March 2025
This book about Krishnamurti (1895-1986) is long and complex but its central importance is that, unlike much writing about and by Krishnamurti, it convincingly and in detail explores the role of the Masters of Wisdom in his life. (Coming from an early Theosophical perspective, Sanat refers to them as the “Perennial Masters”, who teach the “Perennial Philosophy”.)
Sanat’s work about the role of the Masters in Krishnamurti’s life throws a different light on the man who many in the West have accepted as a great and illuminating teacher. Krishnamurti (K) himself played down (at least publicly) the role of the Masters because it was counter to his teaching that refuted any reliance on authority. He spoke against the idea of teachers or gurus of any kind — not so much necessarily to deny the Masters’ existence but to stress its irrelevance to each individual’s self-reliance; the aim is always self-discovery along with self-forgetfulness, or, as K put it, “dying to the known”. “You are the door through which you yourself have to go.” No one should rely on a ‘guru’ or a Master. Nor should they even rely on Krishnamurti himself. Perhaps his lack of focus on esoteric ideas made K’s teaching more palatable to modern Western audiences. But it can also be seen as a gap.
Sanat establishes the reality of Maitreya, Gautama Buddha and other Masters, and traces their important part in Krishnamurti’s evolving life — not as hallucinations or ‘visions’ as some commentators have averred. He quotes Madame Blavatsky: “[The Masters] are living men … We call them Masters because they are our teachers and because from them we have derived all the theosophical truths however inadequately some of us may have expressed and others understood them. They are men of great learning whom we term initiates, and still greater holiness of life… .” Readers of Alice A.Bailey, who received telepathically most of her writings from the Master Djwhal Khul, will have no difficulty in accepting Sanat’s account of the reality of the Masters; nor will readers of Share International, which every month during Benjamin Creme’s lifetime published an article from a Master of Wisdom. However, Sanat is writing for an audience that has been accustomed to the idea that, for most of his life’s teaching, K dismissed the idea.
The first indication of the Masters’ role in K’s life is how, as an unkempt child, he was ‘discovered’ (recognized) along with his brother, by Charles Leadbeater, on a beach in Adyar in 1909, and was then adopted and brought up in the UK by Annie Besant. (Both Leadbeater and Besant were early Theosophists.) A Master must have had a part to play. Then, there is the evidence in K’s first book At the feet of the Master, produced when he was only 14, where the introduction says: “These are not my words; they are the words of the Master who taught me.” Later commentators seem largely to have forgotten this book, or thought it was written by Leadbeater, and K did not refer to it in his later years of teaching.
The Masters were responsible for Krishnamurti’s development — culminating in the gruelling, initiatory ‘process’, as K himself called it.* The Masters were real, physical beings who brought in spiritual energies through K. In chapter 2, ‘A new perspective’, Sanat demonstrates the relevance of the perennial wisdom teachings to the discoveries of modern physics, in particular the notion of ‘subtle energies’. Modern esotericism talks in terms of ‘energies’ that are counter to what most people in the West believe. However, those who practise Transmission Meditation are very aware of the energies sent from the Masters.
A demonstration of the presence and influence of the Masters and Maitreya in K’s life is clear from his account to a small number of associates in 1910: “When I left my body … I went at once to the Master KH’s house and found him there with the Master Morya and the Master Djwhal Khul…Then we all went together to the house of the Lord Maitreya and there we found many of the Masters…” (p140).
In 1924, Sanat recounts, while K was staying in Italy, and when he was undergoing his painful initiatory ‘process’, he gave a message from Maitreya to his close associates in “a style totally different from his own manner of speaking”:
“Do not look for the Great Ones when they may be very near you.
You are like the blind man who seeks sunshine.
Learn to serve Me, for along that path alone will you find me.
Forget yourself for then only am I to be found.
You are like the hungry man who is offered food and will not eat.
The happiness you seek is not far off; it lies in every common stone.
I am there if you will only see. I am the Helper if you will let Me help”
Sanat believes that Krishnamurti may be “considered the esoteric too serious to discuss publicly”, for the study of the esoteric should not be simply academic but a living experience of transformation. However, we might wish that in the later part of his life K had been more open with his audiences — maybe more people would now accept the reality of the Masters of Wisdom and Maitreya.
*According to Benjamin Creme, this was part of specific preparation to enable K to be able to ‘endure’ physically the powerful energies involved in overshadowing by Maitreya — since he was chosen to be a possible vehicle for Maitreya prior to Maitreya having decided that he himself could appear [in a mayavirupa, a self-created body].
The Inner Life of Krishnamurti: Private Passion and Perennial Wisdom
by Aryel Sanat, Quest Books, USA, 1999
