Jiddu Krishnamurti Biography Quotes 24 Report mistakes

Early Life
Jiddu Krishnamurti was born in 1895 in Madanapalle, in the Madras Presidency of British India, into a Telugu-speaking Brahmin family. His early years were marked by frail health and a sensitive, impressionable disposition. After the family moved to the Theosophical Society headquarters at Adyar, near Madras, he came to the attention of the prominent Theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater in 1909. Leadbeater, struck by the boy's demeanor and what he claimed was an extraordinary aura, introduced him to Annie Besant, then the Society's president. Besant became Krishnamurti's legal guardian, and the two Theosophists undertook to educate and train him for a special spiritual mission.

The World Teacher Project
Under the guidance of Leadbeater and Besant, the Theosophical Society advanced the idea that Krishnamurti was the chosen vehicle for the coming World Teacher. In 1911 they founded the Order of the Star in the East to gather a global following around this expectation. Krishnamurti and his younger brother, Nitya (J. Nityananda), were tutored by Theosophists and traveled between India and Europe, meeting supporters and learning languages. The brothers developed a deep bond, and Nitya's companionship stabilized Krishnamurti during an adolescence shaped by ceremony, public anticipation, and private uncertainty.

Loss and Inner Upheaval
A decisive turning point came in the 1920s. In Ojai, California, in 1922, Krishnamurti underwent intense physical and psychological experiences that associates later referred to as "the process", episodes of severe pain and states of unusual clarity that he interpreted as a profound transformation. Then, in 1925, Nitya died of tuberculosis, a shattering loss that contradicted assurances given by those around them and cut at the heart of the messianic narrative. The death compelled Krishnamurti to reexamine all authority and belief, including the claims made on his behalf.

Break with Organizations
In 1929, at Ommen in the Netherlands, Krishnamurti dissolved the Order of the Star, declaring that "truth is a pathless land". He renounced all titles and leadership roles, urged the dissolution of structures built around him, and emphasized that no organization could lead a person to freedom. This break with the Theosophical framework, and implicitly with Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater's expectations, marked his emergence as an independent teacher whose work would center on radical psychological freedom rather than creed, ritual, or authority.

Independent Teaching and Dialogues
For the next five decades he spoke across India, Europe, the Americas, and beyond, engaging audiences without ritual or doctrine. He cautioned against gurus and psychological dependency, insisting that transformation lies in direct perception and in understanding the movement of thought and conditioning. His themes included fear and desire, the fragmentation of the self, the nature of relationship, meditation as choiceless awareness, and the ending of conflict through insight. "Be a light to yourself", he often said, capturing his refusal to become an authority.

Krishnamurti's exchanges with scientists and writers broadened the reach of his inquiries. His sustained dialogues with the physicist David Bohm explored the relationships among thought, perception, and reality, and were published in books and recorded conversations that continue to be studied. The novelist Aldous Huxley, an early admirer, wrote a foreword to The First and Last Freedom and encouraged readers to engage the talks as experiments in direct seeing. In India, the cultural activist Pupul Jayakar helped organize discussions and seminars; her later biography illuminated the personal and historical setting of his work. The biographer Mary Lutyens produced a multi-volume portrait drawing on letters, diaries, and first-hand observation. He was also sought out by political figures; his dialogues with Indira Gandhi during periods of national turmoil were an example of his reach into public life while remaining independent of politics.

Schools and Foundations
Krishnamurti placed special emphasis on education as the crucible of a new mind. He inspired and helped establish schools intended to cultivate freedom, sensitivity, and responsibility without fear or comparison. In India these included Rishi Valley School, Rajghat Besant School in Varanasi, and The Valley School near Bangalore. In the United States he supported the creation of Oak Grove School in Ojai, and in the United Kingdom he founded Brockwood Park School, which also houses the Krishnamurti Centre. To ensure the preservation and dissemination of his talks, writings, and recordings, foundations were set up in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States: Krishnamurti Foundation India, the Krishnamurti Foundation Trust, and the Krishnamurti Foundation of America. These organizations maintain archives and support the schools and study centers.

Stewardship and Controversies
For many years in the United States, the affairs surrounding publications and properties were overseen by D. Rajagopal, a close associate based at Ojai, where Rosalind Rajagopal was also a central figure in the community. Over time, disagreements arose regarding governance and ownership of materials, leading to prolonged legal disputes in California. Krishnamurti pressed for a transparent, nonpersonal stewardship of the teachings. Although complex and contested, these conflicts culminated in changes that placed his work under the care of the foundations he endorsed.

Later Years
In the 1960s through the 1980s, Krishnamurti maintained a demanding schedule of public talks and small-group dialogues at places like Bombay (Mumbai), Madras (Chennai), Saanen in Switzerland, Brockwood Park, and Ojai. His later journals and talks returned to perennial themes: the quiet observation of nature, the subtlety of thought, and the immediacy of insight. Without adopting methods or traditions, he described meditation as a state of attention in which the observer and the observed are not separate. He spoke against nationalism and sectarian identity, seeing them as sources of division. He continued teaching into advanced age and died in Ojai in 1986.

Ideas and Influence
Krishnamurti refused the role of guru while insisting on the seriousness of self-knowledge. He urged listeners to watch the operations of fear, pleasure, and sorrow without choice, to see how conditioning is created and sustained, and to understand the structure of the self as memory and thought. He held that the ending of psychological time, of the projected future of becoming, opens the possibility of compassion and intelligence unbound by the past. In education he argued for environments where inquiry replaces comparison and authority does not stifle sensitivity. In the wider culture his conversations with David Bohm and others influenced discourse in psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind by questioning whether analysis alone can end conflict. His writings, including The First and Last Freedom, Commentaries on Living, Freedom from the Known, Krishnamurti's Notebook, and The Ending of Time (with Bohm), are largely transcripts of talks and dialogues rather than systematized doctrine.

Legacy
Krishnamurti left no successors and discouraged any cult of personality. The foundations and schools he inspired continue to present his teachings as an open invitation to observe, question, and discover. Those who wrote about him, notably Mary Lutyens and Pupul Jayakar, and those who worked closely with him, from David Bohm to colleagues in the schools and foundations, form part of a historical record that highlights an unusual consistency between his public statements and personal conduct. His enduring legacy rests on a simple, demanding proposition: that freedom and insight arise in the very act of seeing, here and now, without authority, method, or promise.

Our collection contains 24 quotes who is written by Jiddu, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Love - Learning.