In November I met J. Krishnamurti, a man who didn’t fit any category at all. He was giving a series of daily talks at Rajghat in Benaras. Not only was he not a Christian, he was not a Hindu, not a Buddhist. That was just his point. “Truth is a pathless land,” he said. “You can’t approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.” He didn’t say, “Follow me.” On the contrary, he said, “I desire those who seek to understand me to be free, not to follow me, not to make out of me a cage which will become a religion, a sect.” He did not care for the labels of any religion. Indeed, he observed the way in which we fearfully, anxiously, shape our whole lives by religious, political, cultural, and personal labels and names – all of which function as a buffer zone of security between ourselves and the experience of life.

Krishnamurti posed my first real encounter with the “otherness” of a world view. No one in my world had ever asked about the value of labeling, judging, discriminating, and categorizing experience or suggested that by doing so we distance ourselves from experience. We call it a beautiful sunrise on the Ganges and don’t ever really see it because we have dispensed with it by giving it a name and label. Perhaps we write a poem about it to capture it in words or take a photograph of it and feel satisfied that we “got it.” We name so-and-so as a friend or an enemy. The next time we encounter that person, the pigeonhole is ready. Are not our minds perpetually busy in these maneuvers? I must admit, at twenty it had never occurred to me to ask such questions. And what about religion? Is it just a name? I had to ask myself about being a Christian. Did the label provide me with a shelter or barrier to shield me from real encounter and questioning? What did I have invested in this name? Everywhere I turned I saw question marks.

It is possible, however, that Krishnamurti’s ideas would have meant little to me had not Krishnamurti himself been so arresting. Never had I experienced the quality of presence – I suppose now I would say “spiritual presence”-that he brought into a room. It is what I then called his “existentialism,” for want of a better word. He spoke without notes, simply, directly, and he continually named and challenged the nature of our attention to him. Were we taking down notes? Why? Were we hoping to seize what he had to say? Were we comparing his ideas to those of Teilhard de Chardin or Zen Buddhism? Were we judging his thoughts with our likes and dislikes? Why couldn’t we just listen? Is simple presence and attention so impossible? The questions Krishnamurti asked were not about the world and its injustices, they were questions about me and my habits of apprehending the world. Though I had read some of Paul Tillich’s work the year before and had especially liked The Shaking of the foundation, this was the real shaking of the foundations for me.

Krishnamurti and Patwardhan were important to me precisely because they were what Christains might call “witnesses” to their faith; they somehow embodied their faith in their lives. In retrospect, it is somewhat embarrassing to articulate this as a discovery, but as a 20 year old it came as news to me: Christians didn’t have a corner on love, wisdom, and justice. Christains were not the only ones nourished by faith and empowered by their faith to work to change the world. I knew nothing of the Hindu devotional traditions of
bhakti then but I met people – like Krishnamurti and Patwardhan – whose very lives were a message of God-grounded love.

From the book Beyond Gurus by Diane L. Eck

available at the Mind Body Library