DIVINELY BEAUTIFUL BOYS: KRISHNAMURTI AND THE THEOSOPHISTS
BY RONALD JAN VERGEER

The following article, originally titled Boylove in Theosophical Circles, is an authorised adaptation by Gorrit Goslinga, published in Koinos magazine, issue 16, Amsterdam, 4^th Quarter 1997, pp. 6-10. The three black-and-white photos accompanied the original article.

At the beginning of this century, the attraction exercised by beautiful boys was - at least for some of its prominent members - clearly an element in the activities and philosophy of the Theosophical Society. Since 1882 this religious movement among whites in British India had had its headquarters at the mouth of the Adyar River, just to the south of the great city of Madras (presently Chennai). It was thanks to them that the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 -1986) experienced his remarkable ascent at a young age, and his world fame.

Theosophy was originally based on the teachings of Madame Helene Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), who combined tantric (magical/mystical) writings from Tibet with Hindu and Buddhist traditions to produce a “secret doctrine.” In the Theosophist’s order of deities, the highest place was reserved for Sanat Kumar, whom both Tantrism and the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu epic, present as a youth of sixteen, eternally young and outside time.

In 1907 Mrs. Annie Besant (1847-1933) come to be president of the Theosophical Society. One of her important proteges was Charles Webster Leadbeater (1847-1934), a former Anglican clergyman. He had had problems because of accusations that his interest in and concern for young boys was homosexual in nature. Therefore there was little love for him in colonial circles. He also had a reputation for clairvoyance, which he used to “recognize” very beautiful boys as persons with particular gifts.

He was not alone in that: in that time, the Theosophists expected the arrival of a new Messiah, which meant it would be important to recognize Him in the vehicle of a boy. Thus some first had their eye on the American teenager Hubert van Hook, who was in Madras with his mother from 1909 to 1914. Around that same time, another prominent Theosophist, Ferdinand T. Brooks, “discovered” the 12-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru - later the first Prime Minister of India - and presented him to a gathering at Benares (now Varanasi).

Leadbeater’s most important discovery was Jiddu Krishnamurti. He came to notice when in 1909, at the age of 13, he was swimming at the Adyar beach. According to what Leadbeater told his young assistant Ernst Wood, Jiddu had a “remarkable aura,” that is, a special charisma. Wood was surprised at this, because he knew the boy and his younger brother Nitya (1898-1925), their poverty-stricken background and Jiddu’s poor grades in school. But Leadbeater insisted that the boy was pre-destined co become a spiritual leader. Krishnamurti himself later wrote about this meeting and the period that followed. He [Leadbeater] was my dear friend and elder brother. Going down to the sea with Mr. van Maanen and others to have a swim (...) We met very often and he sometimes invited ns to his bungalow (...) We soon became very friendly with Mr. Leadbeater and he helped ns regularly with our lessons (...) My father was very pleased with the progress we were to make, and on August 14th it was finally decided that we should not go to school anymore.

Theosophical education

In his book The Lives of Alcyone, Leadbeater delved into the earlier reincarnations which he claimed Krishnamurti had had. He considered him to be the Maitreya, the tenth incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu (in Hinduism Krishna is considered to be the eighth, and Buddha the ninth). Meanwhile, Jiddu was seeing his divine masters in his dreams, among them the youth Sanat Kumar. Leadbeater subjected Jiddu and his younger brother Nitya to a regime of vegetarianism and a strict British education under the tutor Dick B. Clarke, naturally also a Theosophist.

Many evenings, according to Leadbeater, by laying his hand on Jiddu’s head he took the boy with him to the astral plane, so that he could acquire the teaching of the Masters. A week after his first meeting with Mrs. Besant, at the end of November, 1909, the boy was already admitted to the “esoteric section” of the Society. When she left for Benares, she corresponded with him about his visions and their meaning. Annie Besant herself felt great admiration and considerable love for Krishnamurti: I am always your loving mother.

Jiddu and Nitya had hardly any contact with their family anymore, and lived entirely under the supervision of the Theosophist leaders. In 1911 they even travelled to England with Mrs. Besant. But a year later there were such powerful rumours about Leadbeater’s sexual interests that the boys’ father, Narianiah, began to resist further contact between Leadbeater and his children. However, Mrs. Besant took the boys with her to Taormina in Sicily, a place that in that time was very widely known among boy-lovers, and the residence of the famous photographer Wilhelm Von Gloeden, among others. Leadbeater was there too. While Annie Besant was involved in legal proceedings in British India over the guardianship of the brothers, she left them to live in the care of her follower George Arundale in London.

Lady Emily Lutyens, wife of the later architect of New Delhi and herself one of Krishnamurti’s biographers, was deeply impressed by Jiddu, now sixteen years old, with long hair and large eyes. According to reports, her feelings were so visible that both her husband and Mrs. Besant were seriously annoyed, according to the latter because an emotional atmosphere might damage the religious mission of her protégé.

Spiritual enlightenment

 

In the meantime, at a Theosophical congress in Benares, Leadbeater had discovered the thirten-year-old Brahman D. Rajagopal, attracted by his brilliantly coloured aura. He predicted a future for this Raja as the next Buddha on the planet Mercury (just as Jiddu, according to him, had a connection with the constellation Pleiades). Raja was later a successful law student at Cambridge, where Krishnamurti failed in all his attempts to pursue his studies. The Krishnamurti brothers only returned to Madras and saw their father again in 1921, after nine years. Krishnamurti’s attachment to his brother made that in 1922 they travelled together first to Colombo, Ceylon, and thereafter attended a Theosophical gathering in Sydney, Australia. Here they saw Charles Leadbeater again after eleven years, and Jiddu was happy to see his old mentor once more. Here too there were again rumours about Leadbeater’s homosexuality, this time denied by Jiddu.

Next the brothers visited what had previously been an Indian reservation in Ojai, California, where several years later Annie Besant purchased a property that she named Arya Vihara (Cloister of the Nobles). There, through meditation, Jiddu Krishnamurti reached an intense spiritual enlightenment that was to change the course of his life. He later asked himself why so few people chose the simple path of joy in life in place of the long detour of concentration on cares and negativity. His conclusion was that modern society is too complicated and too materialistic.

Meanwhile, Leadbeater was surrounding himself with young boys and girls as his chosen disciples in an institution derived from Catholicism, with purple vestments, rosaries and crosses covered with gems. At a mass gathering at the Dutch village of Ommen, where 3000 of her followers were present, Annie Besant proclaimed several persons to be apostles. Not only Nitya Krishnamurti and Rajagopal shared in this honour, but also the fifteen-year-old, golden-haired Theodore St. John, once again a protege of Leadbeater.

Schools

Although Jiddu Krishnamurti was revered as the new Messiah by the Theosophists, he left that movement under the motto Not the guru is important but the teachings. He rejected every authority with the statement, Truth is a pathless land; you can not approach it by ally religion, nor by any sect; no organisation can mankind lead to spirituality. He continued to travel around the world and give addresses, not in order to attract followers, but to insist on freedom, unconditional realization of the Self a revolution of consciousness and a perception of the global. According to him, people, animals and everything in nature are of the same value. His pedagogical insights overlap with Greek paidagogia, the pedagogical eros of Gustav Wyncken, the ideas of Janusz Korczak in Poland, O’Neill (Summerhill) in England and Freinet and Kameneff (L’école en bateau) in France. This can be seen, for example, in his acceptance of the Socratic way of questioning, in which the teacher and pupil function on an equal level. There are still schools today which follow his concepts: in India, amongst others, at Varanasi (Rai Ghat) and at Rishi Valley, Andhra Pradesh; in the United States, Ojai, California, and in England (Brockwood).

In a conversation with teachers at Rishi Valley in 1979, Krishnamurti said that a deep trust in the teacher on the student’s part was central to the educational process. On the matter of sexuality he said, Sex is like a tender flower, an intense flame, delicate and rare. It has to be nurtured and cherished. You have to be especially watchful when it is not operating as nature intended. To let sex function freely is to dissipate energy; to suppress it brutally is to destroy something delicate and intensely beautiful. This is a pronouncement that both boy-lovers and their adversaries should take to heart.

In 1980, nearly a half-century after he had broken with the Theosophical Society, Krishnamurti returned to his birthplace by the mouth of the Adyar. One evening there he spoke to two fisherboys on the beach, slender and dark-skinned as he and his brother had been seventy years earlier. He was moved, just as he had been when he entered what had previously been Annie Besant’s room and saw a large photograph of Leadbeater. After several minutes he lifted his right hand and said, Pax, pax (Latin for “peace”).

In 1989, three years after the philosopher’s death, during a congress organised by his friends, Prof Ramachandra Gandhi spoke about the symposium of Socrates and Socrates’ use of boys’ homosexual inclinations: Sensuality against brutally, as Asyphyros was a young gay-boy and by his lovesequent appears a wisdom that goes beyond theory and practice of gratification. This is a form of Tantra, in which not the complex paintings but the complex body and attractiveness of a boy can be the key to insight.

Primary source:`
Pupul Jayakar,
J. Krishnamurti, a Biography
ISBN 0-14-010343-0.