‘My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.’

Thus spoke U. G. Krishnamurti in his uniquely iconoclastic and subversive way, distancing himself from gurus, spiritual ‘advisers’, mystics, sages, ‘enlightened’ philosophers et al. UG’s only advice was that people should throw away their crutches and free themselves from the ‘stranglehold’ of cultural conditioning.

Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti was born on 9 July 1918 in Masulipatnam, a coastal town in Andhra Pradesh. He died on 22 March 2007 at the age of eighty-nine in Vallecrosia, Italy, at the villa of a friend. UG never showed any fear or concern about dying, insisting that ‘life and death cannot be separated … when what you call clinical death takes place, the body breaks itself into its constituent elements and that provides the basis for the continuity of life …in that sense the body is immortal.’

The effect that he has had, and will continue to have, on legions of his admirers is difficult to put into words. With his flowing silvery hair, deep-set eyes and elongated Buddha-like ears he was an explosive yet cleansing presence, and he has been variously described as ‘a wild flower of the earth’, a ‘bird in constant flight’, a ‘Sage in Rage’, an ‘Anti-guru’ and a ‘Cosmic Naxalite’.

UG gave no lectures or discourses and had no organization or fixed address. After one public talk he vowed never again to give another, but travelled all over the world to meet people who flocked to listen to his ‘anti-teaching’. His language was always uncompromisingly simple and unadorned, his conversational style informal, intimate, blasphemous and invigorating.

This reader, edited by long-time friend and admirer Mukunda Rao, is a compilation of UG’s freewheeling and radical utterances and ideas. From sex to God, from holy business to politics, from notions of time and space, body and mind to desire, fear and enlightenment, UG relentlessly questioned and dealt a deathblow to the very foundations of human thought. But, as Rao says, in the cathartic laughter or in the silence after UG had spoken, there was a profound sense of freedom from illusory goals and ‘the tyranny of knowledge, beauty, goodness, truth and God.’