Krishnamurti (K) joined Vanda Scaravelli at Geneva and then on to Gstaad where she had rented a large furnished house for the summer of 1961, Chalet Tannegg, which she was thereafter to take for him every summer. A small gathering had been arranged for him at the Landhaus in the neighbouring village of Saanen. Nine meetings were held at this first Saanen gathering between July 25 and August 13.The Landhaus, holding about 350 people, was full at each meeting and19 different nationalities were represented. On July 27 Aldous Huxley and his second wife arrived at Gstaad and stayed at the Palace Hotel for 10 days. They went several times to hear K speak … ‘among the most impressive things I ever heard,’ Huxley wrote.
On August 11 at Chalet Tannegg, an official committee had been formed for the purpose of inviting K to speak at Saanen in 1962 and subsequent years and making all arrangements for these gatherings which would be much larger in future. Madame Safra, who lived at Chalet Isabelle at Gstaad, where K had stayed with her in 1957, supplied the necessary Swiss address for legalizing the Committee under Swiss law. The ever-increasing numbers attending each year found accommodation at Saanen or other villages nearby. Those who wished to camp did so in the official Saanen camping ground.
In July 1962 the second gathering was held at Saanen – in a tent this year with a prefabricated dome invented by Buckminster Fuller, the American architect-designer. Holding about 900 people, it was erected on a Swiss military air-strip and hired for 10 meetings from July 22 to August 12. There were also some small discussion meetings after the talks in the Bellevue Hotel.
In July 1963 K gave 10 talks in the same domed tent, but situated now by the side of the Saanen river, the site where the Saanen Gatherings were to be held thereafter, though the land had not yet been bought. The only disadvantage of this site (now the Saanen football pitch) was that it was close to a railway and K had to pause three times during an hour’s talk while the noisy little local train went by. The talks, which ended on July 28, were again followed by a week of daily discussions with a small group at the Bellevue Hotel. The Yehudi Menuhins* and their children, who were staying at Gstaad, came to lunch one day at Tannegg, and another day the Charles Lindberghs lunched there.
The land on which the tent was erected for the Saanen Gatherings – 1¾ acres, with a river flowing by and woods on two sides – could no longer be rented after the summer of talks beginning 10 July 1964, because the owner wanted to sell. Consequently the Saanen Committee decided to buy it for the purchase price of $50,000.
By 1968 the domed tent which had been used for the meetings since 1962 was wearing out, and in that year it was replaced by a new pavilion made of rigid corrugated plastic sheeting, with terraced seating and windows of nylon netting to give more air. Staff and students from Brockwood Park began recording the Saanen talks in 1976. And by 1984, the larger tent hardly held the crowds who came to Saanen.
Also by 1984, Chalet Tannegg had been sold (and would be torn down), so another house, Chalet Horner at Schönried, was rented. K, missing Tannegg after so many years, continued to take his usual afternoon Turbach walk through a wood to the river. Each time they came to the wood, K would ask aloud, ‘May we come in?’
For the summer 1985 talks in Saanen, K stayed in Chalet l’O Perrevoué in Rougemont. There was a sense of euphoria that summer at the Saanen Gathering, perhaps because of the beauty of the weather; the crowds were larger than they had ever been. At the end of the last talk it was announced that after 25 years there were to be no more Gatherings at Saanen.
Two days later K began the first Question and Answer meeting characteristically: ‘I have been told that there are so many people who are sad leaving, ending Saanen. If one is sad it is about time that we left.’ But at the last meeting he spoke with intense feeling: ‘We have had the most marvellous days, lovely mornings, beautiful evenings, long shadows and deep blue valleys and clear blue sky and snow. A whole summer has never been like this. So the mountains, the valleys, the trees and the river, tell us good-bye.’
Abridged and edited fromThe Years of Fulfilment and The Open Door volumes two and three of the authorised biography of Krishnamurti by
Mary Lutyens