The British occultists took the thin and sickly but beautiful boy away from his family. Groomed him for 20 years to become the savior of humanity. Trained him between 1909-29 to be a serene guru and charming English aristocrat. He looked good in a double-breasted suit and had fabulous hair. Huge amounts of money flowed into the organization they built around him.
But Krishnamurti became a man the day he shocked them all. Julian’s latest chapter of his historical series wraps up Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society—one of the crucial 19th century roots of New Age metaphysics, and the phenomenon we call conspirituality.
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They found the boy in 1909 on a beach by the Adyar River in Chennai, the capital city of Tamil Nadu in India.
There is some controversy over the date of his birth.
Some say he was 14 when discovered.
By his own account, in some interviews, he may have been as young as 9.
The Englishman who first saw him, Charles Leadbeater, described him as having the most wonderful aura he had ever seen.
Leadbeater professed to be clairvoyant.
However, the boy's father and teachers had apparently beaten him regularly, finding him to be vague and dreamy, and believing he was either lazy or intellectually disabled.
He had contracted malaria in 1903 and suffered recurrent bouts of the illness, so he was sickly and thin and sensitive, but he struck Leadbeater as radiant and possessed of not a particle of selfishness, as he put it, and his education began in earnest.
He and his younger brother Nietzsche from whom he was inseparable, were privately tutored from then on.
And within six months, the boy was fluent in both written and spoken English.
His name was Jiddu Krishnamurti.
And his benefactor and tutor, Charles Leadbeater, believed he had found the chosen one who would become a vessel for the incarnation of Maitreya, the world teacher and final Buddha.
Incarnating to enlighten all of humanity.
His English associate, Annie Besant, would come to hold legal guardianship over the young brothers, taking them away from their family.
Krishnamurti's biographer, Roland Vernon, describes a rigorous program imposed upon the boy which included school subjects, sport and exercise, meditation and yoga, religious studies, and instruction in the ways of British high society.
For twenty years, Krishnamurti was educated and groomed to assume his venerated role as the world teacher.
An organization was established around him, with him at the head.
It was called the Order of the Star of the East, and at its peak it boasted over 40,000 members.
Money flowed liberally into the organization, a castle As many as 5,000 acres of property were donated.
The boy wore tailored double-breasted suits and posed confidently in black-and-white photographs.
He grew into a handsome young man with beautiful thick hair, kept kind of short around the sides and the back, and parted down the middle into longer flowing waves on top.
Sometimes they dressed him in couture versions of more traditionally Indian garb, A luxurious narrow jacket, perhaps, with long coattails in the back over gathered form-fitting pants with slip-on shoes.
He was shy, and at first spoke haltingly in public when giving addresses to the organization within two years of his discovery.
But he grew into the role, became a good student, came to believe in his destiny, and by the time the whole order was buzzing with anticipation at his full flowering, he was an accomplished writer and speaker who had compellingly addressed groups in several European countries.
In 1925, while giving a talk on the significance of the world teacher for the first time, the young Krishnamurti began speaking in the first person.
He said, I come for those who want sympathy, who want happiness, who are longing to be released, who are longing to find happiness in all things.
I come to reform and not to tear down.
I come not to destroy, but to build.
Those in attendance described this as a spine-tingling confirmation that Lord Maitreya was about to emerge.
We'll pick up the story of Krishnamurti's early life shortly.
For now, I will just say that if you've been following my bonus series so far, you might be interested to know that Annie Besant and Charles Ledbetter were the successors to Madame Helena Blavatsky after she died.
They took to heart her ideas about the masters of ancient wisdom and her pronouncements about the Theosophical Society as having been established To prepare humanity for the arrival of the world teacher.
And in 1909 believed they had found the boy who was to be Maitreya's vessel in one Jiddu Krishnamurti.
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