An icebreaker
Two unrelated men, both named Krishnamurti, both rejected gurus, teachers, and organized spiritual paths — yet arrived by very different roads and ended up disagreeing sharply with each other. As tradition-breakers go, they could not agree on what breaking tradition even means.
In 1929 he dissolved the organization built to promote him as World Teacher, telling followers that truth was 'a pathless land' no path or teacher could lead them to. He spent decades afterward speaking without ever founding a new doctrine.
He described a seven-day bodily upheaval on his forty-ninth birthday that left him, he said, without continuous thought, and he called it the calamity rather than enlightenment. He insisted no teaching, including his own, could cause or explain it.
Over fifteen recorded dialogues in 1980, he pressed the elder Krishnamurti on whether insight alone could truly end psychological time and disorder. Their published conversations became a central text for readers of that teaching.
Raised within his inner circle, she later published a memoir describing his decades-long secret relationship with a married associate, which sat uneasily with his public teaching. Others close to him disputed parts of her account.