Ramana Maharshi

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A boy of sixteen lay down on the floor of an upstairs room in Madurai and decided to find out what death was. Nothing was wrong with him; the fear had arrived without cause, sudden and total, in the summer of 1896. Rather than struggle against it, Venkataraman Iyer made himself rigid, held his breath, sealed his lips, and put the question to his own body: this thing is about to become a corpse — and is the corpse I? What he reported afterward was not an argument but a settling. The body would be carried out and burned, and yet the sense of being — the bare fact I am — was not touched by any of it, did not subside when the body was imagined dead, was if anything more vivid for the experiment. From that hour the fear of death was gone, and so, by every account he later gave, was the seeker. There had been no gradual path, no teacher, no scripture consulted. The realization that classical Advaita places at the end of a long discipline had arrived, in this telling, at the beginning, and the remaining fifty-four years were lived out of it rather than toward it.

The earliest known photograph of Ramana Maharshi, age about twenty-two, in 1902 at Arunachala — Unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Six weeks later the boy left home with a few rupees and a half-finished note, drawn to a hill he had heard named only in passing. He never went back. Arunachala — the red mountain at Tiruvannamalai in the Tamil country — became the fixed point of his life and the one place he refused to leave; the man the world came to call Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi was, to the end, the sage of that hill and almost nothing else.

The hill and the silence

The young arrival spent his first years at Tiruvannamalai in a near-total withdrawal that the Hindu ascetic vocabulary already had words for but that he had read about in none of them. He sat in the thousand-pillared hall and the underground vault called the Patala Lingam, indifferent to vermin and to his own neglected body, until devotees carried him out and fed him by force. He passed through the Gurumurtam shrine and a mango orchard, then settled for nearly two decades into the caves of the hill itself — Virupaksha Cave from about 1899, and from 1916 the higher hermitage of Skandasramam. For long stretches he did not speak at all. The silence was not a vow and not, as he insisted later, a technique; it was the natural register of one for whom the question of the separate self had already closed. Visitors who climbed the hill to argue doctrine often found the argument dissolving in his presence before a word was exchanged. He taught, when he taught, first by stillness, then by a few spare sentences, and only rarely by writing.

A learned Sanskritist gave him the name. In November 1907 the poet and tantric scholar Kavyakantha Ganapati Muni climbed to Virupaksha Cave in spiritual distress, received from the silent ascetic a brief instruction he found wholly original, and declared him a maharshi — a seer — bestowing the full title Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi on the man until then known only as the Brahmana Swami. Ganapati Muni would become the first to set Ramana’s teaching into the high Sanskrit idiom of the tradition; the name he conferred is the one under which the world later knew the sage.

Ramana Maharshi in 1948, two years before his death — Photograph by G. G. Welling, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Around the silent center an ashram slowly accreted. Ramana’s mother came to live near him and died in 1922; he held that at the moment of her death he had worked directly on the I-thought rising in her until it was extinguished, and her tomb at the foot of the hill became the seed of Sri Ramanasramam, the establishment that grew up around him for the rest of his life. He did not found it in any deliberate sense, appoint successors, or build an order with a rule. People came, and a place formed where they could sit near him; that was the whole of the institution. It is one of the sharp distinctions between Ramana and the later Western current that claimed descent from him — a current of lineage-light satsang that the twentieth century made of him rather than one he built. He stayed in one place for half a century and set his teaching inside the inherited frame of the tradition, not against it.

What “Who am I?” answers and what it asks

Ramana’s teaching is austere to the point of seeming to have almost no content, and its apparent simplicity has been the source of both its reach and its frequent flattening. He stood within Advaita Vedānta, the non-dualist reading of scripture given systematic form by Adi Shankara in the eighth century: the position that brahman — the one reality, without a second — alone truly is, that the innermost self (ātman) is not different from it, and that bondage is a case of mistaken identity rather than a real fall to be reversed. What is sometimes missed is that this is a particular non-dualism among rivals. It is not the qualified non-dualism of Ramanuja, for whom souls and matter are real and form the body of a personal God and never lose their distinctness in liberation; nor the frank dualism of Madhva, for whom the fivefold difference between God, souls, and world is eternal and irreducible. Ramana’s claim is the strong one: that the individual, examined closely enough, is not finally there to be liberated.

His distinctive move was to compress the whole of that scholastic apparatus — the fourfold preliminary qualification, the hearing and reasoning and meditation on the great Upaniṣadic sentences — into a single repeated act of attention. Where the older path establishes the identity of self and absolute through scripture and argument, Ramana asks the seeker simply to find the one to whom every experience occurs. Every thought, he held, hangs on a prior thought, the “I”-thought, the first rising of a separate someone; trace that “I” back toward its source and it is found to attach to nothing, to have no substance of its own, and to subside — leaving not a blank but the Self it had all along obscured. He named the source-point of this rising the Heart, locating it by gesture on the right side of the chest, and spoke of a sphuraṇa, a pulsation or shining of the “I-I,” as the felt sign of attention coming home. The architecture of this inquiry — its diagnosis of the ego as a knot rather than an entity, its single instrument, its refusal of the standard preliminaries — is treated in its own right under self-inquiry; what matters here is that it was for Ramana not a method bolted onto a doctrine but the doctrine performed, the eighth-century recognition restated in the imperative and in Tamil.

He allowed, for those who could not take that direct turn, a second way: complete surrender, the giving up of the “I” not by tracing it but by handing it to God. The two were for him the same road from opposite ends — inquiry dissolving the ego by looking for it, surrender dissolving it by letting it go — and both terminated in the same wordless abidance. He was wary of the more elaborate disciplines. Breath-control and the postures of yoga he treated as aids that might quiet the mind but could not by themselves end the “I”-thought, useful as a help and dangerous as a destination.

The corpus

Ramana wrote little and reluctantly, almost always at a devotee’s request, and the small body of his own composition is correspondingly dense. Its chronology matters, because the teaching’s center of gravity shifted over the decades from devotional hymn to terse metaphysical verse.

The earliest texts are not poems but answers. Around 1901-1902, while still in the caves, the young sage responded in writing — or by writing on the ground, his replies later copied out — to the questions of two seekers. From Sivaprakasam Pillai’s questions came Nan Yar? (“Who Am I?”), the spare question-and-answer catechism that is the most widely read statement of the teaching; from Gambhiram Seshayya’s came Vichara Sangraham (“Self-Enquiry”), a fuller treatment. Both circulated in manuscript long before print: Nan Yar? first appeared in Tamil in 1923, appended to Pillai’s verse-life of the sage, and was later recast by Ramana himself into a continuous essay; Vichara Sangraham was first printed in 1930.

The middle period belongs to Arunachala. Asked by his cave-dwelling devotees for songs to sing on their alms-rounds, Ramana composed, while circumambulating the hill, the Akṣaramaṇamālai — the “Marital Garland of Letters,” one hundred and eight Tamil verses whose openings run through the alphabet, addressing Arunachala as a bride addresses her bridegroom, a sustained outpouring of longing and union toward the mountain that for him was Shiva made visible as a hill. With four further hymns — the Navamaṇimālai, the Arunachala Padikam, the Arunachala Ashtakam, and the Sanskrit-and-Tamil Arunachala Pancharatnam — it forms the Sri Arunachala Stuti Panchakam, the five hymns to Arunachala, gathered and first printed in 1922. That the most rigorous of non-dualists also poured out love-poetry to a hill is not a contradiction within the teaching but a demonstration of it: surrender and inquiry, the bhakta’s longing and the knower’s collapse of the “I,” arriving at one place.

Ramana seated before Arunachala, the hill he addressed in his Tamil hymns — Unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The late compositions are the metaphysical core. In 1927 Ramana wrote the thirty Tamil verses of Upadeśa Undiyār (later given in Sanskrit as Upadeśa Sāram, “The Essence of Instruction”), ranking action, devotion, breath, and inquiry as paths and bringing them to rest in the abidance of the Self. In August 1928, again at the prompting of the poet Muruganar, he composed Ulladu Narpadu — “Forty Verses on That Which Is,” sometimes rendered “Reality in Forty Verses” — the most compressed statement of his ontology, arguing that the world, the seer, and God stand or fall together, that the ego is the single false term whose investigation undoes the whole apparatus of bondage. To it he attached a supplement, the Anubandham; only its original twenty-one verses belong to the 1928 first edition, the remainder accreting through the 1930s. Ganapati Muni selected two of Ramana’s stanzas to serve as the invocatory verses of the forty. These works, with the hymns and the early prose, were gathered as Sri Ramana Nutirattu, the collected Tamil works, in 1931. Alongside his original verse he had also turned the classical canon into Tamil — paraphrasing Shankara’s Vivekachūḍāmaṇi and the Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka, rendering the Dakṣiṇāmūrti Stotram — placing his own austere idiom in continuity with the tradition he restated.

One major text was not his. Between 1913 and 1917, Ganapati Muni gathered the sage’s answers to his and others’ questions into the Sri Ramana Gita, eighteen chapters of Sanskrit verse, some three hundred stanzas, the first attempt to present Ramana’s teaching in the high scriptural language and the genre — the dialogue of disciple and master — that the Bhagavad Gita had made canonical. It is the bridge between the silent sage of the hill and the textual tradition of Vedānta, composed by the man who had given him his name.

The world arrives

For its first two decades Ramana’s reputation was almost entirely local and Tamil. The first crack of Western light came in 1911, when a young English police officer in training, Frank Humphreys, made the climb to the cave; his account of the encounter, published across three 1913 issues of the London International Psychic Gazette, is the earliest English-language record of the teaching and the only substantial piece of it that the United States copyright clock has so far released. It found few readers. The decisive turn came in the 1930s. B. V. Narasimha Swami’s biography Self Realization appeared in 1931. Then in 1934 the British journalist Paul Brunton published A Search in Secret India, an account of a tour among Indian holy men that culminated in his meeting with Ramana and presented the sage to a large Anglophone readership as the living center of the book. After Brunton, the visitors came in numbers, and from the stream of their recorded conversations grew the literature most readers now associate with Ramana — Arthur Osborne’s biography of 1954, the Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi recorded by Munagala Venkataramiah and published in 1955, and, decades later, David Godman’s widely used anthology Be As You Are of 1985. None of this conversational corpus came from Ramana’s pen; it is the record others kept of a man who mostly sat in silence.

Ramana seated at the ashram in 1948, in the posture in which visitors found him — Photograph by G. G. Welling, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Among those drawn to that silence in the mid-century were figures from the very different worlds that Western interest in Indian thought had opened. The Theosophical Society, whose Adyar headquarters lay in the same Tamil country, had helped prepare an English-speaking audience for Indian sages; the young teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom Theosophy had groomed and who then walked away from it, moved in adjacent circles, though his path of choiceless awareness without method or guru ran on a separate track from Ramana’s. The Bengali current that ran from Ramakrishna through Vivekananda had already carried a reformed Vedānta westward a generation earlier. Ramana belonged to none of these movements and joined nothing; what he offered was older and barer than any of them, and it drew people precisely because it asked nothing of the apparatus they had come through. He neither solicited the attention nor turned it away. The hill received whoever climbed it.

A separate strand of modern non-dualism is sometimes set beside his and should be kept distinct from it. The Bombay teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj, of the Navnath lineage, taught an inquiry into the bare sense “I am” and into the awareness prior to it; the resemblance to Ramana’s “Who am I?” is real and the two are often shelved together, but Nisargadatta’s pointed dialectic of the “I am” is a different instrument in a different lineage from Ramana’s wordless abidance in the Self, and merging them into a single modern-Advaita-guru portrait loses what is particular to each.

Scholarship, texts, and the documentary record

The study of Ramana faces an unusual archival situation: he is a recent figure whose primary teaching survives in a small set of early-twentieth-century Tamil and Sanskrit imprints, while the conversational and biographical literature most readers know remains under copyright held by his ashram for years to come. The earliest stratum is therefore the most accessible. Frank Humphreys’s three-part 1913 account in the International Psychic Gazette — the first Western notice — is in the public domain. The composition chronology of the works, the relation of the Tamil originals to their Sanskrit and English renderings, and the textual history of Nan Yar? and Ulladu Narpadu have been worked out in close detail by the translator Michael James, whose Teachings of Sri Ramana bibliography and translations date the early prose to 1900-1902, Upadeśa Undiyār to 1927, and Ulladu Narpadu to 1928. The biographical and bibliographic essays of David Godman, longtime editor at Tiruvannamalai, trace the role of the devotee-poet Muruganar — who prompted both Upadeśa Undiyār and Ulladu Narpadu and composed more than twenty thousand verses on the sage — and remain the standard apparatus for the corpus and its devotees. The verse texts themselves, in multiple English translations, are gathered in the open archive at Realization.org, which hosts renderings of Ulladu Narpadu by K. Swaminathan, S. S. Cohen, Osborne, and others side by side — a useful way to see how a single terse Tamil verse refracts through its translators.

For the classical frame in which Ramana set himself, the foundational texts are older and far better documented. His own paraphrase of the Vivekachūḍāmaṇi points back to that poem of discrimination traditionally ascribed to Shankara, available in Charles Johnston’s 1925 rendering as The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom; the doctrinal spine of Advaita survives in Shankara’s commentary on the Brahma-Sūtras, in George Thibaut’s Sacred Books of the East translation, against which Ramana’s compression of the path into a single question can be measured; and the dialogue-form of his teaching looks back to the Bhagavad Gita that the Sri Ramana Gita deliberately echoed. The modern academic literature situates him variously as the last great exponent of lived Advaita, as a node in the twentieth-century globalization of Indian contemplative practice, and as the fountainhead of currents — the satsang teachers of the late century — that carried his self-inquiry far from the metaphysics that gave it its point.

The end at the foot of the hill

In his final years a cancer grew on Ramana’s arm; he submitted to several operations and to none of the alarm around them, treating the dissolving body as he had treated the imagined corpse in Madurai half a century before — as not the “I.” When devotees begged him not to leave them, the answer they recorded was that he was not going anywhere; where could he go, and where was here? He died on the evening of 14 April 1950 at Sri Ramanasramam, at the foot of the mountain he had reached as a boy and never left. Witnesses reported a meteor crossing the sky toward the hill at the moment of death.

The teaching he leaves is finally not a body of statements but a single instruction that empties itself in the giving. Every doctrine he spoke pointed past speech, toward the abidance in which the question “Who am I?” finds no one to have asked it and no answer needing words. The hill remains; the silence it stood for was never the absence of his voice but the thing his voice had only ever been pointing at, and to which, by his own account, there was never anywhere else to return.

→ In the library: The Vedânta-Sûtras with Śankara's Commentary (Thibaut, SBE, 1890/1896) · The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom (Vivekachūdāmaṇi, Johnston, 1925) · The Bhagavad Gita (Edwin Arnold, The Song Celestial, 1885)

→ Related: Atma Vichara Self Inquiry · Vedanta Advaita Visistadvaita Dvaita · Sankara · Brahman · Nisargadatta Maharaj · Neo Advaita · Guru · Hinduism · Bhagavad Gita · Yoga · Jiddu Krishnamurti · Ramakrishna · Theosophical Society · Swami Vivekananda · Ramanuja · Madhva