Interviewer: For thousands of years
people have invented and endured
all kinds of disciplines, deprivations and discomforts
in the hope of achieving enlightenment.
Spending a week under canvas in Hampshire
hardly ranks with some of the great sacrifices
that litter the history of practically every religion.
The atmosphere here at Brockwood Park
is that of the international camp site.
The only ceremonies and rituals performed are self-imposed.
The man that more than three thousand people have come to hear
has rejected all of the panoply and dogma imposed by organised religion.
He has even rejected the role for which he was groomed: Messiah.
He is Jiddu Krishnamurti.
Now in his ninety-first year, Krishnamurti has been described
as one of the greatest philosophers and teachers of all time,
a role he can hardly have anticipated fifty-six years ago,
when to the profound shock of his devoted followers
he announced he was not the Messiah,
and dissolved the organisation of which he was the head.
I: Krishnamurti presents a calm and conventional exterior.
With a stunning lack of pomp and ceremony he sits,
very upright and very still on a hard straight-backed chair,
and talks without notes and without preparation
for at least an hour.
Looking at this slight unassuming figure
it is hard to believe his bizarre and extraordinary history.
He was born in 1895,
the eighth child of a Brahmin family,
the highest caste at a time
when the system was rigidly observed.
He was very close indeed to his mother
who before he was born said she had a premonition
that he would be in some way remarkable.
She died when Krishnamurti was ten years old
and the family moved to Adyar, near Madras.
It was here living in extreme poverty
that he was spotted by Charles Webster Leadbeater,
a leading figure in the Theosophical Society.
Theosophy was a world movement which embraced all religions.
They believed that following on Buddha, Krishna and Christ
the world was ready for the next incarnation of the Messiah.
Its president, Annie Besant, was a flamboyant figure
who fought uncompromisingly
for a whole range of social reforms in Britain and India.
Krishnamurti must have looked an unlikely candidate:
undernourished, with crooked teeth and a vacant expression.
But Leadbeater said the child had an aura of unselfishness;
he was the chosen one.
Mrs Besant adopted him and began grooming him
for his future role by bringing him to England.
I: Krishnamurti was extremely grateful to all those
who had such a trusting faith in him.
He tried his best to please them,
going to huge Theosophical gatherings,
and undergoing, for him,
the torture of getting up and speaking in public.
Obviously the Theosophists influenced him
but it seems only superficially.
All the time he was working out his own philosophy,
his own view of how to arrive at the truth.
The time bomb had begun to tick.
In 1929 at a vast gathering of Theosophists
at Ommen in Holland it exploded.
ML: I think it was in the morning he spoke up and he said,
I am now going to dissolve the Order,
the Order of which I happen to be head.
You can go and join another Order if you want to.
I don’t want followers. I don’t want followers.
If there is one person who understands,
it can do more good than all these three thousand people here.
And it was a big and very rich organisation
and he gave it all completely away,
and all the land and all the property
and the Castle Eerde that had been given,
he gave it all back to the owner,
and he divested himself of all property.
And one of the things,
the very lovely speech he gave on that occasion,
was to say, ‘Truth is a pathless land,
you cannot get to it by any path whatever’.
I: In what became his most famous speech,
Krishnamurti said,
‘This is no magnificent deed,
because I do not want followers, and I mean this.
The moment you follow someone you cease to follow truth.
I am concerning myself with only one essential thing,
to set man free.
I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears,
and not to found religions, new sects,
nor to establish new theories and new philosophies’.
The speech was such a shock to many of the followers
that they turned away from the man
from whom they had expected so much.
Others took a different view.
I: Krishnamurti has developed and expanded his teaching
but he still rejects all organised religion.
K: You see, we are now trying to impose morality on people.
Right?
I: Many religions have tried. K: I know, I know.
They have failed.
Why?
I: You tell me, why?
K: Because they are based on some belief
which has no value at all,
on some dogma – right? –
faith, and do this, don’t do that
that’s what religions have done.
I: They would say they are all different ways, different paths.
K: No. Ah, that’s all the good old game, that – different paths.
Because I am a Hindu and I say, ‘That’s my path’.
You are a Christian and you say that’s your path.
It’s nonsense. Path to what?
They say to God, to truth,
as though fixed,
God and truth are stationary.
I: Aren’t they?
K: Of course! I mean, a living thing can’t be stationary!