J. Krishnamurti

He was born in Madanapalle in southern India and found as a boy by the Theosophical Society, which took him in, educated him in England and announced him as the vehicle for a coming world teacher. An order of some thousands of followers, the Order of the Star in the East, was built around him. In 1929, at thirty-four, he stood in front of that order and dissolved it. "Truth is a pathless land," he said, "and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect." He gave back the money and the properties and spent the rest of his life refusing to be anyone's authority.

What followed was nearly sixty years of talks, on four continents, that kept circling the same ground without ever hardening into a system. He rejected organised religion, gurus, disciples, rituals and techniques, including meditation practised as a method. In their place he put observation: watching thought as it moves, and above all watching oneself in the mirror of relationship, where conditioning becomes visible in a way it never does in solitude. He called the seeing that does this choiceless awareness, and insisted that it is not a state to be reached but something available now or not at all.

He founded schools in India, England and California and kept returning to them, holding that if anything could change a human being it would have to reach children before conditioning had finished its work. In his later decades he held long recorded dialogues with the physicist David Bohm, which remain among the most searching things either of them did. He died in Ojai, California, in 1986, and asked that no one turn his words into an authority either.