S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 2 2 3 Shai Tubali 1 Introduction The mystic and thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) engaged – from 1948 to 1985, a year before his death – in numerous dialogues. These were either group conversations or one-on-one dialogues, and the great diversity of discussants included disciples, scientists, philosophers, psychologists, theologians, and politicians, as well as religious leaders and wandering monks (sadhus), and even schoolteachers and schoolchildren. In this article, I intend to establish that although Krishnamurti did not recognize this reality – recognizing it would have implied going against his own credo as a teacher – there is a distinctive and unparalleled method behind his dialogue form. This method, whose existence has evaded Krishnamurti’s followers and scholars alike, is, I argue, as innovative as what has become widely known as the Socratic method. For this reason, I shall refer to it as the Krishnamurti dialogue, notwithstanding the fact that this term does not exist elsewhere. Intriguingly, Krishnamurti’s method and the Socratic method seem to share important common features, the most striking being the fact that they centered on teaching the discussant how to think rather than what to think [1]. Based on Pierre Hadot’s hermeneutic approach, which will be explicated below, I shall unveil the persistent methodology that enables Krishnamurti’s dialogue to accomplish its transformative goals. My starting point will be to introduce the way that Krishnamurti began, quite unintentionally, to develop his dialogical methodology together with some of his closest students. I will extricate from these spontaneous group discussions the major tools and purposes of the Krishnamurti dialogue, which were evident even in those early days of hesitant manifestation. This will be followed by analyses of two dialogues, from which I shall deduce the major components of Krishnamurti’s method. Nonetheless, I have restricted myself to group and one-on-one discussions with disciples. My reason for doing so has been that it is reasonable to expect that the method found its freest, most fulfilled expression with interlocutors who were genuinely and expressly eager to be guided and changed through it. Most of my attention will be devoted to what I deem his two most revolutionary tools of investigation: an unconventional use of questions and an innovative employment of the mystical principle of negation, or the via negativa. By placing these About the author Shai Tubali, MA, is an author, speaker and researcher in the fields of self-transformation and South Asian thought and practice, with more than twenty books published in English, German, and Hebrew. His email is prst@leeds.ac.uk. two tools in broader philosophical and mystical contexts, I hope to highlight the uniqueness of Krishnamurti’s approach. In my reading of Krishnamurti’s dialogues, I have adopted a hermeneutic approach following the methodological tradition of Pierre Hadot (1922–2010), who claimed to have resolved the apparent incoherences and contradictions of the ancient Greco-Roman texts by choosing to read them as texts whose purpose had been not to lay out systematic theories but to “lead disciples along a path of spiritual progress” (Hadot 2009, 52–53, 90). Hadot’s interpretive principles have later been applied to a more effective reading of Hindu and Buddhist texts by scholars of Asian philosophies (e.g. , Apple 2010; Ganeri 2013; Nicholson 2015; Fiordalis 2018). Hadot himself was inspired by Victor Goldschmidt’s formula, originally applied to Plato’s dialogues, that “these dialogues aim not to inform but to form” (Hadot 2009, 91). Functioning as a spiritual exercise (Gr. áskēsis), a practice designed to “pro-
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