Annamalai Swami

The full-length study of this teacher is still being written. What is below is the complete short life, and it is accurate as far as it goes.

The life

He came to Sri Ramanasramam in 1928, from a village in Tamil Nadu, at about twenty-two, wanting to sit at his teacher's feet. He was given a building site. For years he supervised construction at the ashram under Ramana's direct eye — sheds, walls, the cowshed, the stone work — and this is the part of his record that earns him a place here. He kept a diary. It shows, day by day, a man being handed practical tasks by someone who would not let him treat the work and the enquiry as two different activities. Where should my attention be while I carry bricks? The answers are in the diary, and they are not consoling: there is no arrangement of outward circumstances that will do the work for you. Later he withdrew to Palakothu, the small settlement of huts just beside the ashram at the foot of Arunachala, and stayed there for over fifty years, practising, until his death in 1995. In a notebook from 1961 he wrote out 175 teachings and thirty-three questions with their answers. In the 1980s small groups of visitors began to come, and he talked to them with great plainness about what he had been told and what he had found; those conversations were published as Living by the Words of Bhagavan and Final Talks. The lesson is unfashionable and useful: he was told that work and enquiry are not rivals, and he proved it with bricks.

The turn it rests on

He was told that work and enquiry are not rivals, and proved it with bricks.

What was taught

Spent years in physical work at Ramana's direction, then decades in practice; taught plainly that the mind is the only obstacle.