Hearing the parable of the Good Samaritan—for the first time!

A teacher of the Law approached Jesus and tried to trap him. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to receive eternal life?”

Jesus answered him, “What do the Scriptures say? How do you interpret them?”

The man answered, “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind’; and ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself.’ ”

“You are right,” Jesus replied, “do this, and you will live.”

But the teacher of the Law wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”

Jesus answered, “There was once a man who was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when robbers attacked him, stripped him, and beat him up, leaving him half dead. It so happened that a priest was going down that road; but when he saw the man, he walked on by, on the other side. In the same way a Levite also came along, went over and looked at the man, and then walked on by, on the other side. But a Samaritan who was traveling that way came upon the man, and when he saw him, his heart was filled with pity. He went over to him, poured oil and wine on his wounds and bandaged them; then he put the man on his own animal and took him to an inn, where he took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Take care of him,’ he told the innkeeper, ‘and when I come back this way, I will pay you whatever else you spend on him.’ ”

And Jesus concluded, “In your opinion, which one of these three acted like a neighbor towards the man attacked by the robbers?”

The teacher of the Law answered, “The one who was kind to him.”

Jesus replied, “You go, then, and do the same.”

 

My friend, a Jesuit priest, Joe Devlin, said Mass in the Zendo at Hartford Street in the early 1990s. Joe was visiting friends in San Francisco, and I asked him to come by to say Mass for the Catholic men in Maitri Hospice. I told Issan about my plan, and he said he was happy to have Mass and very excited to meet Joe. 

It was a Saturday evening. Joe was due to arrive at 5. I was scrambling, assembling a few basics, actually just the essentials: bread, wine, and a clean tablecloth for the dining room table. Issan, who was at the time in the final stages of HIV disease, came downstairs in his bathrobe to ask when “Father Joe” was due to arrive and see what I was doing. After I explained, he said with a big smile but firmly, “Mass will be in the zendo, not the dining room.” Then he took over and directed all the preparations with the same care that he would have given to a full-blown Zen ritual: the table he wanted for the service, the tablecloth, the candles, the cup. He went back upstairs, and when he came down again, he was dressed in robes. He greeted Joe at the door with a hug and kiss, thanking him for coming and telling him that Mass would be in our chapel, the Zendo.

 

Issan and five or six of us sat in meditation posture on cushions while Joe improvised the ancient Catholic liturgy, beginning with a simple rite of confession and forgiveness. I noticed that Issan brought the same attention to the Catholic ritual as he did Zazen and Zen services. When it came time to read from the Testament of Jesus, Joe took a small white, well-worn book out of a pocket in his jacket and said that his mother had told him that the story he was about to read contained all the essentials for an authentic Christian life. Sometimes, even Jesuits get their best theological training from their mothers.

 

Then he read from the gospel of Luke, chapter 10, the parable of the Good Samaritan. For any of you who need a refresher course in New Testament studies, this is a story about a man who is robbed, taken for everything he has, savagely beaten, and left by the side of the road to die. All the people who might have helped, even those who should have helped, chose to walk on the other side of the street when they saw him—except for the Samaritan. Now the Samaritan in Jesus’ day was the guy whom good upstanding members of the community might have called the equivalent of “faggot” or “queer.” He was an outcast, but he was the only person who stopped and took some real action to help the poor fellow out. Jesus teaches us that real love is shown through actions, not words.

 

The following day—Sunday mornings were the usual gathering of the Hartford Street community—Issan began to talk about Fr. Joe and the liturgy. Catholic Mass in the Zendo was not universally welcomed. So many members at Hartford Street carried the wounds of discrimination in the religion of their parents that Christianity was rarely spoken about. And the Irish priest from Most Holy Redeemer, who came to administer the Last Rites to hospice residents who requested them, was friendly but rather perfunctory. However, Issan was exuberant. He’d fallen in love with Joe. He said that during the Mass, he had the experience of being forgiven, which allowed him to feel peace and even appreciation for his early religious training. 

Issan had also fallen in love with Luke's parable. He turned to me and asked, “What was the little white book that Fr. Joe read from?” Startled, I said that was the New Testament. “Oh,” said Issan lightly, “it must have been in Latin when I heard it as an altar boy, but it was exactly how we should lead our lives as Buddhists.” 

 

Issan saw Maitri as much more than just a Buddhist hospice, though it was deeply Buddhist to its very roots. He shaved his head and wore a Soto priest’s patchwork robe; he bowed and chanted in Sino-Japanese, but he clearly understood that genuine wisdom, what Buddhists call prajna, is not the sole property of any religion. I think he took the Teaching of Jesus to a new, heroic level: the definition of friend included building an inn for the injured traveler when he couldn't find one in town.

 

When Joe and I had dinner together the night before he flew back to Boston, I told him what Issan had said. A few days later, the small New Testament in his jacket, which had been in his jacket for years, arrived in an envelope addressed to Issan. Before Issan died 6 months later, during one of our last meetings, he asked me to thank Joe again for the Zendo mass after he was gone. I did. And that New Testament passed from the pocket of Joe’s jacket to Issan’s bookshelf at Hartford Street to my altar. I have since passed it on to a person who asked a dharma question about one of the stories in the Gospel of Jesus.

Shopping List for the Dragon King

For Bob Ochs, who told me this story

With some American devotees

Yogi Chen

Went shopping in Chinatown

For the Dragon King

Who lives off Timber Cove

In the Pacific Ocean.

Yesterday Chen bought two bags

Of Industrial scrap diamond chips

And cheap bead necklaces, all colors,

From the Woolworth Dime Store.

Today

Master Chen and the devotees go to a Chinese grocery

To look for red sea horses — need one or two per month

He says he wants a male fish with a long snout

A female who carries babies

Penis and vagina

The Yogi said

“Full Moon coming, love and good fortune,

Ghosts and demons love you.”

Next, the Chinese pharmacy

Basket by the door, dead beetles

Bulging-eyed

Chen scoops up a handful

Gives to the clerk who crushes them with a pestle.

The clerk knows all mysteries

Pours the contents out of the bowl, wraps in paper.

An American lady asks for antelope horn

She said she has a cold

Chen offers

Dristan tablet.

Yogi Chen and devotees go to lunch

Hunan Restaurant on Kearny

Chen is from Hunan, near Szechwan

He was a classmate of Chairman Mao.

As a Buddhist scholar, he fled the Communists

As a hermit in India, he meditated alone in a house for 15 years

Till he dreamt of the Big Sacrifice in California

On the Dragon's belly.

He came to the U.S., uses geomancy.

On the Dragon’s mountain spine that curls from Puget Sound to Baja California

He finds its belly button on three green hills

In Sonoma County

He buys the land

And prepares 

Big sacrifices.

Hunan waitress takes their order,

Rice and vegetables

Chen turns up his smiling face

Flirts with the waitress 

Tells devotees the next sacrifice

For Love Goddess

Will be in February

For the sacrifice, he’ll need fire

From a brothel.

Devotees giggle.

Sorry, not a laughing matter.

Afternoon

Yogi Chen said Now we need goldfish

So we won’t have another war.

Devotees pile into the Volkswagen and

Go to Lucky Dog Pet Shop.

600 goldfish cost nearly a 1000 dollars.

600 goldfish in 10 plastic bags of water

600 goldfish in the car’s back seat.

Chen directs now we must drive to Walnut Creek

Devotees drive and drive.

Eventually find Walnut Creek

running behind chain fence.

Devotees ask, “How do we get to creek?”

Chen points to a hole in fence.

The car stops. Doors open.

Devotees carry bags of goldfish through

fence hole,

climb downhill to creek.

Yogi Chen comes with bells and skull drum

Motion devotees gather round.

Chen prays that Kissinger brings peace

Rings bells, beats the skull drum

Dumps $1000 worth of goldfish

in creek

Keeps one big bag

Scrap diamonds.

That’s for the Dragon King.

“May our sacrifices find their Way

To the Big Sea Dragon.”

Yogi CM Chen, Bob Ochs and Me

When Bob Ochs and I lived together on Hillegass Avenue, we both began serious conversations with Buddhists — conversations with the intense inquiry that Jesuits are well known for. In the Spring of 1974, during the SAT retreat, Naranjo introduced Yogi C. M. Chen, whom he called a high tantric initiate. Ochs told me that he felt an immediate karmic connection with Master Chen.

I recall only a few things about that talk, which, frankly, puzzled me. It was interesting. Nothing was wrong, or offensive, or gibberish, but I had assumed that Chen was going to talk about the Tibetan tantra instead of listing, condemning, and crying real tears about the number of monks and nuns Chairman Mao and the Red Guards had murdered.

Tharang Tulku had established the Nyingma Institute on Berkeley’s Holy Hill in 1969 and focused on teaching meditation. Although the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa for Northern India in 1959, by 1974, he was a high-ranking monk living in a North Indian Hill Station, almost totally dedicated to helping other Tibetans escape and creating an exile community. There were no crowds of Western followers. The number of Westerners undertaking monastic training was just a handful.

Master Chen told me that he fled Tibet with the 16th Karmapa in 1959 and settled in Kalimpong (but I may have the timeline mixed up). The 16th Karmapa had a significant impact on Master Chen as the sponsor of his three-year retreat. During that period, Chen wrote “Buddhist Meditation Systematic and Practical,” with the help of Sangharakshita (Dennis Philip Edward Lingwood). He also attracted a few Western students. It was through them that he immigrated to Berkeley, California, in 1972, and moved into a small walk-up on Shattuck Avenue.

Yogi Chen, as we called him, left his wife and son and in about 1926 (or perhaps 1929). He told me that he traveled from his native Hunan Province to Eastern Tibet in search of an authentic Buddhism that he could not find in Chinese (mostly reformed Chan) monasteries. Over the next 25 years or more, he undertook every major practice of all four Tibetan schools and actually practiced them. He’d lived in a cave, in the charnel grounds, and did the three-year, three-month solitary retreat.

Bob Ochs began visiting Chen and assisting his practice: driving him to Timber Cove at Jenner on the California Coast, which Chen identified as the Palace of the Dragon King, or to his retreat property in Cazadero, which he claimed was the navel of the Dragon. Chen had identified these power spots using geomancy.

Chen offered three traditional Tibetan fire pujas: to the Yiddam of the God of Wealth, to the Blue Manifestation of Lord Buddha for health, and to Kurukulla, a Vajrayana goddess associated with love, enchantment, and magnetic attraction. Wealth, health, and love. He also prayed for the dead, chanting while driving through a cemetery, and "Powa," a ritual for the transference of consciousness to guide the recently deceased to a Pure Land free from suffering. He also released fish and frogs back into the wild, which was associated with long life. That covers the basics that people normally pray for. Performing these rituals for people who requested them was his practice. It seemed to me to be primitive and magical, quite far from my Ignatian spiritual exercises, but it offered me an opportunity to experience esoteric Buddhism.

Bob Ochs was interested in this esoteric ritual practice. He became Chen’s assistant — a complicated affair, procuring offerings, all manner of things, flowers, incense, birthday cakes, precious stones, seeds, colored cloth, and thread; then there was the long journey to Timber Cove, or Cazadero, or a cemetery; after that was the actual preparation of the site, building the fire, or loading the boat. Bob told me that he’d hoped that participating in all these activities with Master Chen would give him a key to a deeper understanding of the mystery of the Mass. If Bob and Chen discussed this directly, he never told me about the substance of their conversations.

Bob also mentioned, almost offhand, that Chen claimed to have had visions of the Virgin Mary — and they had serious conversations about Saint Ignatius.

Bob did this for perhaps two years. I accompanied him when there was room in his car or when there was another car for other participants. Then suddenly, their relationship ended. I am unclear about the exact circumstances, but Bob, in an elliptical way, explained that perhaps Chen had understood that he was presenting himself as a serious Dharma student, but Bob was a Catholic priest and would remain a Catholic priest who was not interested in the rigorous Buddhist practice. He also didn’t know Tibetan or Chinese, and at 45, was probably not going to dedicate the years required for proficiency. Or it could have been far simpler: they were both Enneagram One. Or it might have been a cultural impasse: Chen was more comfortable in the immigrant Chinese community. (which is, by the way, where he would find his dharma hier, a young PhD student from UC Berkeley, Dr. Yutang Lin).

I owe Bob a deep debt of gratitude: he encouraged me to visit Chen; he was the first authentic Buddhist practitioner with whom I had actual conversations. I remember standing on Shattuck Avenue at a public phone dialing the number that Bob had given me. Chen answered right away. I asked if and when I could visit. Chen replied, “Now is the appropriate time.”

I began to visit Chen in his one-room walk-up on Shattuck Avenue a few times a month. I liked him enormously, although I didn’t feel as strong a karmic connection with him as Bob had, or imagined he had. I decided that rather than present myself as a student, I would be a friend. Of course, I helped with the preparation for the various pujas, but I also helped him prepare for the US naturalization examination.

Over 10 years, we also talked about meditation, relationships, Tibetan Buddhism, Jesus, and Ignatius of Loyola. His answers were always straightforward and unpredictable. When I asked him for meditation instruction, he began what was to become an investigation into impermanence that lasted for two decades. I was not particularly interested in ritual practice, but I helped. I took him shopping. I drove him to Jenner and Cazadero. The ethnic Tibetan and Chinese tangkas, statues of Buddhist yidams on old towels carefully positioned on turned-over cardboard boxes, didn’t drive me away. I enjoyed his company and our conversations in the car. I was awestruck that he could sleep in a moving car on a bumpy dirt road.

Ochs helped Chen publish several free booklets about various Buddhist topics. I also became involved in the publication of Chen’s Dharma books. After Chen died in 1987, I spent nearly 5 years editing his book on Zen, “Lighthouse in the Ocean of Chan,” from a transcription of the first English translation, studying it, and trying to straighten out the awkward English of Dr. Fa-Yen Kog, a monk from the Thervaden tradition who did the first English translation. Eventually, Chen’s dharma heir, Dr. Yutang Lin, dissatisfied with my efforts, undertook a completely new translation from Chen’s original Chinese manuscript. He thanked me for providing an English rough draft to work from, and I paid for printing the first 500 books.

At some point, Yogi Chen seemed to focus on his ethnic Chinese students, devotees, and turn away from the few Western practitioners (with one notable exception, Juan Bulnes, a Chilean whom I knew from Naranjo’s groups). When I first visited him, most of the requests came from people in Hong Kong associated with D.T. Shen, an uber-wealthy Buddhist mogul who owned a huge shipping line. Later, they were mostly Chinese who’d immigrated from Taiwan. I suspect that Shen had died and his support had dried up.

In the early to mid-80s, after helping Chen for a week — gathering all the offerings for a fire puja to the God of Wealth, setting up, being his assistant during the burn — as we gathered around the dying embers, the time he usually gave some dharma remarks, he said, “There are so many Chinese people here today, I will speak in Chinese.” The wealthy Chinese owners of several gas stations in the Central Valley were offered some teaching that was off limits to the rest of us because we were not rich and Chinese. That marked the point at which I began to withdraw.

But Chen continued to have a profound influence on my life and practice. I no longer visited, but I knew one Western lady, also from Naranjo’s groups, who cleaned his room and acted as a kind of secretary a few days a week. He dictated thoughtful and helpful responses to my written notes and questions. My assessment: he was the real deal, and of all the religious practitioners I’d ever met, he was most likely to have had real visions of the Virgin Mary.

Yogi Chen lived in a shabby SRO hotel on Shattuck Ave. It may have even been called the Shattuck Arms. But the residents were not grad students or junior faculty, rather indigent Hispanic day laborers, mostly people of color, sex workers, drug addicts, some with obvious mental issues, and a few retirees. Chen was equally beaming and courteous to every resident, though he avoided one or two. He told me they’d threatened him. I never felt entirely safe visiting him. I always called beforehand or came for a set appointment.

The walls had not been painted in a decade; once white, they were now brown, and there was a faint, musty odor. The shared toilet was clean; it smelled of disinfectant, but it was grey and brown rather than shiny porcelain. Chen’s room was clean, but the chairs were cheap cast-off yard furniture from the nearby Goodwill Store. The piles of threadbare towels were clean. He used them for everything, even as altar cloths for the elaborate Tibetan shrine that occupied a quarter of the living space. He could have easily asked DT Shen for more money to rent a more comfortable apartment, but Chen was a true renunciate; I have met others in India. If they exist in America, I have not met them.

I had several very powerful experiences with Yogi Chen. I am writing about these separately at the end of my story. They are so far outside what most Westerners consider normal that taking them as anything other than aberrations or hallucinations might lead people to discount the power of Master Chen’s teachings or my sanity. However, they affected my life profoundly. I hold them in a category labeled “I don’t know what the hell was going on and perhaps never will.”

On the second or third visit, I asked him for the meditation instruction that I’d missed at the SAT retreat. I sat down and listened attentively. He may have said something about paying attention to the breath, but suddenly, in a flash, I seemed to disconnect from my body. I could have sworn that he was speaking in Mandarin, and I understood perfectly. He was smiling at me broadly and laughing. The feeling was euphoric. I also knew that I was still connected to the reality that presented itself in that room that morning. It ended, though it’s hard to pinpoint precisely when, and he continued his instruction. The euphoria lingered for several hours. Somehow, asking him about what had happened seemed inappropriate, like handing back a gift.

In 1975, when I was doing the 19th Annotation Adaptation of the Spiritual Exercises while weighing whether or not to leave the Jesuits, Chen and I had several long conversations about Ignatius and the prayer life of the Jesuits. I remember him telling me quite clearly to study Ignatius and pray to him. I think I said, Don’t worry. Our SAT group finished the last exercises of Naranjo’s version of the Arica Training, Lines and Crossing Over, which was a three-day meditation done prostrate, face down. By the end, I was more clear that I would leave the Jesuits rather than be ordained. I decided to move to San Francisco with Hal Slate, who was also in SAT, and we rented an apartment on Frederick Street with easy access to the Castro. In other words, I gave up trying to be a saint.

I was still meditating every morning, keeping a journal, and trying to make some sense out of the Gay Liberation that I’d fallen into the middle of. One morning, as I sat, I looked down the long corridor that opened onto the busy street, and Saint Ignatius stood in the doorway. I really mean Saint Ignatius appeared and stood in the doorway. This was not a dream. It was Ignatius, luminous and brightly colored, dressed like the famous Rubens painting in the Gesù, though my memory tells me that there was something slightly reminiscent of a Tibetan teacher or saint around his halo. He was very tall, eight or nine feet up to the ceiling.

I wasn’t frightened, though more than slightly intimidated at first. There was no message, no reprimand for quitting the Jesuits, no instruction about how to conduct my life. I don’t remember that he exuded some heavenly kindness. That would fit the cliche. He just looked at me directly, almost just checking in, letting me know that he had not and would not abandon me. Then he vanished. I’ve told very few people about this vision, and might edit it out if I publish this account to my blog. Truly super-normal activity usually comes with expectations of saintly behavior that I am unwilling to commit to and don’t think is required. And it may have been a powerful hallucination. I am willing to keep that question open.

Yogi Chen died in 1987. I was one of only a few Westerners at his cremation in a small mortuary in El Cerrito. I was overwhelmed with emotion. I promised to return to a serious practice. I found a small neighborhood Zen temple in the Castro and began a regular meditation practice.

In 1989, I lost a very dear friend, Nancy Storm, a woman who’d been like a mother to me. The day she died, I called Yutang Lin and asked him to perform Powa. That night, in the middle of a very deep sleep, I suddenly woke, sat straight up in bed, and opened my eyes to watch a vivid sequence of events: Yogi Chen swept into Nancy’s hospital room. He was flying. He grabbed her by the hair and pulled her naked body out of bed. Then they both disappeared. I was stunned; I could not fall back to sleep.

Early the next morning, Nancy’s daughter phoned and asked me to help her donate the hospital bed that Nancy had bought for her room in the retirement home. I made a series of phone calls; none of the local AIDS hospices wanted it unless it came with a warranty, which I didn’t have. Then a gay friend who was doing design work for the Zen Center Hospice Project gave me the number of the director, Frank Ostaseski. Could the Hospice use the bed? Frank said, Of course. How could we move it across town? I had a truck. Frank said, Let’s meet and be delivery men. We set a time.

Frank was not my picture of a deathbed priest. I liked him immediately. He was also very persuasive — between the time we loaded the bed onto my truck and unloaded it at Zen Center, I was signed up for the upcoming Zen Center Hospice Volunteer Training Program. By the end of that initial Training, I’d met Issan Dorsey Roshi and Zenshin Phil Whalen.

Within 24 hours of requesting the Powa ritual for Nancy, I’d laid the foundation for my return to serious Buddhist practice. I could not have known that this simple trip would lead to directing the first residential Buddhist Hospice in the United States. I would leave the work I’d been doing for 20 years, live in a Zen community, and spend 30 years of serious work with the koans. I was just helping a man carry a bed across San Francisco.

陳健民 Chen Jianmin (1906–1987)
aka Buddhist Yogi C. M. Chen

Krishnamurti Redux

Let’s take a trip to Ojai, California.

There was a famous Indian teacher who lived in Ojai for the greater part of his long life. Jiddu Krishnamurti was born into an upper caste but struggling family in Southern India. When his dad took a job at the Theosophical Society headquarters in Madras, he was discovered by the occultist Charles Webster Leadbeater. In 1909, Leadbeater, who had just emerged from a scandal where he recommended masturbation to his young students, much to the dismay of his Anglican superiors, spotted Krishna on the Theosophical Society’s beach. Pictures show a very handsome young man, whom his tutors called dimwitted.  Leadbeater claimed extrasensory, clairvoyant abilities, and said Krishna had an extraordinary aura. I can legitimately entertain other inspirations for the homosexual Leadbeater’s psychic insight, and really, it cannot go unsaid. 

This unleashed a series of events that would transform Krishnamurti’s life — Annie Besant and Leadbeater claimed that they had discovered the heralded World Teacher; they took the young man under their wing, even legally adopting him, and carefully indoctrinated him in the doctrines of Theosophy. Eventually, Krishna would rebel against the Order of the Star in the East. This organization had created and encouraged the myths surrounding his role in the Enlightenment of Man and Womankind. Rejecting the role of spiritual teacher, for the rest of his life, he lectured about the ruse of surrendering to the guru. 

Since I first learned about him in the 70s and 80s, Krishnamurti always left an odd, unbalanced taste in my mouth. It was not his argument or his eloquence. On the surface, I could find no fault in that. It was the way people used him. Most of these followers, if pressed, could thread their way to the end of an argument, but It was just too easy to say, in a slightly superior tone, “Read Krishnamurti. You don’t know what you’re talking about,” and walk away. They weren’t blatantly stupid and arrogant. For the most part, they just wanted to have sex with whomever they wanted or eat whatever their tastes dictated, except for the strict vegetarian who ruined his marriage to a lovely Italian woman who couldn’t give up sausages. She told me she tried, but her husband wouldn’t tolerate a mixed-cuisine marriage. (By the time of their divorce, she also had a Green Card.)

It was impossible to convince this anti-authoritarian faction that the statement, “The guru says that you can’t trust the guru,” is an argument from authority that should be rigorously applied equally across all the guru’s statements. When you rely on the guru to tell you that you can’t trust the guru, your decision not to trust the guru still relies on basic trust. The skepticism may have real teeth (and I think it does), but I will insist on other avenues of verification, which of course merits me the label of materialist. 

Why is Krishnamurti so persuasive and appealing? First of all, what is his argument? I just did a thought experiment, not entirely rigorous but still revealing. I picked up Krishna's First and Last Freedom and began to read. After three paragraphs, enough to catch the thread of his argument in its context, I randomly turned ahead some pages, and continued to read from the top of the first paragraph that caught my eye. I was shocked. It made perfect sense. I wasn't jarred by any abrupt shift in the argument; the tone, even the sentences, maintained a conversational flow. 

I might conclude that Krishna used an argument that can be succinctly stated in the three paragraphs, which he repeated and riffed over and over, but that would not do justice to his rigorous self-examination or his eloquence. I went back to First and Last Freedom, and read through the chapters carefully and was moved by the intelligent, even forceful way he invites each of us into his analysis, which included a thorough examination of our belief systems*, our prejudices, our sensory experience, and our past memories. 

He was exhaustively thorough and doggedly insistent. He could be compassionate as well as angry or dismissive without apology. But in my view, the analysis is always kept at arm’s length, or perhaps I have not read him as carefully and thoroughly as I should. He emphasizes repeatedly that our immediate experience must be viewed and evaluated within the context of our relationships, with ourselves, our past, our environment, as well as with our family and friends. He was obviously a man who investigated the prison of his own delusion. Leadbeater and Besant were grooming him for the unique role as avatar for the Coming Age, but he never gets very personal or vulnerable about his own experience. 

It is ironic that the man who preached that the guru is untrustworthy himself became a guru. As much as Krishna might protest, the path to a normal life must have been difficult when he uncovered the sham that his karma had singled him out. I think he actually tried to be normal, but circumstances created a pampered life. To bolster my case that he was nothing more than a real human, he had a long-term lover, the wife of a close associate. Of course, he lied about it, claiming to be celibate — which leads me back to my initial problem with his analysis. “Trust me to tell you not to trust me” is the brick wall you hear in the conversation of an abusive lover.

I haven’t answered my own question about knowing ourselves. I’ve just joined Krishnamurti and pointed out some of the false claims. Knowing that there are limits to what we can know doesn’t invalidate what direct experience teaches us or weaken those experiences. It simply rejects their infallibility. I can be satisfied with my own experience. In the words of Jack Kerouac, “One day I will find the right words, ... then it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.” 

_____________________

 

*"Belief is the central problem in the analysis of mind. Believing seems the most "mental" thing we do, the thing most remote from what is done by mere matter. The whole intellectual life consists of beliefs, and of the passage from one belief to another by what is called "reasoning." Beliefs give knowledge and error; they are the vehicles of truth and falsehood. Psychology, theory of knowledge and metaphysics revolve about belief, and on the view we take of belief our philosophical outlook largely depends.”

Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (1921), Lecture. XII: Belief, p. 295