Life
Krishna Menon was a working magistrate in the British colonial administration in Kerala — a householder teacher in the classical Hindu sense, never a renunciate. He met his own teacher, Yogananda Swami, in 1919; the encounter was brief and decisive. After Yogananda's death the following year, Krishna Menon spent more than two decades in private practice before students began to gather. He never built an institution.
Method
His method was unusual within the Advaita tradition for being immediate rather than gradual. Most classical formulations treat the direct recognition of Brahman as the culmination of long preparatory practice. Krishna Menon's teaching collapsed that sequence: the inquiry into the nature of awareness was offered to the student at the start, not at the end. The direct path name reflects this — the seeker is not led around the question but invited to look at it on the first day.
Transmission to the West
Of the handful of Westerners who reached him, Jean Klein carried the teaching back to Europe most fully. The lineage runs through Klein → Francis Lucille → Rupert Spira and a generation of English-speaking teachers. The hallmark — philosophical articulacy paired with insistence on first-person investigation — is recognisably his.
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