mundane. This volume combines the three books by his official biographer, Mary Lutyens, written over two decades ago with the full co-operation of the subject. Daughter of Edward Lutyens, the builder of New Delhi, she had known her subject all her life. Her mother Emily was a great friend and admirer of Krishnamurti.
The early years
The first volume, a painstakingly researched effort, "The Years of Awakening", traces the fairy tale life of an innocent Brahmin boy catapulted from the obscurity of an Indian village to Theosophists Annie Besant and E.W. Leadbeater and the stately homes of Edwardian England. Gifted a castle in Holland, and an Order created for him, with a membership of thousands to herald his emerging as the World Teacher, Krishnamurti then renounced it all and struck out on his own, claiming to be no one's guru. He sternly directed his "followers" to follow no one, but be a light unto themselves.
The book narrates through many voices the esoteric and comical happenings, besides whispers of scandals within a society, which, for all its modernity and sophistication, had its share of quixotic individuals claiming spiritual progression along the various stages of the path. There are also poignant scenes of incredible psychic events around the principal actor, especially in Ojai California, where, in 1922, a painfully physical cleansing took place that seemed central to Krishna's evolution to another order of consciousness. Acknowledged by him as just "the process", it remained with him in some form throughout his life and was a precursor to his coming to be respectfully called Krishnaji.
The full flowering
The second volume unfolds "The Years of Fulfilment" — of the magic and the mystique, the full flowering of a religious teacher who spoke to millions around the world, yet seeking none as a disciple. He did not want to establish any form of apostolic succession, and in fact expressly forbade it. During the mature years of the post war era, the teachings too took on a more evolved and at times abstruse form although K (as he preferred to refer to himself) continued to examine the words and refine their expression to a finely honed simplicity. While he distilled it into a few words (You are the world and world is you; when you are not, the other is), he was acutely aware that the oral tradition of an ancient land, where a sage's every word was worshipped, could turn them into chants and mantras.
They would make him into another deity, the very antithesis of the Teachings. If they had really listened to the Buddha, he said once, there would be no Buddhism! The messenger was unimportant, the message was. The undying appetite for learning the minute details of his daily life could therefore be considered decidedly odd, to which this book too contributes, detailing perhaps to excess the itinerary, clothes, food and the cars he drove.
A paradox of Krishanmurti's life was that, at crucial points of his life, people closest to him were dismayed and distressed simply because they could not take what he said to be entirely true. The first instance was when he pointed out in 1929, in disbanding the Order of the Star, that truth was a pathless land. It is timeless and dynamic and no one could hold or organise without doing violence to it. This was his contrarian message to his Theosophist friends and followers, who had built up such expectations of salvation from the World Teacher. They had made the fatal error of pre-visioning the truth itself. The second was in believing Krishnamurti to be free of human foibles, a trap the oriental mind readily falls into. As Mary Lutyens repeatedly points out, he was in fact very much a human being, full of little adorable quirks, besides upper-class tastes and manners which, to some, ran counter to notions of how sages ought to behave. The biographer, on the contrary, found his human contradictions his most endearing quality. It is a fact, however, that he was making strenuous efforts literally till his last breath to express the inexpressible, to make the rest of the world see what he had, "the view from the mountain top", the ecstasy of living in a state of beatitude, free from fear and the narrow constraints of the self.
Free of sentimentality
In the third and smaller volume, "The Open Door", Krishnamurti himself opens up the dialogue into his origins, what kept that boy Krishna as vacant as he was, and what would happen to the extraordinary energy after the body is done with its tasks on earth. While that consciousness would be gone, anyone who chose to live the Teachings, according to him, could also sense the way of living life naturally, easily, free from conflict and violence and without problems. He refused to accept that his own life could have been a freak. That requires, however, that we, especially the educated and articulate, put the word in its proper place; and not give thought undue importance; and above all realise that an intellectual understanding of the limitations of the self is no step forward at all. Alas, the difficulty for the worldly is, we want all this and heaven too!
The book is refreshingly free of any sentimentality, and its objectivity is welcome. Yet, Mary Lutyens lapses occasionally into the failure of her class to shake off a colonial perspective, which peeps through the narrative. One wishes too the editor had made an effort to check the spellings of Indian words and not treated them in such a cavalier fashion, so that mridangam goes unchecked as mordangan.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
