In early 1959 it was decided that Krishnaji would not return to Ojai, but would be spending his second year in India. He had been in the country since the autumn of 1957 and was not to return to Europe till the spring of 1960. It was the longest period that he was to spend in India since he left the country as a young boy.
In April, when the damp, hot weather became unbearable, Krishnaji decided to leave Bombay for Lonavala, a small hillside resort between Bombay and Poona. He stayed alone with a servant in the house of Amru Mehta, my youngest sister. Sunanda and her husband, Pama Patwardhan, were at Poona, which was only forty miles from Lonavala, and often came to visit him. He spent most days alone.
In May it had been arranged that he go to Kashmir via Delhi, accompanied by Madhavachari and a South Indian cook named Parameswaran. While in New Delhi Krishnaji insisted that a new woolen suit be tailored for Madhavachari. It gave him great delight to see Madhavachari well dressed, and he remarked, “Mamaji will look very smart now.” On their arrival they stayed overnight on a houseboat in Srinagar. The next day they moved to a house located in a crowded part of the city, and in a letter to me Krishnaji expressed his unhappiness with the rat-infested house and its surroundings.
By May 26 Krishnaji and Madhavachari had left Srinagar and driven to Achebal, a serai or rest house built by Nur Jehan on the ancient road from Lahore to Srinagar. Achebal is mentioned in the Akbar Nama1 as a place of worship of
the ancients; its abundant water, crystal clear and cold, arises from a torrential spring. Occasionally, the Akbar Nama goes on to say, a beautiful yellow-spotted fish would appear in the waters, and its appearance was regarded as very fortunate. For hundreds of years pilgrims had come to this sacred site because of the healing properties of the spring water, though myths of the yakshis, water and tree spirits who guarded the spring, had long disappeared.
Nur Jehan had built a walled garden around the spring, enclosing an area planted with chinar and poplar trees. At one point in the enclosed area the spring that gushed torrentially from the earth fell as a sheet of water to lower levels of the garden. The huge branches of the chinar trees spread across the falling waters. Below the fall were pools and fountains, and channels had been laid to carry the water to distant parts of the garden. The channels were so planned that the rays of the sun created rainbows as they caught the spray of waterfall and fountain. Flowers had been planted, a trifle wildly, in areas where the chinar and poplar did not cast their shadow. Pavilions, originally built by the Moghuls, but
later repaired and bearing little trace of their earlier exquisite proportions, were placed near the pool. The thunder of the waterfall and the sound of rippling water did not intrude to shatter the silences nor disturb the birds that rested in the wide- trunked chinar trees. The countryside was a vast carpet of sun-soaked green young rice fields, against a backdrop of snow-peaked mountains, which arose precipitously on the horizon.
Soon after their arrival Madhavachari had to leave for Madras, as one of his children was ill. But Parameswaran stayed on to attend to Krishnaji’s needs. I joined Krishnaji at Achebal on June 6, and lived in a tiny hut next to Krishnaji’s till the end of the month.
Before I came up to Kashmir, Krishnaji had written asking me to bring him a beginner’s book of English, a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English
Verse, and a bottle of hair tonic. I had also brought up a parcel of alfonso
mangoes, a fruit Krishnaji loved. There was no electricity in Achebal, and at night we used kerosene lanterns or a petromax.1
K woke at dawn and did his yoga asanas and pranayama, which he had learned from B. K. S. Iyengar, an eminent teacher of yoga from Poona. Krishnaji was trying to persuade me to learn the yogic asanas, but I am by temperament physically lethargic and my attempts to learn were futile. After Krishnaji’s
asanas were over, we had a South Indian breakfast of idlis and sambhar or dosas, savory rice-and-lentil cakes, with coconut chutney. I drank coffee,
Krishnaji drank some herbal concoction.
By then Krishnaji was ready for his long walk, and I joined him in climbing the surrounding hills. Walking through pine forests, we climbed steep slopes; Krishnaji was agile, exquisitely balanced, clambering over rocks and taking the most strenuous shortcuts with ease. I panted and sighed, but I was used to the mountains from childhood and managed to keep pace with him. He would climb swiftly, then look back at me, watching me struggle to negotiate a particularly difficult rock; sometimes he lent a hand and pulled me up behind him, across very steep slopes. From the top of the hill, which we reached after long and arduous climbing, the view was breathtaking. The walled garden and the cool green of rice fields flanked with poplar trees lay below, while the startling white of the snows surrounded us. Krishnaji was enchanted with the place.
In the afternoons, after resting, he would teach Parameswaran English. In the evenings we walked at a slower pace amongst the rice fields, or within the walled Moghul garden. The flowers were in full bloom and the light winds carried the fragrance of rose, lilac, and honeysuckle. Watercress grew along the bed of the stream, and we picked some for our evening meal. There was a trout hatchery, and Krishnaji spent time watching the swift movement of the fish.
Krishnaji was water’s child. He delighted in falling, leaping, running water, or water flowing over lichen-covered boulders, or water with no ripple. The translucence and the freedom of water, its enormous turbulence, its stillness or its thrust through earth and rock, embodied him.
1 Petromax: Before electricity was introduced in India, lamps fed with kerosene oil with special wicks and
with a pump were used to produce a bright light. The petromax is still used at night in wedding processions.
Krishnaji’s mood was young; no storms raged. Laughter was on his lips and his eyes. He drowned me in compassion and affection. At times he was intensely serious and contemplative. Many of the insights that he was to explore later in the year, in his talks at Madras and Bombay, were arising. Like the tide, or the waxing and waning of the moon, his mind moved in its own rhythm. I saw this man of mystery, endowed with limitless beauty, comment on the “the wholeness of sunlight,” look up at a budding leaf, put his hands on a centuries-old tree, make friends with it, feel its bark, listen to the thunder of the sap as it flowed through the veins of a leaf. “The timeless is here, it lies under every leaf,” he would say. I felt the earth on which we walked, talked, ate, and lived as the ground of an energy without limit. At times I felt intoxicated, as if fed on morning dew.
On a walk he asked me how I observed, and how I spoke. I was puzzled. He then said, “Is it possible to speak, sing, chant, not from the throat and mouth, not from the front of the mouth, but letting the words touch the back of the head, through the eyes, with attention held behind the eyes, and so speak? That is, to speak with the whole head.”
We discussed at length the truly religious mind and the scientific mind as the only two minds that would exist in the years to come—a statement that he was to explore later in his talks at Madras. He spoke of death and ending as the source of creation and the release of an energy that did not dissipate. For him, listening was itself the miracle that transmuted and deeply penetrated, uprooting and destroying the hidden bonds of the mind.
On dark, moonless nights we would go out and watch the stars and the receding darkness of space. He would point out the various constellations. He spoke of the journey into outer space and the pilgrimage within as the discovery of the endless. But a petty mind could not embark on this pilgrimage of eternity.
Every evening was a benediction.
At night, after an early dinner under the light of the petromax, he would recite poetry from the Golden Treasury. Keats’s “Ode to the Nightingale” was his favorite. It was cold at night and we burned firewood and dry pine cones in the open fireplace. Occasionally, he would chant in Sanskrit. The sounds of his deep voice filled the room and resounded across the rice fields, reaching beyond the snows. Listening and seeing flowered in his pristine presence.
Krishnaji told me that on one of his walks he had met a group of monks walking, within the presence of the snow-clad peaks. They were passing through brilliant green rice fields, and the soaring, snowy peaks were aflame with the setting sun. In the seeing of the vastness was the essence of divinity. The monks, however, walked with their eyes narrowed and focused on the ground before their feet, totally unaware of the glory around them. However silent their minds became, he said, it would be the silence of the limited, of small spaces, and the vast expanding universe would have no place within it.
Every few days I would go to Srinagar by car and return in the evenings. Krishnaji had great feeling for the handcrafted, and I would bring back textiles and craft objects. He handled them with care and rejoiced in their colors, their
textures, and the skill of the craftsman. I would also bring back fresh vegetables and fruit, for they were not available at Achebal.
In 1959 I had no knowledge that Achebal was an ancient site of pilgrimage, and that the waters of the spring were held sacred. The local inhabitants, who were Muslims, had erased all traces of their archaic past and the myths connected with it. Krishnaji, however, felt the pulse of the soil, the reverberations of the many pilgrims’ feet that had walked on the path to the spring. He often spoke of the role of the pilgrim. I told him of an early text where the feet of the wanderer are likened to a flower. I also said that the pilgrims’ route lay in Pahalgam, about forty miles from Achebal. But to no avail.
I grew aware of how difficult it was to live close to Krishnaji without growing insensitive. It was like living in front of a laser beam; one could so easily take the intensity for granted and so be scorched and shrivel. To live near him was to live in a field of observation and listening. One had to be immensely awake so that the spine straightened, the mind became alert, the body still. He was watchful of every movement, every thought; the way one walked, the agitated movements of the body, the way one spoke, the pitch of the voice, the silences. He listened to every response—was aware when the mind imitated, when it was alive with insight. Without a word said, one felt the listening and the observing. But the being who was near, who watched, who listened, was without judgment. It was like seeing one’s face in a finely polished ancient bronze mirror.
A little distance from us lived a man who in his young days had taken
sannyas and had later given up the robe. He was a constant visitor, bringing
Krishnaji a vegetal brew he said was good for the kidneys. Krishnaji, instinctively a naturopath, delighted in herbs and drank the brew, insisting that it was good for his kidneys.
By the end of June I returned to Delhi. Madhavachari was soon to rejoin Krishnaji in Pahalgam, the main base camp for pilgrims journeying to Amarnath, one of the most sacred pilgrimages in India. At the Amarnath cave high in the Himalayas, a natural lingam of snow was formed and melted to the cyclic rhythm of the moon. The main pilgrimage was on the full-moon day of August when the lingam appeared in its perfect ovalid form, but from mid-June sannyasis and laymen journeyed to the cave. The journey was hazardous. The path lay across high passes and through precipitous gorges. Along the route was Sheshnag, a lake of limpid blue, against which towered high mountains. The full moon rising behind the highest peak, making luminous the eternal snows, was likened to the crescent moon resting on Shiva’s matted locks.
At Pahalgam, Krishnaji stayed at a tourist hut set amongst pines. Through the valley, two rivers made turbulent by the massive boulders that lay along their bed, descended from the high places; the Lidar arising from the Kolahai glacier and the other, the Amarganga, sometimes called Sheshnag, along the banks of which lay the path to Amarnath.
Sannyasis and visitors from Srinagar came to see Krishnaji, and he talked
with some of them. He was to refer to these sannyasis in his talks at Madras later in the year. He said, “The other day in Kashmir several sannyasis said to me,
‘We live alone in the snow. We never see anybody. No one ever comes to visit us.’ I said to them, ‘Are you really alone, or are you merely physically separated from humanity?’ ‘Ah, yes,’ they replied, ‘we are alone.’ But they were with their
Vedas and Upanishads, with their experiences and their gathered knowledge,
with their meditations and japams.1 They had not renounced the burden of their
conditioning. That is not being alone. Putting on a saffron robe does not mean renouncing. You can never renounce the world, because the world is part of you. You renounce a few cows, a house, but to renounce your heredity, your tradition, the burden of your condition, that demands enormous enquiry.”
Most of Krishnaji’s walks were alone through the thick forests of pine and fir that surrounded Pahalgam. On August 13 Vinoba Bhave and his followers came to see Krishnamurti.
Vinobaji said this was the first time he had seen Krishnaji. The Gandhian pilgrim asked, “How old are you?”
Krishnaji answered, “Sixty-four.”
“So you are my younger brother. I have come to pay my respects and seek your blessings. Rao and Achyut Patwardhan, Dada Dharmadhikari, and Vimla have told me about you several times. But I am always on the move and so are you. So we have never met.”
After the pleasantries were over Vinobaji asked Krishnaji to speak to him of his wisdom. Krishnaji appeared shy and was silent. A record of the discussions were kept by Nirmala Deshpande, who was present during the meetings and who took down notes as the conversation took place.1
Vinobaji said, “How do we start?”
“It depends on what you are interested,” answered Krishnaji. “Life,” responded Vinobaji.
“Everyone is interested in life. But discussion depends on words, and words are necessary,” said Vinoba.
“Not too many words, otherwise discussion loses significance,” K replied. “Discussion implies...”
Before Krishnaji could proceed, Vinobaji said, “Sharing experiences.”
“Yes, and also to penetrate deeply. Experience is limited—I distrust basing action on experience.”
“Is that because experience conditions man?” asked Vinobaji.
“Yes,” replied K, “that is why it is important to have a free mind, a mind that is not full of experience, but free to see beyond experience. One has to die to experience every day. One is always translating experience in terms of the old. As a Hindu I translate it in terms of Shiva, Krishna—but they are just words.”
“The division taking place as Hindu, Muslim, Christian has to be wiped out,” said Krishnaji.
Vinobaji responded, “Yes.”
“You say ‘yes,’ but it is a verbal statement. Do you cease to be a Hindu? In science, one drops past experience, to discover a new insight. From the very
beginning one should be taught to be free of conditioning—as a Hindu, Muslim, Christian. None of us let go. We only pretend to do so.
“One has to cease to be Hindu or Muslim; one has to be a human being. But that is very difficult. Thinking about being free leads you nowhere.
“First, one must be free. Freedom first, not through thinking about freedom.” Vinobaji asked his comrades to ask questions, but they were hesitant. Vinobaji said to Krishnaji that most people don’t want to question, but come for
darshan. The discussion moved away from the serious, and Vinobaji asked
Krishnaji, “How much time do you spend in India?” “Six months.”
“Do you take exercise?” “A little, I walk.”
One of Vinobaji’s followers asked, “What is the meaning of self-realization?” “What does it mean to you?” was the reply.
“Union with Brahman—with God,” said one of Vinobaji’s disciples.
“God is a phrase. To realize God, you must have a free mind, a good mind that does not follow anybody. A mind that has no guru, no system. Try it.”
“How does one get such a mind?” came the reply.
“There has to be self-knowledge. Not knowledge of the Atman, but how one thinks, why one thinks—how one acts. What is the ‘oneself?’ I am not speaking only of the conscious self, but of the deep levels of the unconscious. What is needed is a revolutionary mind. You cannot have that by sadhana. If you see only through one window, your view is limited.”
“Is it not possible for philosophy to be taught?” asked one of Vinobaji’s followers.
“There is a right way of thinking. Does it matter who listens?” said Krishnaji. “Perhaps he feels that you should come out as a preacher,” Vinobaji intervened.
“Me, Sir! I am talking—that is my life. Do you want me to do it traditionally?”
“Perhaps you are doing in your way what he wants you to do.”
“Sir, there is no my way, your way, his way. There is only one way.” Krishnaji was uncompromising.
“I think in one way, you think in another. We mislead a whole generation. One has to be free, man has to be free to speak of God. The Communists say there is no God, you say God is. You are both conditioned. You are both saying