Great teachers and infinite caprice

Great teachers and infinite caprice

Posted on March 24th, 2009 by Frank Wilson

Think on These Things is the title of a book by Jiddu Krishnamurti. I don’t how many people nowadays remember Krishnamurti, but he was a most extraordinary fellow.

Born near Madras, India, in 1895, he was spotted on a beach when he 13 years old by C.W. Leadbeater, an Anglican priest turned theosophist. Leadbeater said the boy had the most perfect aura he had ever seen, and he and Annie Besant, the president of the World Theosophical Society, arranged with Krishnamurti’s father to take the boy and his younger brother back to England with them. There they supervised his education and founded an organization called the Order of the Star of the East to prepare the world for the eventual installation of Krishnamurti as the World Teacher for the 20th century.

The installation took place at Oppen, in the Netherlands, in 1929, though things didn’t go quite as planned. “Truth is a pathless land,” Krishnamurti told the crowd assembled to witness his debut. “You cannot approach it … by any religion, by any sect. … The moment you follow someone you cease to follow truth. … For two years I have been thinking about this … and I have now decided to disband the Order, as I happen to be its head. You can form other organizations and expect someone else.” Krishnamurti continued to explain this to audience after audience for the next 55 years, until his death in 1986.

The title of the Krishnamurti book I mentioned at the beginning is taken from St. Paul’s epistle to the Philippians: “For the rest, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever modest, whatsoever just, whatsoever holy, whatsoever lovely, whatsoever of good fame, if there be any virtue, if any praise of discipline, think on these things.”

Unfortunately, seriously thinking about what a great teacher is trying to impart seems to cause most disciples a headache, which is why, I guess, they turn their attention to speculation over the personality of the teacher himself and reduce his teaching to platitudes suitable for needlepoint.

I was prompted to think about this after Mass recently. The Gospel that day had been the parable of the Prodigal Son. The younger of two sons asks his father for his inheritance. His father consents, and the son goes off and squanders it all on fast women and slow horses. He ends up working as a swineherd. It then occurs to him that he’d be better off if he just went home and got a job with his old man. When he arrives home, his father is so glad to see him that he has the servants bring the best robe and sandals and even a ring for him to wear. He orders the fatted calf to be slaughtered and a banquet prepared.

The older son, meanwhile, is working in the fields. When he returns to the house and hears the music and the partying, he asks one of the servants what’s going on. And when he finds out he is none too pleased. In fact, he stays outside, sulking. His father comes out and the son reminds Dad that he has been the dutiful son and that not even a goat had ever been slaughtered for him and his buddies. “But he said to him: Son, thou art always with me, and all I have is thine. But it was fit that we should make merry and be glad, for this thy brother was dead and is come to life again; he was lost, and is found.”

Traditionally, the focus is on the unconditional nature of God’s forgiveness. “[S]aith the Lord: if your sins be as scarlet, they shall be made as white as snow: and if they be red as crimson, they shall be white as wool.”

This is certainly good to be reminded of, but I am not sure it does complete justice to the rich ambiguity of Jesus’ parable. After all, the older son doesn’t seem to be objecting to his father’s forgiving his brother. One can’t help feeling that the younger son has always been a ne’er-do-well, and that, despite that — or maybe because of it — he has also been his father’s favorite. One senses that the father has always taken the older son’s dutifulness for granted, and that, perhaps, the older son has been so dutiful in order to win some greater measure of his father’s love and approval. In other words, the family dynamics at work here do not seem at all simple and clear-cut.

I suspect that this parable, like a poem, means what it says precisely as it says it, and that to reduce it to a “message” is like “explicating” a poem by translating it into prose. It is, instead, one of those things we should think on, letting it sink into the well of our consciousness like a Zen koan, where it might bring about not merely an idea or a moral, but a radical change in outlook

For it powerfully suggests that God’s ways are altogether different from ours, which is why the Russian Jewish philosopher Lev Shestov said that, from our perspective, God could well be thought of as “infinite caprice.”