390

J. Krishnamurti is an enlightened man – you need not defend him.

He does mean what he says, he is against sannyas. That’s his approach toward life, a very narrow approach of course. He has a very tunnel-type of vision. Of course whatsoever he says is right according to his tunnel vision, but his vision is very narrow.

He can say sannyas is wrong, he can say I am wrong. Still, I cannot say that he is wrong, because I have a wider vision, very inclusive. If I can say Buddha is right, Zarathustra is right, Lao Tzu is right, Tilopa, Atisha, and many, many more are right, I can also say Krishnamurti is right.

Yes, there are people for whom his vision will be of help, but those people will be very few. In fact the people for whom his vision is right may not need his help at all – because to need help from a master is what sannyas is all about, to need help from a master is the fundamental of disciplehood. Whether you call it disciplehood or not does not matter.

Krishnamurti is very much against the words disciple and master. But that’s what he has been doing for fifty years. He is a master who says that he is not a master. And the people who listen to him and follow him are disciples who think they are not disciples.

It does not matter what you think. What matters is what you are. He is a master and he has disciples. He denies that he is a master; that is part of his device. In this egoistic world it is very difficult for people to surrender, to drop their egos. For the egoists who cannot drop their egos he opens a door. He says, “Keep your ego; you don’t need to be a disciple, you don’t need to be a sannyasin.” The egoists feel very good that they need not bow down to anybody. But listening to him continuously again and again, deep down the bowing starts happening, the surrender starts happening.

He does not claim that he is a master. But whatsoever a master requires, he requires from his listeners. The master says, “Listen without thinking, listen totally, without any interference from your thoughts.” And that’s what he requires from his disciples whom he does not call disciples. It is a very sophisticated game.

He can say sannyas is wrong – he has to say it. And whenever he is in India – and soon now, wherever he will be, in every meeting he will find my sannyasins. That irritates him very much, and it must be even more irritating that when he talks against sannyas and against sannyasins, my sannyasins laugh and enjoy it.

He has been asking them, “Why do you come to me? If you have already got a master there is no need to come.” To one of my sannyasins he said in a private interview, “If you have got a master, you need not come here.” And my sannyasin said, “But my master says ‘Go everywhere. Wherever you find something can be learned, go there!’ This is his teaching and we are following him, and we are not here to follow you!”

Naturally he gets very irritated. But you need not defend him. And this is the beauty, that he cannot accept me but I can accept him. It makes no problem for me. I accept all kinds of people and all kinds of philosophies; my vision is wide enough.

In fact why is he so much against masters and disciples? It is a wound that has healed but the scar is still left. He was forced to be a disciple against his will. He was a small child when he was adopted by Annie Besant and the theosophists, only nine years old, completely unaware of what was being done to him. And he was forced to follow a very rigid discipline.

Twenty-four hours a day he was being trained, because one of the theosophist leaders, Leadbeater, had this idea, this vision, that this boy is going to become a world teacher – a jagatguru, a master of the whole world – that he is going to become the vehicle of Lord Maitreya, that he has to be prepared so he can receive the new incarnation of Buddha in his body. So he was tortured in many ways. He was not allowed to eat like other children, he was not allowed to play with other children, as any child would like to. He was guarded. He was not allowed to go to ordinary schools, he was almost completely kept a prisoner. And then getting up early at three o’clock in the morning, and then the ritual bath, and so many, many rituals – Tibetan, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian… he must have become tired.

And the last wound happened when his brother Nityananda died. There were two brothers, Krishnamurti and Nityananda, and both were being prepared, because there was a little suspicion as to who was really going to be the master. Nityananda died from this rigid discipline, this almost insane imposition. His death was a trauma for Krishnamurti; he had loved his brother tremendously. There was no other outlet for his love. He had been taken away from his family; his mother had died and his father was not able to look after them, he was just a small clerk. Both the children were adopted by Annie Besant and they had to travel all around the world learning different esoteric disciplines. It was very hard on them. There is every possibility that Nityananda died simply because of too much training.

And then those masters, whom Krishnamurti had not chosen out of love… they were like prisoners and the masters were like jailers. He carried a very wrong notion about masters; it was very difficult for him to get free from their trap. Finally he got free from their trap – how long can you hold someone? When he became a young man, and strong enough to get out of the trap, he simply rushed out, and declared, “I am nobody’s master, and I am not going to be a world teacher, and this is all nonsense!”

Since then, the scar has remained. Since then he has been talking about things like masters, disciplines, meditations, disciplehood, and he has been against all of them. It is natural. In fact he has never known a master, and he has never known disciplehood – because these are not things that can be imposed on you, these are things which you accept out of joy and love.

You are far more fortunate than he is. You have chosen me out of joy, out of love, and you are free to leave me at any moment. He was not free to leave. He had not chosen these people. And there is every possibility that many wrong things were done to him when he was a child. It is almost an established fact that Leadbeater was a homosexual. The point was even raised in court that he was sexually exploiting the children. Just think of a nine-year-old child, if sexually mishandled he will have a very deep wound from it; it will be difficult for him to erase the scar.

You can ask the psychologists: if a child is in some way sexually exploited, his whole life becomes disturbed. If a girl was somehow sexually exploited against her will, or when she was not aware of what was happening, she will never be at ease sexually, never. The fear will come again and again.

There is every possibility that something like this happened. Krishnamurti never talks about these things, there is no point in talking about these things, all those old fogies are dead. But somewhere the scar is there. Hence his antagonism to masters, to disciplehood, to sannyas, to all kinds of methods. This shows something about his history; it shows nothing about masters and disciples. What does he know about Buddha and the disciples that Buddha had? What does he know about Atisha and the masters Dharmakirti, Dharmarakshita and Yogin Maitreya – what does he know about these people?

And one thing more, a calamity happened. Annie Besant and Leadbeater never allowed him to read ancient scriptures because they were afraid he would lose his originality. So he was kept utterly ignorant of all the great traditions of the world. And if you don’t know anything about Atisha and Dharmakirti, you will miss something. Dharmakirti was the master who told Atisha to move to another master, Dharmarakshita, “because what I have known, I have given to you. I can give you the rest too, but that has never been my path. Go to Dharmarakshita, he has followed another route. He will give you something more, something more authentic. I have only heard about it, or only seen it from the mountain-top. I give you emptiness. Now, to learn compassion, go to Dharmarakshita.”

What beautiful people they must have been! And Dharmarakshita told him, “I know only the feminine kind of compassion, the passive kind. For the active, you must go to another master, Yogin Maitreya; he will teach you.” These are not people who are possessive, who are jealous, who want to dominate. These are people who give freedom!

Krishnamurti is utterly unaware of all the great traditions of the world – he only knows the theosophists. And that was one of the ugliest things that happened in this century. All kinds of fools gathered under the banner of theosophy, it was a hotchpotch. It was an effort to create a synthesis of all that is good from all the religions. But no such synthesis is possible. And if you make such a synthesis you will only have a corpse in your hands, not an alive body breathing, pulsating.

It is as if you love many women – one woman has beautiful eyes, you take the eyes out; another woman has a beautiful nose, you cut off the nose – and so on and so forth. Put all the parts together, assemble them, and you will have a corpse. Making the corpse you have killed twenty beautiful women, and the end result is just utter stupidity. That’s what theosophy did. Something is beautiful in Hinduism, something is beautiful in Taoism, something is beautiful in Mohammedanism, something is beautiful in Judaism, and so on and so forth. Collect all that, put it together, put it in a mixer and mix it, and what you will have will be just a corpse.

Krishnamurti unfortunately had to live with these people. But he has tremendous intelligence. Anybody else in his place would have been lost, anybody in his situation would not have been able to come out of the cage. And the cage was so beautiful, so alluring – thousands of followers were available. But he had the courage, he had the guts and intelligence to renounce all that, to simply move out of the whole trap. It was difficult for him, very difficult; even to survive was difficult. I respect the man, I respect him tremendously. And I can understand why he is against masters, disciples, sannyas.

You say, [“Although I have not been to Krishnamurti’s latest discourses in Mumbai, I have heard that he had talked against sannyas in them. It seems to me that this attitude is a device that helps both his work and yours, that he does not mean what he says.”]

- He says what he means, he means what he says. His narrow vision is very clear. That is one of the most beautiful things about narrow visions, they are clear. The wider the sky, the less the clarity; the bigger the vision, the less the clarity. And my vision contains all. His vision is very exclusive, my vision is very inclusive. His vision is only his. My vision contains Buddha, Zarathustra, Moses, Mahavira, Mohammed, and millions more.

And remember, I am not trying to make a synthesis here. I am not trying to choose whatsoever is beautiful in one and whatsoever is beautiful somewhere else. No, I accept every tradition as it is – even though sometimes it goes against me, even though sometimes there are points which I would like not to be there. But then who am I? Why should I bring my choice into it?

I accept every tradition as it is, without interfering with it. This has never been done before, and this may not be done again for centuries, because to have such inclusive vision is very confusing. Being with me, you can never have certainty. The more you are with me, the more and more the ground under your feet will disappear. The more you are here with me, the more and more your mind will be taken away, and with it all certainty. Yes, you will have transparency, but no certainty.

With Krishnamurti everything is certain, absolutely certain. He is one of the most consistent men who has ever walked on the earth, because he has such a narrow vision. When you have a very narrow vision you are bound to be very consistent. You cannot find a more inconsistent person than me, because I have to make space for so many contradictory standpoints. There is nothing in common between Bahauddin and Atisha, there is nothing in common between Rinzai and Mohammed, there is nothing in common between Mahavira and Christ. And yet they all have met in me, and they are all one in me. And I have not chosen, I have not interfered, I have simply digested them all.

A tremendously new kind of symphony, I will not call it a synthesis but a symphony, is arising here. In a synthesis something dead is produced. In a symphony, in an orchestra, all instruments are playing, but in a tremendous harmony.

Krishnamurti is a solo flute player. I am an orchestra; the flute is accepted. Of course my orchestra will not be accepted by Krishnamurti, he is a solo flute player. And a beautiful flute player he is, I appreciate him. I can appreciate him, but he cannot appreciate me. What does he know about the orchestra? I know everything about the flute, because it is part of my orchestra, just a small part. But for him the flute is all.

Don’t try to defend him, there is no need. He can defend himself, he is quite capable. I can understand his criticism of sannyas. If he had not criticized it, that would have been a surprise. If he really wants to surprise me he should stop criticizing my sannyasins – it would be unbelievable, it would be really a shock to me.

But let that old man continue, and please continue going to listen to him. Provoke him. Just sit in the front row, and whenever he criticizes sannyas, applaud, laugh. And then he will be really in a rage. He is the only enlightened person in the world who can get angry. And that’s perfectly beautiful. I love him, I respect him – and I love him and respect him as he is. But he cannot love and respect me; that too I can understand.