The winter of 1955 saw Krishnaji in Varanasi. He had come there with Rosalind from Sydney. His astonishing, awesome beauty was absent. The face appeared aged, the hair had started to turn grey.
He questioned himself aloud. “What is action without consequence?” For three days he probed into the question, refusing to allow any immediate response, letting the question unfold, letting it release the energy held within it. There was no leaving the question, and during the discussion meetings our minds probed with him. He refused to let us answer from the Gita or the sacred books. For him the question had to evoke its own answer. And yet every answer from the past was a consequence, from the present a consequence, and the projected future was also a consequence.
Krishnaji asked, “Can there be action without consequence? Can the past, future, be brought together in the present and extinguished? The past mistake was a consequence, my action on it is a consequence, my refusal to act on it is also a consequence, and yet there has to be action without consequence.” He went on searching. He would take up the question, letting every intimation surrounding the question arise, perceiving the response without condemnation or justification and so negating it. All enquiry was tentative, there was a total absence of any assertive statement.
Then suddenly, on the third day, as if there had been revelation, he said, “Can one live without self-concept? Can one live without the reflected self-image? Only in that is there action without consequence.”
“What does that imply?” we asked.
“To live without self-concept,” he responded, “is to be aware of the constant projection of the self and seeing it to negate it.”
Another morning he said, “We die through disease, old age, suicide. The dying is the sinking into the unknown, a sudden cutting away, an oblivion.” Then he asked with great gravity, “Living, can one enter the house of death?”
Rosalind was visiting India after many years. She was meeting old friends from the days of her life in the Theosophical Society, and made new friends, among them Malti Nowroji and Kanji Dwarkadas, Jamnadas’s brother and an old associate of Mrs. Besant. Kitty Shiva Rao was also in Varanasi, and they spent long days together. Sunanda Patwardhan had been working as Krishnaji’s secretary from 1949, while Krishnaji was in India. She traveled with him around the country, taking shorthand notes, typing his letters, attending the talks and discussions. Rosalind liked her and gave her much affection. However, in
Rosalind’s relationship to Krishnaji, the tensions had accentuated. Like Rajagopal, her voice was often heard remonstrating with Krishnaji. Faced with her anger, Krishnaji was to tell us later, he became totally silent and passive. He listened with precision, deeply and extensively, but refused to react. Her inability to evoke a response from Krishnaji made Rosalind furious. It was a confrontation with no opponent. The other had vanished.
With an unending stream of questions, Rosalind sought to find the “influence” that underlay the seeming change in Krishnaji. For many years Rosalind had taken Krishnaji for granted, and now she found that there was suddenly no Krishnaji to contact or with whom she could establish a relationship.
Obstinately, Rosalind insisted that Krishnaji agree to travel with her to see the Ajanta and Ellora caves. Malti Nowroji and Sunanda accompanied them. It was very hot. The landscape was stark, the Deccan rocks molten in the sun. There was little green to relieve the eye. Krishnaji suffered, and when they returned to Bombay, the situation remained grim.
Krishnaji returned alone to Delhi in early October 1956. Beauty filled him. He was speaking again in the capital city after many years, under an open
shamiana, a tent erected on the lawns of the Constitution Club. Diplomats, sannyasis, bureaucrats, clerks, professors, and a sprinkling of young people came
to hear him.
The young were a handful. In spite of the massacres of partition, the euphoria of freedom continued at its zenith. The glitter and affluence generated by the skills and artifacts of science and technology were becoming apparent in India. The young minds, stimulated and responsive to vast new explosions of knowledge in the West and the opportunities being released by technology, were not interested in self-knowledge or the long perspective. It was the immediacy and possibilities of the new that fired their minds.
The older generation was still steeped in the sterility of dead traditions; with the death of Gandhiji, the Gandhians had turned to Vinoba Bhave. Intrigued by Rao Sahib and Achyut’s total involvement with Krishnaji and his teachings, the Gandhians had started attending Krishnaji’s talks. The small group discussions had commenced. Shankar Rao Deo and Dada Dharmadhikari, two very important members of the Sarva Seva Sangh were seen at every gathering.
Shankar Rao Deo, matured in the freedom struggle, was steeped in a tradition of austerity. Highly educated, he was one of the bare-bodied followers of Gandhiji, imposing on himself rigid disciplines of fasting and practice of
brahmacharya, which involves a vow of total celibacy. He had gone to jail
several times, had been placed in “C” class—the lowest class reserved for prisoners. Political prisoners placed in “C” class had to wear prison garments, eat prison food, and were not permitted newspapers or books. Revolted by the prevalent injustices, he had protested and gone on a fast. His refusal to break his fast had infuriated the prison authorities. He had been placed on the triangle and flogged and left jail with permanent scars. A wildness and passionate urgency for the unexpressed fired his eyes; he had curbed his senses with a harsh austerity; deep within were frustrations and unfulfilled desires, passions, and ambitions. In
jail Shankar Rao Deo had come in close contact with Javdekar, a close friend of Tilak and Bhagwat,1 and an associate of Mahatma Gandhi from 1920.
Recognized as intellectuals in Maharashtra, they were steeped in the finest traditions of learning. With them, Shankar Rao Deo had read Krishnamurti’s books. In later years Javdekar and Bhagwat had attended Krishnaji’s talks, but had never come close to him personally. They felt strongly that Krishnaji was expressing, although in a new language, the entire Advaita position of Vedanta.
In 1948 Javdekar and Bhagwat, in Lok Shakti, a much-respected Maharashtrian journal, wrote a six-column article in which Krishnaji was proclaimed a realized human being. The Maharashtra pandits accepted Krishnaji in 1948; it was late in the 1970s before the pandits of Varanasi did the same. With the acceptance of Krishnaji by Javdekar and Bhagwat, a stream of Maharashtrian thinkers and writers were drawn to him. They saw in him a teacher who, without contradicting the past, had shattered the tradition, transcending it. Through him they saw revealed the luminous, eternal truth.
In 1948 Shankar Rao Deo had been in New Delhi for the meetings of the Constituent Assembly. He had also participated in the small discussions Krishnaji had held at the time. At one of the first ones, Krishnaji had been discussing violence and nationalism. Shankar Rao Deo said of this, “To understand Krishnaji you had to understand the ‘I.’ Krishnaji had said, ‘The understanding of the “I” involves time and space; understanding is, when time has ended.’ ”1
1956 was the year of the Buddha Jayanti, and the government of India invited His Holiness the Dalai Lama from Tibet to visit India and travel to the various sacred sites associated with the Enlightened One. Apa Sahib Pant, a senior officer in the Foreign Service who at the time was political officer in Sikkim, had been asked to accompany the Dalai Lama around the country. They traveled in a large, air-conditioned train accompanied by a vast entourage.
As religious and secular head of the Tibetan state, the life of the Dalai Lama was strictly bound by protocol. He had been a figure of mystery. In Tibet, rarely visible except to a few lamas, he lived a life of strict discipline and meditation. This would be the first visit of any Dalai Lama out of that mysterious land.
When he arrived in Madras in December, Apa Sahib Pant had suggested to the twenty-year-old incarnation of the divine that he visit Krishnamurti, who at the time was staying in Vasant Vihar. Apa Sahib had related the life of Krishnaji and the extraordinary nature of his teachings. The young monk had commented, “A Nagarjuna!”2 and had expressed a keen desire to meet Krishnaji. Those
around the Dalai Lama were most distressed. It was a shattering of all protocol. But the Dalai Lama insisted, and the meeting was arranged.
1 Bal Gangadhar Tilak was a Brahmin intellectual, scholar, writer, and freedom fighter. A highly revered
and respected figure in Maharashtra, he was tried by the British government on charges of sedition and imprisoned in Burma.
Bhagwat was a philosopher, freedom fighter, and editor of an important Marathi newspaper, Lok
Shakti.
2 A reference to the second-century Buddhist sage who taught adherence to the “Middle Path” as also the
In Apa Sahib’s words, “Krishnaji received [the Dalai Lama] simply. It was breathtaking to feel the electric affection that instantly flashed between them.” The Dalai Lama gently but directly asked, “Sir, what do you believe in?” and then the conversation went on in almost monosyllabic sentences, as it was a communication without rhetoric. The young Lama was feeling on familiar ground as Krishnaji made him “coexperience.” On the return journey to Raj Bhawan, the Dalai Lama was to say, “A great soul, a great experience.”2 The
Dalai Lama also expressed a wish to meet Krishnamurti again.
From the mid-1950s Shankar Rao Deo became a familiar figure at Krishnaji’s talks; every winter he would visit Varanasi and stay at the Sarva Seva Sangh headquarters, which had been built at the entrance to Rajghat. With Rao Sahib Patwardhan, I had often visited him there and had found him engaged in shram
dan—the gift of work, which along with the gift of land, was part of the
teachings of the hermit Vinoba Bhave. We would find Shankar Rao sitting for hours with a winnowing fan, picking tiny stones out of rice. It amused me to see him do this seemingly absurd activity, but his action appeared perfectly appropriate to Rao Sahib.
Shankar Rao used to come to hear Krishnaji’s talks; he would attend the discussions and sometimes meet K alone. Krishnaji would banter with Shankar Rao, make him laugh, point to the river and the trees, speak of beauty, love, and the nature of compassion, and overwhelm him with affection. Shankar Rao would listen, powerfully attracted by Krishnaji, yet his whole background rebelled against K’s words. He was incapable of comprehending Krishnaji’s insistence on the need for love, beauty, and sensitivity. Krishnaji’s attitude to the sense and to desire perplexed him. “Listen to desire as you listen to the wind amongst the trees,” said Krishnaji. The Gandhian, nurtured on ideas that demanded the destruction of desire, did not know where to turn or what to say. Shankar Rao found it difficult to reconcile Krishnaji’s teaching with Gandhian ideals.
Krishnaji’s response to Shankar Rao’s determined austerity and his harsh denial of the senses was later reflected in Krishnaji’s talks in Bombay. In February 1957 Krishnaji was to say, “To make the senses insensitive to that which is tempestuous, contradictory, conflicting, sorrowful, is to deny the whole depth and beauty and glory of existence. Reality demands your whole being, a total human being, not with a mind that is paralyzed. There is a constant battle between ‘what I am’ and ‘what I should be.’ This is the web of sorrow on which man is caught. To curb your senses is the cultivation of insensitivity. Though you may be seeking God, your mind is made dull.”
In the small discussions the nature of being and becoming were explored. Germinating in the dark recesses of the mind, “desire to become is the soil in which sorrow takes root.” The mind, to be free, has to see itself as the result of time—only in the energy of self-knowing is true enquiry possible.
“There is an astounding movement in the stillness of discovery moment to moment, which destroys germination in the mind. Self-knowing is the understanding of becoming in oneself. The religious revolution is the ending of
becoming.” On his evening walks on the Worli beach he spoke of the act of listening as “unpremeditated and uncalculated. It is an action of truth, for in it is total attention,” and of silence as “the source of all creation.” Then he made a seminal statement, which was to find expression again in his talks. “Can there be a feeling without thought? Can you ride a feeling without directing it, seeking to change it, calling it good or bad? Try it,” he said.
Shankar Rao was present at the talks and at the small discussions. His conflicts and his complex reactions seemed to intensify. Shankar Rao Deo was incapable of living life with both passion and austerity. In Bombay Krishnaji asked, “If you knew that you were about to die, what would you do? Can you live one hour completely—live one day—one hour—as if you were going to die the next hour? But if you die so that you are living fully in this hour, there is enormous vitality, tremendous attention to everything. You look at the spring of life, the tear, you feel the earth, the quality of the tree. You feel the love that has no continuity and no object. Then you will find in that attention that the ‘me’ is not. It is then that the mind, being empty, can renew itself.”
In the winter of 1956 Vimla Thakkar, a young woman devotee of Vinoba Bhave, was to accompany Shankar Rao and Dada Dharmadhikari to see Krishnaji in Varanasi. She was a Maharashtrian, passionate of speech, learned in Sanskrit and the ancient Indian texts. From her childhood she was attached to a religious life, and had visions of Krishna and other mystical experiences. In search of a guru, for some years she had been a disciple of Tukroji Maharaj, an accepted saint of Maharashtra, and later had left him to join Vinoba Bhave. She had walked with him through the villages of India. Preaching came naturally to her. She saw herself as a woman of destiny; this gave her enormous energy, eloquence, and drive.
During discussions Krishnaji, sensing her self-image, said to her, “Don’t try to experience truth through Shankara, Krishna, Gandhi, or Krishnamurti.” She questioned him, but found that there appeared to be no relationship between the questions she asked Krishnaji and his responses. For his responses were a challenge to her mind and its assumptions.
Vimla Thakkar had been practicing intense yogic sadhanas,1 and she was
suffering from a severe pain in the ear. The trouble in her ear persisted, and her friends had told her that it was due to the awakening of the kundalini. One morning when she, Shankar Rao, and Dada Dharmadhikari were discussing some aspect of the teaching with Krishnaji, Dada spoke of Vimla’s ear trouble. He told Krishnaji that it was related to Vimla’s yogic practices, but Krishnaji did not agree. He asked her to see a doctor, as he felt that it was not a mystical experience but a physical illness. She was distressed to hear Krishnaji say this, but later went to an ear surgeon and in 1960 was operated on in Bombay. The pain disappeared, but she became totally deaf in one ear.
In December 1960 she met Krishnaji again in Varanasi with Shankar Rao and Dada. During the conversation the deafness was mentioned, and Krishnaji suddenly said, “My mother used to tell me when I was very young that I had the
power to heal in these hands.” He said it shyly, as always when he spoke of himself. “Would you like me to see whether I can help you with your ear?” Vimla was taken aback. Brought up in a tradition which made her react strongly against all miracle makers, she said she did not believe in these things, and so the moment passed. Dada later chided her and told her that she should not have refused; Krishnaji was not like the ordinary sadhu living on miracles. After much discussion, she went back to Krishnaji and sought his help.
Krishnaji had a certain way of performing an act of healing. The sufferer sat on a chair, Krishnaji stood behind, and placed his hands on the head of the patient. Then, with a gesture, he seemed to throw off what had entered his hands. He would repeat this several times. Then he placed his hands on the patient’s head for several moments, after which he asked the person to sit quietly for a while. Krishnaji invariably washed his hands afterward. In this way, for several days Krishnaji placed his hands on Vimla’s ear, and slight hearing returned.
Vimla followed Krishnaji to Bombay, where he was giving talks. He asked her about her ear. She said she was hearing the sound of a flute in the deaf ear. He told her that she was translating the sound into her own imagery; he asked her to stop doing so and to use ice packs on the ear to cure the noise. She was later to follow Krishnaji to London—and then to Saanen in Switzerland, where he continued his therapy. From Saanen she wrote to Dada joyfully, “I am cured, and can hear clearly.”
At an interview in Wimbledon, Vimla asked Krishnaji about his healing powers. He told her, “I am afraid you won’t understand.”
She followed him to Gstaad, Switzerland. Krishnaji was not looking well, and appeared to be under a strain. She asked him again about his power to heal, as she felt that the healing had affected her mind as well as her body. The deafness was cured, and the mind too had been released, freed from bondage. She felt “something inside let loose, can’t stand frontiers.” Krishnaji was to say to her very seriously, “Who told you that the two are related?” She again questioned him on the “explosion” within her. But he did not encourage her in her belief, and refused to accept that his touch had brought about deep psychic changes and release from bondage. She decided not to attend any more of Krishnaji’s talks, but to start speaking of reality, on her own.3