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Pointing the Way to Wisdom

Education and the Significance of Life by J. Krishnamurti

Harper & Row, 1981 (K&R Foundation, 1953)

Reading Jiddu Krishnamurti's collected speeches and lectures, you get the impression that he could get a bit cranky sometimes.

And why not? Most of the people in the audience behaved as if they had no clue what he was talking about. Not only that, but the poor man had been answering the same damn error-filled questions about his teachings for decades. Going by his lectures and speeches alone, you'd probably end up thinking that after 80+ years on the planet Krishnamurti despaired of ever seeing real change in the way people related to each other and to their universe.

You get a very different impression of Krishnamurti from reading books that he wrote specifically as books, such as Education and the Significance of Life. In this book, Krishnamurti offers a vision of hope for things yet unmade, a vision that can overcome the usual sad litany of human failings and myopia that he chronicled in his speeches.

Education is a slim book, only 125 pages, but it seems much more hefty when you're reading it. Not that the book is hard to read; Krishnamurti is a master of straightforward, concise, readable English prose. The challenge is that he packs so much wisdom into each sentence that you pretty much have to stop after each paragraph and absorb the enormous implications of what he is saying.

For example, here's a single sentence, picked almost at random:

"As long as the mind allows itself to be dominated and controlled by the desire for its own security, there can be no release from the self and its problems; and that is why there is no release from the self through dogma and organized belief, which we call religion." (p. 61)

Just in that one sentence, an unprepared reader can come up with quite a few reasonable sounding questions:

• What's wrong with security?
• Why would I need to release myself from "the self"?
• Who's talking about giving up religion here?
• You mean these things are bad?
• Why does that scare the bejeezus out of me?

The Man With No Plan

The basic premise of Krishnamurti's teaching is that "truth is a pathless land," a concept he elaborated in a famous 1929 speech. And so it is for education, which is supposed to equip children with the tools they will need to seek truth.

The big difference between Krishnamurti's concept of "school" and the institution we all know and love (or hate) is precisely the school's institutional nature. Krishnamurti is not laying out a structured program in which facts and cultural knowledge are passed on as the essential information necessary for effective citizen-participants. Rather, he wants students to learn to understand what relationships really are:

"Conflict and confusion result from our own wrong relationship with people, things and ideas, and until we understand that relationship and alter it, mere learning, the gathering of facts and the acquiring of various skills, can only lead us to engulfing chaos and destruction." (p. 17)

Not a lot of ambiguity or gray area there. We're not talking about piffling consequenses like having to put up with idiot bosses who won't promote you. According to Krishnamurti, the ultimate consequence of wrong relationship is nothing less than Armageddon.

Krishnamurti clearly distinguishes between the accumulation of external knowledge and the understanding of one's own self. And this is where a lot of people get turned off to Krishamurti. They say he is either championing moral relativism, or advocating anarchy, or retreating into navel-gazing.

However, a more careful and thoughtful reading of Krishnamurti's work reveals a much subtler call to action of an intelligent, centered sort. Krishnamurti does not deride technical knowledge. He simply seeks to place it in the same relationship to the rest of life that Socrates sought to do -- in other words, there are many techne (crafts), and specialists can attain arete (excellence) in their chosen craft, but one can have craft excellence without moral excellence.

Schools, therefore, should not be devoted exclusively to training students in technique. To paraphrase Baudelaire, people by nature are not specialists. Or to quote another philosopher, whose name I can't find but whose statement has always stayed with me, "specialization is for insects." To be skilled in the execution of your job, but with little or no understanding of who you really are and what it means to be part of the web of life -- without, in other words, really understanding how your actions affect the world -- how can you practice your job with anything approaching a full awareness of its real impact? I mean, after all, don't we see enough of that type of behavior these days?

In Education and the Significance of Life, Krishnamurti, perhaps the best questioner since Socrates, invites each reader to consider this question and to find an answer for perself:

"Some form of technical training seems necessary; but when we have become engineers, physicians, accountants -- then what? Is the practice of a profession the fulfilment of life? (p. 19)

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