On death and loneliness

Sarath Lewke Bandara

“Truth is a strange thing; The more you pursue it the more it will elude you. You can’t capture it by any means, however subtle and cunning. You cannot hold it in the net of your thought. Do realize this and let everything go. On the journey of life and death you must walk alone. On this journey there cannot be taking comfort in knowledge, in experience in memories. The mind must be purged of all things it has gathered in it urge to be secure; its gods and virtues must be given back to the society that bred them. There must be complete uncontaminated aloneness.”

Jiddu Krishnamurthy

These are the words offered by J Krishnamurti to a man who lay dying of a terminal illness who pleaded with him to provide the answer to the question, if there was an identified continuity after death. “What happens after death? Do I continue? I am begging to know now,” he implored.

Krishnamurti did not offer him a ready made explanation or a panacea but asked him to look at death: “The great unknown which is greater than the known which is but a barque on the ocean of the unknown. Let all things go.”

Death therefore is one of the most intriguing and mysterious phenomenon that occupied man’s thought and imagination from the beginning of human kind. This prompted man to postpone death as a morbid subject and relegated it to the ultimate item in life’s agenda. All attempts to console himself by rationalizations or beliefs like re-incarnation or life after death acted only as a thin veneer over the deep agony of the fear of death.

J Krishnamurti, the renowned religious teacher of the last century called the ‘the seer who walked alone, dealt with Death “Living with Death” and dying from moment to moment, treated death as an event as significant as birth. He laid bare the depth and content of the human condition with the sole concern “to set man free absolutely and unconditionally.”

Most people who are familiar with both the core teachings of the Buddha and J Krishnamurti find a great affinity between the two. Krishnamurti’s teachings give a perfect expression, in a modern idiom, to what Gautama Buddha taught 2600 years ago. Krishnamurti regarded the Buddha as the only historical teacher who discovered the truth. The exploration of the nature, causes and ending of suffering does cover much common ground between them. However both raise the fundamental challenge that it is insight and not knowledge that liberates the human mind.

Exploding the myth of symbols including the attachment to and veneration of the Word, he pointed out that knowledge is an affair of symbols and a hindrance to wisdom. Most of the atrocities that have been committed in cold blood that beggar the imagination from the beginning of mankind to date on this planet are due to idealists and dogmatic ideological fanatics who have held the World at ransom with weapons of human annihilation or ruthless morbid terrorism to achieve their ideals of nationalism or assertion of their ideologies.

Krishnamurti does not offer a system of beliefs, of dogmas, a set of ready-made notions and ideals. Nor does he hold out a message of authority leadership ritual supplication, prayer or uplift or any form of inspirational twaddle.

There is a transcendent spontaneity of life, a creative reality, as Krishnamurti calls it which reveals itself when the perceiver’s mind is in a state of alert passivity or choiceless awareness at every moment and in all circumstances of life. This is the only and true meditation, uncovering the self from moment to moment which brings about a new mind, “which shall know being, shall know what is it to love; love is its own eternity, it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable.”

Krishnamurti’s talks, dialogues, and writings over nearly seven decades of his life and work (1886-1985) if reduced to print would run to a minimum of four score standard volumes. His favourite medium of expression was the English language which he wielded most dexterously and flexibly. He drew from his vast vocabulary, words to signify most aspects of his insights and gave them a significance and meaning peculiar to his teaching.

Therefore unless one has deeply delved into his teachings with passion even an intellectual, leave alone insightful, comprehension will be lost. In the result an attempt at translation of Krishnamurti’s works is a formidable and uphill task. This deficiency in comprehending Krishnamurti and lack of profound knowledge of both languages is glaringly manifested practically in all the so-called Sinhala renderings of the handful of Krishnamurti’s available Sinhala renderings.

It is in this context that Ariyaratne Wijesinghe’s Sinhala rendering of several talks, dialogues, and writings of J Krishnamurti covering most aspects of his teaching stands out as unique contribution to Sinhala literature. This compilation of Krishnamurti works entitled ‘Death and Loneliness’ (Maranaya Ha Thanikama) is ample testimony of the fact that Wijesinghe has passionately delved into Krishnamurti’s teachings which he has started in his early youth. It is also an example of the brilliant use of his knowledge of Sinhala language with its intricacies, idioms metaphors and nuances in rendering into easily readable and meaningful Sinhala usage the most complex aspects of Krishnamurti’s key insights.

In the result the Sinhala reader of these essays is bound to be absorbed in it forgetting that the original was in the English language. Most of these pieces have been earlier selected and published in a leading weekly newspaper as a series and this fact itself speaks for the excellent of the Sinhala renderings.

The essay on ‘Death and Loneliness’ is a study in the architecture of sorrow in the loss of her spouse by a young widow and strips bare the truth behind her unbearable loss and grief.

Among the other essays two lengthy pieces at the latter part of the book cover a considerable and important part of the dialogue Krishnamurti had with several Buddhist scholars including Ven Walpola Rahula Thera, a close associate of Krishnamurti. Another important participant was Prof David Bohm the renowned Physicist who was considered by Einstein as his ‘intellectual son’.

Bohm dealt with the implications of Quantum Mechanics and suggested a highly enlightened new world view and later established a friendship with Krishnamurti in calibrating the key insight that the “Observer is the observed”. These dialogues highlight the affinity between the teachings of the Buddha and of Krishnamurti and also the intriguing subject of rebirth.

Among the other 45 essays several highly complex aspects of the human condition like love, sex, sexual urge, marriage sensitivity, sensation, beauty would invariably attract the attention of the discerning reader.

The essays on freedom, meditation, knowledge and understanding, social reform, you are the World, Ending of thought, silence, action and concept. The Intelligence of the Body and the Observer and the Observed are deeply insightful subjects that should be of interest to those who would like to go deeper into the teachings.

A veritable well-spring of wisdom, this volume of essays of J Krishnamurti elegantly rendered into readable Sinhala will afford the reader a clear contemporary statement of the fundamental human problem together with an invitation to solve in the only way in which it can solved-for and by himself.

As Krishnamurti so effectively put it. “To understand the misery and confusion that exists within ourselves and so in the World, we must first find clarity within ourselves and that clarity comes about through right thinking...... Right thinking comes with self knowledge. Without understanding yourself, you have no basis for thought. Without self knowledge what you think is not true.”