'KRISHNAMURTI' FOCUSES ON MAN VS. TEACHINGS.

Byline: Frank Wilson Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Title: "Krishnamurti: 100 Years"

Author: Evelyne Blau

Data: 284 pages, Steward Tabori & Chang; $29.95

Our rating: Four Stars

The efforts of great teachers tend to be defeated by the devotion of their disciples, who often shift attention away from what the teacher has been trying to get across to who the teacher actually is. The implication usually is that the teacher is more than human, perhaps even divine.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, who died in 1986 at age 90, impressed quite a few people over the years, among them some notably sharp cookies. So, it's hardly surprising that he should have been given the reverential treatment, as exemplified by "Krishnamurti: 100 Years," during his centenary last year.

Not that there's anything wrong with the book. It does very well what it sets out to do. The many photos are well worth looking at, since Krishnamurti was throughout his long life a pretty good-looking guy. And it's interesting to read what various worthies - people such as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell and George Bernard Shaw - had to say about him. It's even interesting to read what his gardener had to say about him. Author Evelyne Blau has done her interviewing well. Generous excerpts from Krishnamurti's writings are included, and provocative quotations from them are scattered prominently throughout. As a sampler, the book would be hard to beat.

But it's precisely the focus on Krishnamurti the man that seems to me to get in the way of what Krishnamurti was all about. In his case, the teaching illuminates the life, and not the other way around. Blau says as much in her preface.

Krishnamurti first was brought to the world's attention by C.W. Leadbeater, a member of the Theosophical Society and a confidant of its president, Annie Besant. Leadbeater spotted Krishnamurti on a beach near Madras, India, in 1909, when Krishnamurti was 14. He said the boy's aura was the most perfect he ever had seen.

Leadbeater and Besant arranged with Krishnamurti's father to take Krishnamurti and his younger brother back to England with them. There, they founded something called the Order of the Star in the East "to gather into one body those who ... look for the coming of the world teacher." They soon made it plain that Krishnamurti and the world teacher were one and the same.

But some funny things happened on the way to his installation. First, Krishnamurti started thinking for himself. "I walked about the streets," he wrote, "watching the faces of people who perhaps watched me with even greater interest. I went to theaters, I saw how people amused themselves trying to forget their unhappiness, thinking that they were solving their problems by drugging their hearts and minds with superficial excitement."

He found the worshipful attendance paid to him strange and disconcerting: "As I go about the street they point me out ... there goes that chap printed in the papers ... the messiah, then they burst out laughing ... oh, how I hate it all, and I shall have it all my life ... Lord, what have I done to deserve all this."

Something else even stranger happened. In August 1922, while visiting in Ojai, his brother noticed on the back of Krishnamurti's neck "a painful lump of what seemed to be a contracted muscle, about the size of a large marble." During the next few days, Krishnamurti was seized with prolonged episodes of excruciating pain, complaining again and again of "frightful heat." After about three days of this, he was prompted to sit under a nearby pepper tree. "When I had sat thus for some time," he later wrote, "I felt myself going out of my body. ... In front of me was my body. ... I could still see my body and I was hovering near it. ... The presence of the mighty beings was with me for some time and then they were gone."

These episodes - which Krishnamurti called "the process" - continued for many decades thereafter, though with diminished severity.

Things came to a conclusion with the Order of the Star when Krishnamurti addressed a gathering of its members in the Netherlands on Aug. 3, 1929. "Truth is a pathless land," he told the audience. "You cannot approach it ... by any religion, by any sect. ... The moment you follow someone you cease to follow truth. ... For two years I have been thinking about this ... and I have now decided to disband the Order, as I happen to be its head. You can form other organizations and expect someone else."

For the next 50-odd years, Krishnamurti presented audience after audience with variation upon variation of this theme. Nevertheless, on his deathbed he taped a brief message in which he acknowledged that no one seemed to have really understood what he was trying to explain.

G.K. Chesterton once said that Christianity hadn't been tried and found wanting, but had been found difficult and not tried. The same might be said of Krishnamurti's teachings. He seems to have thought it a radical error to separate mind from nature, and he counseled observing the observer as one means of acquiring self-knowledge. "If I know I am a liar, and it is a fact I recognize, then the struggle is over. ... To know that one is in a certain condition ... is already a process of liberation."

One of his key phrases is "choiceless awareness" - observing oneself and one's reactions and motivations without judgment but with absolute honesty.

If this talk of self-knowledge sounds platitudinous, it is useful to recall a point C.G. Jung once made, that "the so-called normal person possesses only a limited degree of self-knowledge," because "people measure their self-knowledge by what the average person ... knows of himself ... not by the real psychic facts, which are for the most part hidden."

One of the problems people have with Krishnamurti is that he offers no pat solutions and indeed says repeatedly that doctrines, gurus and disciplines are all a waste of time and effort:

"When the mind is swept clean of image ... ritual ... belief ... what you see will be the real, the timeless, the everlasting, which may be called God; but this requires enormous insight, understanding, patience, and ... is only for those who really inquire into what is religion and pursue it ... to the end. Only such people know what is true religion. The rest are merely mouthing words."

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO

Photo Jiddu Krishnamurti impressed quite a few people over the years, among them some notably sharp cookies.