A New Age for Krishnamurti’s Teachings : Ojai: Followers of the late guru keep his message alive through workshops, a movie, publications and a private school dedicated to his philosophy.

The crowds that came to the oak grove in Ojai for 60 years to listen to the speeches of Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti are gone now.

The only reminder that they were ever there are a few rusty hooks for loudspeakers that still hang in the tree branches.

But although the oak grove itself has lain fallow since the Indian guru’s death four years ago, a loyal group of Krishnamurti’s followers continue to make Ojai the national headquarters for the dissemination of his teachings.

Students of Krishnamurti--who was proclaimed as a child to be the new messiah but spent his entire adult life denying he was--still give semiannual workshops and publish new collections of his teachings.

They also maintain a library of his works and operate a private school a stone’s throw from the oak grove where Krishnamurti gave his talks.

If it is up to his students, the man they believe to have published the largest number of religious teachings ever--50 titles when he died at age 90--may prove to be just as prolific in death.

“This has to be done so what happened to Christ and Socrates and other religious teachers won’t happen to Krishnamurti,” said Mark Lee, director of the Ojai-based Krishnamurti Foundation of America.

“In 500 years, you won’t be left with a student’s understanding or lack of understanding of what Krishnamurti did or didn’t say.”

A feature-length documentary titled “With a Silent Mind” that was produced by his followers will be shown Saturday to the public during a weekend gathering at the Oak Grove School in Ojai. The film, which has been showing at art film houses around the country, includes interviews with 27 of Krishnamurti’s acquaintances, quotations from a published diary and the sort of nature scenes that the philosopher believed could inspire transcendent experiences.

Michael Mendizza, who directed the movie, said he has gone to considerable lengths to make every detail conform to Krishnamurti’s teachings. For instance, during the nature scenes, the camera lingers for up to 2 1/2 minutes on a single shot, a trick that is meant to simulate the peaceful state of mind to which the title refers.

Viewers who are accustomed to the more jarring rate of 50 cuts in a single 30-second television commercial may find the film’s pace a bit unusual, Mendizza said.

Krishnamurti’s followers expect to follow the film with two new collections of his teachings. And a new biography, “The Reluctant Messiah,” has already come out.

“In a sense, his death put us on alert,” said Evelyne Blau, who produced the film. “Now we can’t rely on his presence. We have to take an active role in making his teachings available to the public.”

Born near Madras, India, in 1895, Krishnamurti became famous as a young boy when he was chosen as the new messiah by an American cultist, Annie Besant, head of the Theosophical Society, whose philosophy was a mix of Buddhism and Indian Brahmanism. Krishnamurti’s father was a follower of Besant’s.

Besant adopted Krishnamurti and took him and his brother with her on her worldwide travels. In 1922, Krishnamurti came to Ojai in the hopes of curing his brother of tuberculosis. Although his brother died, Krishnamurti continued to spend four months of the year in Ojai until his own death.

Throughout the 1920s, Krishnamurti was the darling of the media, and his comings and goings--in luxury aboard the most noted ocean liners of the day--were regularly chronicled.

But in 1928, Krishnamurti, then 33, disbanded his cult because he had decided a central tenet of his value system was “Don’t follow authority.” And, since to lead a cult was to be an authority figure, the cult had to go.

His denials of divinity fell largely on deaf ears though, and even today, his followers flock to Ojai to study his works. The central message of his teachings is that there is no leader, no guru, no master, and that such concepts as nationalism, competition and the supremacy of one religion or another are wrong.

That philosophy is evident at the Oak Grove School, where children work in pairs, tend gardens and play kick ball without keeping score. When they misbehave in class, their teachers don’t chide them but instead encourage them to express their feelings.

Annual tuition ranges from $3,000 to $9,000, Lee said. The 125 children at the school are not grouped by grade level, but by their maturity level. They do not receive grades until they get into high school, when the emphasis switches to preparing the children for college.

“We work very hard to not give the impression that we’re New Age, holistic or liberal,” said Mary Louise Sorem, the director of the upper school.

However, that hasn’t stopped New Agers from discovering Krishnamurti. New Agers are being credited with a rise in the past year of the number of requests for publications from the foundation, which puts out a newsletter and sells Krishnamurti’s books by mail.

“Krishnamurti is attractive to people who’ve been through a whole series of New Age material and gotten burned,” said Clayton Carlson, an executive at Harper & Row, the philosopher’s main publisher in the U.S. since the 1950s.

The Krishnamurti Foundation also is negotiating with “a major publisher” to market an existing computerized database containing most of his published work sometime this year, said Lee. Foundation trustees estimate that laser discs containing the database will sell for $1,000 apiece to hard-core Krishnamurti fans, libraries and such on-line data retrieval systems as Dialog, Lee said.

Assembled by an Oxford mathematician, the database contains roughly 9 million of Krishnamurti’s words. By comparison, the Bible has about 800,000 words. The database is designed to scan 2,314 chapters in books or transcripts of speeches, seminars or conversations that included Krishnamurti.

That may seem like a lot of trouble to go through for a man who was fond of saying that he had only one thing to say--”truth is a pathless land”--and said it a thousand different ways, but Krishnamurti’s followers don’t think so.