Background
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1912 to a German-speaking family, Klein studied music in Vienna and medicine in Berlin. The rise of Nazism drove him to France, where he survived the war and afterwards practised both medicine and musicology. The departure for India in 1953 was a deliberate search for a teacher; he was thirty-eight, intellectually formed, sceptical of the religious vocabulary of Europe, and unprepared for the form the answer would take.
Method
The direct path learned from Krishna Menon at Trivandrum was experiential rather than scriptural — investigation rather than belief. Klein refined it into a teaching that paired careful first-person inquiry with attention to the body, drawing on what he called yoga of the receptive attitude. The work bypassed the gradualism of much classical Advaita Vedānta without bypassing its rigour.
Transmission
Klein taught small groups for nearly four decades. Francis Lucille met him in the early 1970s and was authorised to teach in 1985; through Lucille the lineage reached Rupert Spira. The defining temperament of the Klein stream — quiet, philosophically careful, unwilling to skip the ontological argument that other lineages tend to bypass in favour of pointing — runs through both.
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