When soon afterwards the ascetic Upaka asked him who was his teacher or whose teaching he professed, the Buddha answered that he had no teacher, had no equal, was perfected and was himself the supreme teacher. When the Buddha described his enlightenment, he related how he, as a phase of the process, recollected his past lives during many aeons of world-contraction and world-expansion, but he said nothing about recollecting past Buddhas. I will present not only the biographical forces that led Krishnamurti to that moment but also the social and ideational preconditions that allowed him to adopt a completely divergent religious worldview, one opposite in many ways to the one in which he had been raised. What was the point at which Krishnamurti’s life fundamentally changed its course and what happened to him at that time? In this chapter, I analyze the crisis that led Krishnamurti not only to depart from the Theosophical Society’s leadership but also to change the character of his spiritual path and teachings radically. It seems that his very reluctance to play the part designed for him, as well as his personal rebellion against the authority of his guides and supervisors, only endear him all the more to those who see him as a great spiritual teacher. Diverging from the course his mentors planned for him, the guru who refused to be a guru is revered by many in the contemporary Western spiritual milieu. Spanning the larger part of the twentieth century, the biography of Jiddu Krishnamurti1 (1895-1986) seems like a tale told by the fireplace, fit for a book of ancient legends, or, as some would insist, a new testament.
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