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\nWhat Krishnamurti means to
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\nDiane L. Eck’s views on
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\nThe questions Krishnamurti asked were not about the world and its
\ninjustices, they were questions about me and my habits of apprehending the
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\nIn November I met J. Krishnamurti, a man who didn\u0092t 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. \u0093Truth is a pathless land,\u0094 he said. \u0093You can\u0092t approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.\u0094 He didn\u0092t say, \u0093Follow me.\u0094 On the contrary, he said, \u0093I 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.\u0094 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 \u0096 all of which function as a buffer zone of security between ourselves and the experience of life.
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\nKrishnamurti posed my first real encounter with the \u0093otherness\u0094 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\u0092t 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 \u0093got it.\u0094 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.
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\nIt is possible, however, that Krishnamurti\u0092s ideas would have meant little to me had not Krishnamurti himself been so arresting. Never had I experienced the quality of presence \u0096 I suppose now I would say \u0093spiritual presence\u0094-that he brought into a room. It is what I then called his \u0093existentialism,\u0094 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\u0092t 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\u0092s work the year before and had especially liked The Shaking of the foundation, this was the real shaking of the foundations for me.
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\nKrishnamurti and Patwardhan were important to me precisely because they were what Christains might call \u0093witnesses\u0094 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\u0092t 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
\nbhakti<\/i> then but I met people \u0096 like Krishnamurti and Patwardhan \u0096 whose very lives were a message of God-grounded love.
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\nFrom the book Beyond Gurus<\/i> by Diane L. Eck <\/p>\n
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\navailable at the Mind Body Library<\/p>\n
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