Sri Kavyakantha Ganapati Muni

The Andhra he was born into

He was born on 17 November 1878 in the north of what is now Andhra Pradesh, in the country between the Eastern Ghats and the Bay of Bengal where Telugu is spoken and the old Sanskrit learning of the coast had not yet died. The family biography, Mahatapasvi, written in Telugu by his grandson A. V. Ramana and published by Sri Ramanasramam, names the parents as Ayyala Somayajula Nrisimha Sastry, then about thirty, a landlord and the village officer, an initiate of the twelve-syllable mantra which he repeated always, proficient in astrology and medicine and a worshipper in the Śrī Vidyā method, and his wife Narasamamba; their elder son, Bhima Sastry, was four years old in the February of 1878 when the family went by bullock cart to the Sun temple at Arasavalli, near Srikakulam, to fulfil a vow. The ashram’s own introduction to his collected works, by K. Natesan, adds that he belonged to a family of Śrī Vidyā initiates of the Vāsiṣṭha gotra, which had migrated from a village near Kumbakonam in the Tamil country in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and had come to be called the Ayyalasomayajulu family. The Sanskrit tradition of the far south, in other words, had travelled north up the coast two or three centuries before he was born, and he would carry it back.

Both the biography and the introduction tell the story of his birth as the family told it, and this page reports it as theirs. At Arasavalli, the biography says, Narasamamba fell into a trance in the temple and saw a god issue from the Sun-god’s image holding a vessel of fire, which he put into her hand; her husband, an adept in mantra, understood the god to be Hiraṇyagarbha and told her she would bear a child with the power of the Sun. When she was in her seventh month he took her to her parents’ house for the delivery, left the household in the care of his brother Prakasa Sastry, and went to Kāśī for the month of Kārtika. There, sitting before the image of Ḍhuṇḍi Gaṇapati near the Viśveśvara temple two hours after sunrise on the eighth day after the new moon, repeating the nine-syllable Gaṇapati mantra, he saw a boy crawl out of the image and climb into his lap. He learned on his return that the child had been born at that hour. The boy was named Sūrya Gaṇapati; the introduction says simply that the father believed him an emanation of Gaṇapati, and that the Muni himself wrote in the Umā Sahasram that he was born as an aṁśa, a portion, of that god. A reader may take these stories as the family’s piety. What is not in doubt is that the child was expected, from before his birth, to be a man of the mantra, and that the expectation was fulfilled.

The place of his birth is given by the ashram’s introduction as Kalavarayi near Bobbili, in his mother’s parental home. The biography tells it differently: it calls the family’s own village Kaluvarai, fifteen miles from Srikakulam, and says that the father, returning from Kāśī, reached Kaluvarai, heard the news, and “proceeded to Logisa Agraharam”, which would make that the mother’s home and the birthplace. The two accounts do not agree, and this page does not choose between them; the map below pins the family’s village near Bobbili by the introduction’s description and says so. The introduction also says, in a sentence worth remembering through everything that follows, that he was educated entirely at home.

Where the life was lived

The life runs in a great loop and then a long straight line. It begins on the Andhra coast, at Kaluvarai and Arasavalli; goes north to Kāśī and Bhubaneswar for the years of study and austerity, and to Navadvīpa in Bengal, where the title Kāvyakaṇṭha was given in 1900; comes back south through Kanchipuram to Arunachala in 1903, and to Vellore, where he taught Telugu for three years; and then, from 18 November 1907, settles on the hill at Tiruvannamalai, which remained the fixed point of everything afterwards. From there it went out and came back: to Madras for literary assemblies and the Congress, to Padaiveedu near Vellore for the tapas of 1917, to Gokarna on the Karnataka coast by way of Kāladi in 1912, to Pondicherry to meet Sri Aurobindo in 1928, to Sirsi in North Kanara in 1931, and home to Kaluvarai from 1932. The last two years, from September 1934, were in Bengal: Calcutta and Kharagpur, where he died on 25 July 1936, further from Arunachala than he had been since his youth.

The map is drawn on present-day coordinates from the place-names in the ashram’s biography and introduction. Where those sources name only a district or describe a village’s position in two different ways, the pin’s note says so.

The silent child, and the boy who made almanacs

The first thing the biography records about the boy is that he did not speak. “Surya Ganapati was a normal child up to his sixth year. The only defect in him was that he would not speak. He understood what was spoken, but would not reply and not even call his mother ‘Amma’.” He was not interested in play, study or food; he sat silent with closed eyes most of the time, sometimes lost outward consciousness, and his body would grow warm without cause. The family were anxious. That the man who was later given the title “one with poetry in his throat” began as a child who would not open his mouth is the kind of fact a biographer might be tempted to invent; this one is reported by his grandson from the family’s memory, and this page records it as the family’s account.

When the speech came, everything came. He had, the biography says, a photographic memory, and could learn anything taught only once and repeat it perfectly; before he completed his eighth year he had mastered the basic texts of a Sanskrit education, the Amarakośa, the Bāla Rāmāyaṇa and the Śiva Sahasra. He learned astrology from his father and, the biography records, discovered his own method of calculating the calendar of the year, preparing a special almanac in his ninth year; the ashram’s introduction puts the same feat at ten. The father, Nrisimha Sastry, was an expert in mantra-śāstra, astrology and Āyurveda, as his ancestors had been, and had a profound love of Sanskrit and Telugu and a firm belief in the old gurukula system in which tapas was part of the curriculum. The boy had the whole of that inheritance and nothing else: no English, no school, no examinations. He read the classical poems, grammar and poetics, and, the introduction says, studied the writings of Vyāsa and Vālmīki deeply and read the Mahābhārata again and again.

He was married early, as boys of his class then were. The biography is exact about it, and about the one question he asked. When he heard of his father’s intention he asked whether marriage was not a hurdle to tapas. His father answered that marriage was not proscribed in the tradition of the ṛṣis, that the ancient sages were mostly householders and did tapas also, and that there was no indication of sannyāsa in his horoscope. The boy, who had great faith in astrology and could see for himself that his chart showed no renunciation, let his father decide. “It was then customary for a girl to be married in her eighth year … Accordingly, Visalakshi of eight years was married to Ganapati who was in his twelfth year.” The marriage lasted until her death in 1926 and was, by every account in these sources, a partnership in tapas: the biography says his wife never objected to any of his tapas and was a true helpmate in it, and she is remembered by his disciples as Amma. Their son, Mahadeva, was born on 14 February 1899; the biography records that on the night before the birth the father dreamed of a cow giving birth to a calf.

Kāśī, Bhubaneswar, and the title at Navadvīpa

From about eighteen, the introduction says, he began visiting sacred places for tapas, staying in each for a few days or months. The two that mattered were in the north-east. At Bhubaneswar in Orissa, where the Liṅgarāja temple stands, he had, the introduction records, a vision of the Goddess Lalitāmbikā or Bhuvaneśvarī offering him divine nectar; after tasting it, the account says, his intellect developed exceptional sharpness and he attained complete mastery over poetry. The biography gives the same episode a chapter called “Graced with Nectar”. Whatever a reader makes of the vision, the mastery is not in dispute; it was tested publicly within a year or two.

He was at Kāśī, aged twenty-two, when he heard that an assembly of scholars, a hari-sabhā, was to be held at Navadvīpa in Bengal, the town of Caitanya and of the old Nyāya schools, where Sanskrit learning was examined at its strictest. The biography records that a Bengali scholar named Sivakumar Dutt, who had noticed him, told him to attend, and when the young man wondered how he could get admittance into the hall by himself, promised an introductory letter to the secretary. He went with the letter. “After excelling in the tests given by the scholars, he was unanimously awarded the title kāvyakaṇṭha, meaning ‘one who has poetry in his throat – voice of poetry’.” That is the introduction’s account; the biography tells the story at length, with the tests, and says the examiners were astonished. He was Kāvyakaṇṭha Gaṇapati Śāstrī from then on. The introduction dates the title to his twenty-second year, which is 1900. He also, the biography notes in passing, visited Dakṣiṇeśvar while he was in Calcutta and composed a verse to Kālī on seeing her image there, remembering that Sri Ramakrishna had attained liberation singing her glory. He returned to the south at twenty-five.

Arunachala, 1903, and the Vellore years

He came to Arunachala for the first time in September 1903, during the Navarātri festival, with his brother, from Kanchipuram. (The biography records, without a date, that the head of the Kāmakoṭi Pīṭham there, Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati, had great love for him, and lauded and felicitated him, giving him gifts from his own hand.) At Tiruvannamalai he was told of a young ascetic on the hill known simply as Brāhmaṇa Swāmi, who had been living there in silence since 1896. The introduction records that he visited him twice, in 1903 and 1904, before accepting a teaching post. He did not yet recognise the young man as his guru; that would take four years.

The post was that of Telugu Pandit at the Vellore Christian College, arranged for him, the biography says, by his admirers in Madras after his literary successes there. He was at first unwilling and was persuaded, and moved his family to Vellore in 1904. The three years there were not idle. He gathered students around him into a union he called the Indra Senā, to which the biography gives a chapter, and whose programme it sets out: that education must be free of religious propaganda; that the British had no authority to strangle the beliefs of Indians; that Vedic knowledge must be inculcated in Indian minds; that everybody is fit to acquire knowledge, without discrimination of caste, creed or religion; and that every member must meditate in his heart and awaken the Indra-Śakti inherent in all. Its lessons, the biography says, promoted the equality of men and women, and its founder held that the country could not win its independence unless divine energy was first acquired by the grace of God. He also found his Goddess. At Padaiveedu on the river Kamandalu near Vellore, where Reṇukā, the mother of Paraśurāma, is worshipped, he arrived with his family during the Navarātri of 1906, and in the December holidays took a vow of forty days’ tapas in the temple. The biography says that the Śakti was awakened in him frequently during those days, and that on the fortieth night, lying on his back in pain in the temple, he saw the Goddess appear before him, touched her feet and praised her in verses that are now in the Umā Sahasram. That is the family’s account; what is certain is that Reṇukā of Padaiveedu was his Goddess ever afterwards, and that the verses he wrote to her nearly cost him his liberty. In 1907 he resigned and went back to Arunachala. The introduction puts the reason plainly: an intellectual and spiritual giant with high achievements to his credit and a host of followers, he still felt that his life’s purpose was not fulfilled, and he remembered the silent young man he had met on the hill.

18 November 1907: the question about tapas

The meeting that changed his life, and gave Sri Ramana Maharshi the name by which the world knows him, is recorded in the ashram’s introduction to the Muni’s collected works in words that this page reproduces exactly, because so much depends on them. On 18 November 1907 he approached Brāhmaṇa Swāmi, who was staying in the Virūpākṣa cave, prostrated at his feet and said in a trembling voice:

“All that has to be read I have read, even Vedanta Sastra I have fully understood. I have performed japa and puja to my heart’s content. Yet I have not up to this time understood what tapas is. Hence have I sought refuge at thy feet, pray enlighten me about the nature of tapas.”

For some time, the introduction says, the young Swami gazed silently at him. Then he spoke:

“If one watches where his notion of ‘I’ springs, the mind will be absorbed into that. That is tapas. If a mantra is repeated and attention is directed to the source where the mantra sound is produced, the mind will be absorbed in that. That is tapas.”

The question and the answer are quoted from K. Natesan’s introduction to volume 1 of the Collected Works of Vāsiṣṭha Kāvyakaṇṭha Gaṇapati Muni (Sri Ramanasramam), as reproduced on the site of Arunachala Ashrama, New York, and in the preface to volume 11. The biography gives a slightly different rendering of the same answer in a footnote — “Search within for the place where the ‘I-thought’ arises. The mind will subside there. That is tapas. If repeating a mantra, search for the source of the sound of the mantra and the mind will subside. That is tapas” — and both are translations from the Muni’s own record. Where the two differ, this page has preferred the ashram’s introduction and reports the other.

Three things about the exchange deserve notice. First, the man asking was not a beginner. He had twenty years of mantra-japa behind him, the title of the Navadvīpa scholars, and a following; the introduction says he had read everything, and there is no reason to doubt it. The question he asked was the one that learning cannot answer, and he knew it. Second, the answer met him where he was. He had asked about tapas, the austere effort the old texts prescribe; the answer redefined it as attention to the source of the “I”, and then, because the questioner was a man of the mantra, gave a second form of the same instruction for those who repeat a mantra: attend to where the sound arises. Sri Ramana did not tell him to stop his japa. He told him where to look while doing it. Third, the introduction says that in speaking these words the Swami “broke his 11 years of long silence”; that is the ashram’s phrase, and this page reports it as such rather than claiming to know that no word had passed his lips before.

The scholar, the introduction says, was filled with joy to have found his guru. He announced that the teaching was original, that this young man was indeed a maharṣi, a great seer of the Vedic kind, and that he should be so called; and he gave him the full name Bhagavān Sri Ramaṇa Maharṣi, taking Ramaṇa from Veṅkaṭarāman, the name the boy had been given at Tiruchuli. The biography records that he wrote the name in a letter the following day. It is the name the world has used since. There is a real historical weight in this: it was the most learned man of his region, publicly and at once, who told everyone that the silent young man on the hill was a Maharṣi, and the introduction is right to say that the meeting was of significance not only for the Muni but for the world at large, which could learn from such a high authority about the stature of the teacher. The disciples of the Muni began to call him Nāyana, and Bhagavān used the name too; the ashram’s publisher’s note to his letters says he was “popularly addressed as Nayana”, and so he is on the rest of this page.

Umā Sahasram: a thousand verses against a deadline

He had been composing a great hymn to the Goddess, a thousand verses to Umā in forty chapters of twenty-five, and he had made a vow to finish it within a fixed time. The biography tells the story of the last night with the exactness of a family record. He had a blister on his thumb that made writing impossible; a Tiruvannamalai physician named Punyakoti, the biography says, dreamed that a brahmin told him “The Muniswara on Arunagiri has a blister on his thumb. Go and treat him!”, climbed the hill the next morning, was guided by Bhagavān to the right patient, and operated on the blister. It was still impossible to write, and three hundred verses remained. Five of his disciples offered to take dictation. He told them to come at eight in the evening. It was Sunday, the first day of the month of Mārgaśīra, 15 December 1907, the last day of the vow. Bhagavān sat on a high stool and went into samādhi. The Muni sat at his feet with the five scribes around him, and began to dictate five verses at once, one line to each in turn, each verse in a different metre.

“Midnight arrived and the last five slokas were written down. Three hundred slokas were composed and written down in exactly four hours. The scribes took a deep breath in great relief and looked at Nayana. Nayana was in a trance-like state. Bhagavan was absorbed in samadhi throughout. For five minutes there was absolute silence. All of a sudden Bhagavan opened his eyes and spoke: ‘Nayana! Have you taken down all that I have said?’” And Nāyana, the biography says, with moist eyes touched Bhagavān’s feet with both hands and answered: “Yes, Bhagavan! All that you have said has been received!”

The account is from Part II, chapter 14 of Mahatapasvi, “Composition of Uma Sahasram”. The biography’s own comment is that the feat was unparalleled in the history of poetic composition; this page reports the scene and leaves the superlative to the family.

The exchange is the whole relationship in two sentences. The Muni was the poet; Bhagavān had not spoken a word all evening; and both of them understood that the verses had come through the disciple from the guru’s silence, so that the guru could ask whether his dictation had been taken down and the disciple could answer that it had. The introduction calls the Umā Sahasram the Muni’s magnum opus, composed as part of his tapas and in gratitude to the Goddess for having given him the Maharṣi as guru, and says that its final version, written in his own hand after the experience of 1922, shows his mastery of the tantras and his power to reconcile Vedic, Upaniṣadic and Tantric thought. The biography records, in a chapter of its own, that the manuscript was once washed away and had to be recovered. Sri Aurobindo, who was shown the poem years later, is quoted by the biography as saying: “This is a wonderful work. The author is a super human being. His divine voice rings out in every sloka of the work! I would like to see him.”

Not long after the poem was finished, the biography records, the Muni went into the temple of Tripurasundarī at Tiruvottiyur, near Madras, saw a small shrine of Gaṇeśa in a corner of its garden, went in, and remained there sixteen days absorbed within. Śakti moved in him again; there was an obstruction and severe pain in the spine, and he lay on the floor and prayed to Gaṇeśa to make his dance in the mūlādhāra a little slower. “Miraculously, this prayer was heard by Bhagavan in Virupaksha Cave. The next instant he was standing before Nayana and the pain in Nayana’s back subsided with the touch of Bhagavan’s hand.” The biography adds that Bhagavān’s own account of the same event, given to Kapali Sastry a few days afterwards, tallied exactly with the shrine, and it prints the account as Bhagavān repeated it to the Muni in 1929: that lying awake in the cave he had felt his body carried up until there was nothing but white light, had found himself on a high road at Tiruvottiyur, had gone into a Gaṇapati temple at some distance from it and talked, “but with whom or what, I did not recollect”, and had suddenly found himself lying in the cave again and told Palaniswami at once. This page reports both accounts as the biography gives them. Afterwards, it says, the Muni went back to Vellore, where the family still lived.

The poem also brought him into danger. His verses to the Goddess in her form as Reṇukā at Padaiveedu, with their prayers for the deliverance of the country, came to the notice of the colonial government. A professor at the Vellore Christian College named Subrahmanyam wrote in The Hindu strongly criticising the government’s attitude. “The Governor gave orders to ban Uma Sahasram and to arrest Nayana. Two detectives of police were deputed to arrest Nayana.” A friend warned him. He was, the biography says, unruffled, and remarked cheerfully that Reṇukā, who in the form of Draupadī had destroyed the enemies of righteousness at Kurukṣetra, had now taken up the same work in the form of Durgā. The arrest did not happen; the biography does not say exactly why, and this page does not guess. But it should be understood that the Muni’s devotion was never a private matter. The Goddess he sang was the strength of his country, and he said so in Sanskrit verse at a time when saying so could bring the police to the door.

The Muni’s household, and the guru who swam with a child

Nāyana was a householder throughout, and Bhagavān’s relationship with the whole family is one of the most human parts of the record. When the disciples begged the Muni to read out the finished Umā Sahasram and expound it, the biography says, the Pachaiamman temple at the foot of the hill was chosen for the discourses, and Visalakshi came from Vellore with the boy Mahadeva. “On seeing him, Bhagavan asked him lovingly whether he remembered him. Mahadeva did not say anything as he did not remember. He said, ‘Aham Bho Abhivadaye’ (Sir, I prostrate).” It was to this same Mahadeva, grown up and arriving at his father’s deathbed in 1936, that the last words on this page were spoken. Bhagavān’s own mother, Alagamma, came to live with him in 1916, and the biography records what happened when the disciples objected: “Ramana stood up, went over to Alagamma, took her by the hand and said, ‘Mother let us go. We can find a place somewhere else to live.’” The disciples begged them both to stay. The Muni’s wife and the guru’s mother were thus part of the same small company on the hill in the Skandāśramam years.

Visalakshi’s own practice is recorded, not merely her presence. The biography says she was called Amma by the disciples, that when her husband went on pilgrimage she stayed at home doing mantra-japa and dhyāna, that her radiance attracted people, and that “with the help of her husband’s and Maharshi’s grace, she became steady in the Self and got Liberation on 26-7-1926 at Arunachala” — a Monday, in the second half of the month of Āṣāḍha. She had been with him at Arunachala in the July of 1917, when the dialogues of the Sri Ramaṇa Gītā were held, and the biography records elsewhere that she asked her husband what benefit he had had from a vision he described to her, and got a plain answer. She was not a bystander in this life.

Humphreys, Gokarna, and the father’s death

The first Westerner to meet Sri Ramana came to him through the Muni, and the biography tells the story from the Muni’s side. F. H. Humphreys, a young English police officer posted to Vellore as Assistant Superintendent in 1911, had fallen ill in Bombay on the way and, the biography says, had a vision of a bearded man in white robes who sat on his bed and placed hands on him, after which the fever left. At Vellore he engaged a Telugu teacher, a munshi named Narasimhan, and asked him whether he knew of any Mahātmas; the munshi, who was the Muni’s disciple and at first suspected a policeman’s trap, was told the next day that Humphreys had seen the munshi’s own guru in a dream; he brought some photographs of holy men with his guru’s concealed among them, and Humphreys picked it out at once: “Munshiji, is this not your Guru’s photo? He appeared to me in Bombay and cured my illness. Please, take me to him. I want to have his darshan.” “Nayana recognized the spiritual hunger in Humphreys and took him to Sri Ramana Maharshi in November, 1911.” Humphreys wrote of the visits for the International Psychic Gazette, and the biography quotes him: “The Maharshi is a man beyond description in his expression of dignity, gentleness, self-control and calm strength of conviction.” The biography calls him the first known foreigner to have visited the Maharṣi and the first to give the West his message. It was the Muni who took him up the hill.

In 1912 the Muni went with Mahadeva and Visalakshi on pilgrimage to Gokarna on the western coast, planning, the biography says, to visit Kāladi, the birthplace of Sri Ādi Śaṅkara, first, and then take the boat up the coast; the boat left at six in the evening under a full moon. At Gokarna the family lived in a Vināyaka temple on the Umā-Maheśvara hill at one end of the town, and there, the biography records, the Muni began a sacrifice he called the Vedakośa-mathanam, the churning of the Vedas, with a congregation of scholars: an analysis of the Vedas to prove, as he put it, our debt to the gods and to explain the aspects of Agni. It was there that a telegram reached him. His father, who had had Sri Ramana’s darśan in 1910 — “Total silence reigned between those two gurus of Nayana” — and had kept up the worship of the Divine Mother until 1912, had fallen ill with recurrent fevers. It took the Muni a week to reach Kaluvarai. His brothers Bhima and Sivarama were nursing the old man, who died on 5 December 1912. The biography treats the death with reserve; what it does record is the Muni’s sense that he had had two gurus, his father in the mantra and Bhagavān in the Self, and that the two had met once and said nothing to each other.

Sri Ramaṇa Gītā, and the mantras of Daivarāta

The book by which most readers know the Muni’s relationship with his guru began on 29 December 1913. “On 29-12-1913, Nayana asked Bhagavan some questions, knowing that the answers would benefit seekers. He rendered these questions and answers into seventeen slokas.” The biography explains the motive in an image: the guru taught mostly in silence, and to propagate the teaching in words the Muni made himself the scribe, as Gaṇeśa had been the scribe of Vyāsa. Those seventeen verses became the first chapter, on the primacy of practice. The rest came later, in a fortnight of daily dialogues that began on 7 July 1917, when a group of scholars and disciples gathered before Bhagavān each day and asked their questions — the Muni himself, his disciple Daivarāta, the young Kapali Sastry, and Visalakshi — and he answered them. “This began on 7-7-1917. Nayana codified all the questions and answers into a book called Sri Ramana Gita.” Eighteen chapters of Sanskrit verse, the questions and answers of 1917 rendered by the Muni as they were given. It is the only sustained record of Sri Ramana’s teaching made by a Sanskrit scholar in his presence, and the introduction is right to count it among the Muni’s most cherished writings. The biography also preserves a remark of Bhagavān’s about how it began: “In 1913, Nayana asked some questions and got answers. He rendered them into seventeen slokas.”

The same year Bhagavān composed the one Sanskrit verse in the Gītā that is his own. The biography records that a young scholar, Jagadīśvara Śāstrī, had begun a verse with the words hṛdaya-kuhara-madhye — “in the centre of the cave of the heart” — and could not finish it; Bhagavān completed it. The verse, on Brahman shining alone in the heart as “I”, became the second verse of the Gītā’s second chapter and is chanted at the ashram to this day. And in the same year, 1917, the Muni and Daivarāta went to Padaiveedu near Vellore for tapas, and there, the introduction records, mantras were revealed to Daivarāta in the Vedic manner, and the Muni wrote them down as they came from his lips and wrote a commentary on them. The biography gives the episode a chapter called “Descent of the New Veda”. The claim is large; this page reports it as the ashram’s and leaves the reader to judge. It does show what the Muni believed the mantra tradition to be: not a closed canon but a living channel, still open to a disciplined mind.

Kapāla bheda, 1922: the letter to his uncle

In the summer of 1922 the Muni was living with his family in the Mango-tree cave on the hill, spending most of his time in meditation. The biography says that from the time of his vision of Reṇukā at Padaiveedu he had experienced the movement of Śakti within him and had described it in verses of the Umā Sahasram, and that the flow had been gradually increasing. On 20 August 1922 it came to a head, in an experience the tantric texts call kapāla bheda, the splitting of the skull. The introduction records that he went to the Maharṣi in pain that day and described what was happening in his body, and that Bhagavān placed his hands on his head to comfort him; that night the experience came. Two days later the Muni wrote to his uncle Prakasa Sastry, and the biography prints the letter under his own heading:

“Great good News: Kapala Moksham. Tiruvannamalai, Tuesday, 22-08-1922. O Uncle! Your letter to hand. Starting from 3 p.m. till night, Kundalini Shakti rose up powerfully filling the Sahasrara which merged me in an ocean of electric power. I did not know what to do. I was not sure that the body would withstand this Shakti. I had not even the strength to speak. At 8 p.m. I was in the cave. The two parts of the cranium got loosened and because of the heat, separated a little. It may be called broken also. This is Kapala Moksha. This is a sort of breaking the knot loose. I think this is the idea of Chchinna Masta. After that, this Shakti flowed out like gas from the head to the outside for three minutes. Then I became all tight. Now, the electric power (Shakti) is freely going out and coming in. A hand put on the head without touching it feels the power-like gas flowing. That means the bodily electricity has mingled with nature’s electricity. Nayana”

The letter is printed in Part III, chapter 8 of Mahatapasvi. The ashram’s introduction describes the same night from the Muni’s later account to his disciples: that he experienced his cranium as breaking into two parts, heard a distinct sound from the passage joining the two ear-holes, and perceived a line of smoke going out of his head; and that he connected it with a sentence of the Taittirīya tradition, vyapohya śīrṣakapāle bhūrityagnau prati tiṣṭhati, “having separated the two parts of the cranium, he stands established in Fire as Bhūḥ”. The introduction adds that the body was not usually believed able to survive such an experience for long, and that he lived fourteen years afterwards; and that from then on he could not shave his head or place his bare feet on the ground.

The biography records what the family saw and what the guru did. “They saw a light coming out of the top of his head, forming a round circle of light on the roof of the cave and filling up the whole cave with glow. They were somewhat afraid and went to Skandashramam and told Bhagavan about the strange light. Bhagavan came and applied castor oil on Nayana’s head and cooled it. The next day, Bhagavan got a pair of wooden sandals for Nayana and told him never to touch the ground without them. Nayana took the sandals from Bhagavan and told Bhagavan that he was receiving Paduka Diksha (initiation through sandals) from Bhagavan.” And in a later chapter the biography adds a sentence of Bhagavān’s which shows the other side of the relationship: “When Kavyakantha had the kapala bheda, Maharshi applied castor oil on his head and cooled the heat. He said, ‘I am here to look after Nayana. But who is there for me?’”

This page does not offer a physiology of what happened. What it can say is that the account is the Muni’s own, written within forty-eight hours in a letter to a relative, with the plainness of a man reporting a fact; that the ashram has printed it; and that the guru’s response was castor oil and a pair of wooden sandals. The tradition at Arunachala has never been embarrassed by the body.

The Congress years, and a language called Lāli

The Muni’s devotion to the Goddess as the strength of his country, which had nearly brought the police to his door in 1907, took him in the 1920s into public life. The biography gives it a chapter, “The Call of Politics”. He spoke at Congress meetings from 1923. In 1924 the All-India Congress Committee met at Tiruvannamalai, the biography says, with Gandhi, Madan Mohan Malaviya and Annie Besant among those present, and Nāyana gave the inaugural speech. “In December of the same year, there was a conference in Belgaum, under Gandhiji’s leadership. Gandhiji proposed that Hindi should become the National language. Nayana opposed the idea.” He argued for Sanskrit, and, when it was objected that Sanskrit was too difficult for the mass of the people, set about answering the objection in the only way a grammarian could: he devised a simplified Sanskrit, with rules of his own modelled on Pāṇini’s, which he called Lāli Bhāṣā, and wrote a treatise on it in eleven sections, the Lālibhāṣopadeśa, which survives in the collected works. The idea did not prevail. It is recorded here because it shows the cast of his mind: a practical man, who thought that a nation should pray, legislate and argue in the language of its scriptures, and who, when told that this was impossible, sat down and wrote a grammar.

He worked, too, against untouchability, and the biography records one meeting in particular: “On 25-02-1927, there was a meeting held in Sri Madapati Hanumantha Rao’s house. The conversations held at that meeting took the form of questions from a variety of people and answers by Nayana.” He argued from the śāstras, as a man of his training would, that the exclusion of whole communities from the temples and from the Vedic rites had no warrant in the tradition he served; the same conviction had, in his Vellore years, put “everybody is fit to acquire knowledge” into the programme of the Indra Senā. In 1927 he also completed at Arunachala an Indra Sahasranāma, a thousand names of Indra culled from the Ṛg Veda on the model of the thousand names of Lalitā and of Viṣṇu, and showed it to Bhagavān, who, the biography says, was interested. Indra, for the Muni, was the Vedic god of strength, and his devotion to Indra and to Indrāṇī, the seven hundred verses of the Indrāṇī Saptaśatī, was one of the three loves he named in a letter to his guru in 1931, quoted below.

Sri Aurobindo, 1928, and the death of a brother

On 15 August 1928 he met Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry. The introduction records that he stayed at the ashram there for about a fortnight and meditated several times with the Mother, who said, the introduction reports, that he was a real yogi who could plunge into great depths as soon as he began to meditate, and that she had not previously found anyone abiding in her spiritual consciousness as he did. At the request of two of his disciples who had joined Sri Aurobindo, Kapali Sastry and S. Doraiswamy Iyer, he translated portions of Sri Aurobindo’s The Mother into Sanskrit verse with notes, the Mātṛtattvaprakāśikā; the introduction quotes Sri Aurobindo as saying of the translation, “It far excels the original.” He had, the introduction says, presented Sri Aurobindo before the meeting with the final version of the Umā Sahasram, in his own hand, with notes on each chapter. The two men met once, and each left the other with a book.

The years around 1930 brought the deaths that the biography records most tenderly. His younger brother Sivarama Sastry, who had gone with him to Arunachala in 1903 and shared his tapas, died in his arms of a heart attack: “Sivarama shouted thrice, the breath rattled thrice, and he fell dead into Nayana’s hands. It was 7-02-1930. ‘My brother is no more. He has come to me and died like a hero,’ said Nayana sadly.” He performed the funeral rites himself. And on 17 October 1929, on a visit to Arunachala, he had told Bhagavān of an experience of the guru’s grace during an attack of illness, and Bhagavān had confirmed it by recounting, the biography says, an experience of his own from the Virūpākṣa years: “One day many years ago during my stay at Virupaksha Cave as I was lying down awake, I suddenly felt my body carried up higher and higher till all objects disappeared and all around me was nothing but white light.” The passage continues at length in the biography; a reader who wants Sri Ramana’s own account of that experience, in the Muni’s record, will find it there.

Sirsi: Sat-Darśanam, and the weekly letters

In 1931 the Muni went to Sirsi in North Kanara, in the hills above the Karnataka coast. The heat at Tiruvannamalai, the biography says, was breaking his health; the ashramites wrote to Daivarāta, who was at Gokarna, and he sent two disciples to bring the Muni to Sirsi, a hill resort, and invited him formally by letter, and “Bhagavan also agreed to the proposal and encouraged Nayana to go to Sirasi.” He left reluctantly, praying first to the Mother in the temple. The house there was called the Ānandāśramam. He stayed most of that year, and from there he wrote to his guru every week. The letters were kept; Bhagavān, the ashram’s publisher’s note says, would peruse them carefully, though he himself did not take part in replying except in rare instances where his advice in spiritual problems was sought, and took an interest in having them preserved. They were first published in 1978 by the Kavyakantha Ganapati Muni Trust in Viswanatha Swami’s English translation, and reissued by Sri Ramanasramam in 2006 as Epistles of Light. They are the closest thing we have to the Muni’s inner life in his own words during the years of his maturity, and they are unlike anything else in the literature about Sri Ramana: a great scholar reporting to a silent guru, week by week, on the state of his practice.

The first great work of the Sirsi months was a Sanskrit rendering of Bhagavān’s forty Tamil verses on Reality, the Uḷḷadu Nārpadu, which Sri Muruganar had drawn from him a few years earlier. The biography records that Nāyana read out the Tamil poem, explained its greatness, composed the translation, and described its poetic excellence to Kapali Sastry, Viswanatha and Mahadeva as he went, and that “Nayana completed the translation of ‘The Forty Verses’ into Sanskrit in four days, finishing it on 14-03-1931. The Sanskrit translation was given the name of ‘Sat-Darsanam’.” Two copies were made and one was sent to Bhagavān by the hand of Mahadeva, with this letter:

“Anandashramam, Sirasi, 17-03-1931. Bhagavan, World teacher! The heart prompts me to send a letter to your presence once a week. On Saturday, 14-03-1931, ‘Sat-Darsanam’ has been completed. Bhagavan’s meaning of Sukla Chandas (Yagnavalkya Sutra) was done into upajati metre. Whatever merit there is in my work is Bhagavan’s own. From that Saturday my vision began to be transformed. I am seeing all things as one. I am praying to Bhagavan to make this vision permanent. I am observing all these various forms in the one Sadvastu like bubbles on water. Rejecting these bubbles, I am trying to see the Suddha Sat Rupa (Absolute Existence). Eager for your grace, Vasishta”

Kapali Sastry, the Muni’s disciple who had been at the dialogues of 1917, later wrote a commentary on the Sat-Darśanam, the Sat-Darshana Bhashya, which the biography itself quotes and which the ashram still publishes as one of the standard expositions of Sri Ramana’s teaching. The Muni’s Sanskrit is thus the form in which the Forty Verses first reached readers outside the Tamil country, and its title, “the vision of what is”, has stuck to the poem in many languages.

A second letter from Sirsi, dated 22 July 1931, is the plainest statement in these sources of what the Muni thought he had achieved and what he still lacked, and it is quoted here in full because the honesty of it is the point:

“O Bhagavan, Lover of Thy devotees! The glory of the result of repetition of mantra was attained. The essence of Yoga was perceived. The scriptures were well-read. Tapas was done with severity. The rise and spread of the Kundalini Shakti was experienced. The source of ‘I’ was reached. In silence the nature’s ripening was witnessed. The sense of separation was given up. Attachment to phenomena was rejected. Still I was not satisfied. Now I want to get satisfaction only through devotion. There are three objects to this devotion – one is Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi, the second is Bhagavan Indra and the third is Bhagavati Mother Bharat Bhoomi (Mother India). Your Devotee since long, Ganapati”

Both letters are printed in Part III of Mahatapasvi, chapters 17 and 18, in the English of the biography’s translator; the full series of the 1931 letters, in Viswanatha Swami’s translation, is in Epistles of Light (Sri Ramanasramam, 2006), which is linked below. An earlier letter from Sirsi, which the biography also prints, says that the steadiness he had won was becoming experiential in the cave, that he was experiencing the Self as separate from the body but considered this incomplete, and asked for a grace “which can jump over many miles of distance in a trice”.

“Still I was not satisfied.” A man who had done everything the tradition asks — mantra, yoga, scripture, tapas, the awakening of Śakti, the reaching of the source of “I” — wrote to his guru at fifty-two that he was not satisfied, and that he would now seek satisfaction through devotion alone. The Advaita of Arunachala has room for this. It does not treat devotion as a lower rung; Sri Ramana himself said that surrender and enquiry come to the same thing. But it is rare to see a man of the Muni’s stature say so plainly that the summit of his own path had not been the end, and the letter should be read by anyone who thinks that attainments are the goal.

Kaluvarai and Kharagpur: the last years

From 1932 to 1934 he was at home at Kaluvarai, nursed back to health by Mahadeva and fed by his daughter-in-law Rajeswari, and, the biography says, “spent a peaceful life” there. He wrote the aphorisms of the Daśa-mahāvidyādi-sūtra, on the ten great forms of the Goddess, and began a novel in Sanskrit called Pūrṇā. In 1934 the Andhra University at Visakhapatnam, whose Vice-Chancellor was Sir S. Radhakrishnan — a nephew, the biography notes, of one of the Muni’s disciples — invited him to speak at its anniversary. Then a call came from Bengal. “Nayana closed his eyes and meditated for a few minutes and opened his eyes saying, ‘Well, the call comes, I have to leave.’ On 14-09-1934, along with Simhalu, Sivarama’s son, Nayana left Kaluvarai for Kharagpur.” Mahadeva, the biography says, was very much distressed. A Calcutta man who had heard the Visakhapatnam lecture invited him to that city, and he reached it on 24 November 1934 and was lodged in the house of Guntur Lakshmikantam, a Telugu devotee who, the biography says, had seen the Muni in a dream ten years before and resolved that the man of the dream should be his guru; when he came home at noon and saw his guest for the first time he was stunned and speechless. The disciples then arranged an ashram at Kharagpur, the railway town west of Calcutta. “Nayana was brought to Kharagpur in the third week of August 1935. On 1-09-1935, which was the festival of Ganapati, Nayana was seated on a platform and worshipped in the building of the Andhra Pathasala.” The worship was done in the Vedic form of inviting and then sending off the god, which some thought an ill omen; he did not mind. “Nayana entered the Kharagpur Ashram on 25-4-1936.” Simhalu came from Kaluvarai to attend on him.

He had had diabetes for some years and would not let anyone know of it; the biography says his body, after 1922, could not bear strong tastes, and that he tasted the offerings devotees brought for their satisfaction and not his own. A carbuncle developed. “On 21-7-1936, Nayana was very weak. He could not get up from his bed after his afternoon nap. The doctor asked him to be given glucose. But Nayana would not sip it.” Mahadeva reached Kharagpur on the evening of the 23rd, and Lakshmikantam came from Calcutta with his wife. They gave him fruit juice and Mahadeva asked, with brimming eyes, how he was. “Nayana smiled at them and wrote on a piece of paper, ‘As you have come here just now, you can have a holiday.’” On the 24th it rained and the roof of the hut leaked, and Lakshmikantam said the hut was not comfortable and he should move to a disciple’s house. “Immediately Nayana said, ‘Tomorrow is Saturday. Moving out at 2-30 p.m. would be nice.’ Nobody understood the meaning of those words.”

“On 25th, Nayana looked quite jubilant. He had two easy motions and felt light in the body. But the Shakti started rising from the base of the spine. Upto 2-15 p.m., homam was going on. Nayana got down from his cot and heard the mantras chanted. At 2-30 p.m., Nayana lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. The cranium separated. Mahadeva cried out with great sorrow, ‘Father, what is your message to me?’ Nayana stopped one moment before leaving the body, and said, ‘Japa, dhyana and worship of the Lord are great and should be performed daily.’” He died on Saturday 25 July 1936 at Kharagpur, at half past two in the afternoon, as he had said. He was fifty-seven.

At Arunachala, the biography says, Bhagavān had sat in profound silence since the morning. The next day a telegram came. “‘Nayana has gone! Has Nayana gone? Where does he go? He has come here!’ saying Bhagavan turned away to wipe a tear.” It is one of the very few tears recorded of Sri Ramana Maharshi, and it was for the disciple who had given him his name.

The account of the last days is from Part III, chapter 22 of Mahatapasvi. The ashram’s introduction gives only the year of death, 1936; the day, hour and last words are the family’s record.

The difficulties, which he did not hide

The record is candid about the strains of this life, and this page follows it. The first was poverty. The biography records that the Vellore post was taken reluctantly and given up after three years, and that the household on the hill lived on what disciples brought. A Sanskrit poet in British India had no living, and he never sought one after 1907. The second was the body. From 1922 he could not shave his head or set his bare feet on the ground; he could not bear strong tastes; the diabetes he concealed ended his life at fifty-seven; and the Śakti that he experienced as grace was also, by his own description, an ocean of electric power he was not sure the body would withstand. The tradition’s reticence about such things is usually wise, and the Muni broke it, in a letter to his uncle, because he was a truthful man reporting what had happened. The third was public. He was nearly arrested for a hymn to the Goddess; he argued at Belgaum against Gandhi and lost; his simplified Sanskrit found no takers; his campaign against untouchability was one voice among many. The introduction says that his contribution “is yet to be fully assessed”, and much of what he began is unfinished.

The fourth difficulty was inward, and he named it himself. “Still I was not satisfied.” The letters from Sirsi show a man who had reached the source of “I”, who saw all things as one from a certain Saturday in March 1931, and who prayed to his guru to make the vision permanent, which is not the prayer of a man who thought it already was. The Advaita of the texts speaks of a knowledge that, once had, cannot be lost; the Muni’s letters speak of a vision that comes and must be held, and of a longing, at the end, for devotion rather than attainment. This page does not resolve the difference. It notes that the man who first called Sri Ramana a Maharṣi did not claim the Maharṣi’s state for himself, and that the ashram has printed his saying so.

And there was grief. His wife died in 1926, his brother in his arms in 1930, his father while he was away at Gokarna; and the biography records his tears more than once, at the feet of his Goddess and of his guru. Sri Ramana wiped a tear for him. Neither man pretended that the body and its bonds were nothing, and the reader who comes to Advaita expecting to be told that grief is an error will not find that teaching at Arunachala.

What he taught

The Muni did not teach his own system. His teaching, in the sense that matters for this site, is what he received on 18 November 1907 and spent the rest of his life putting into Sanskrit so that it could be studied: that tapas is not austerity but attention; that the mind is absorbed in its source when one watches where the “I” springs; and that the man of the mantra can reach the same place by attending to where the sound of the mantra arises. Everything he wrote about Sri Ramana — the Ramaṇa Gītā, the Sat-Darśanam, the forty verses of praise called Ramaṇa Catvāriṁśat that are still chanted at the ashram each day — is an elaboration of that answer.

What he added was context. He was a Vedic man, a master of the tantras and a poet, and he understood Sri Ramana’s teaching as the fulfilment of the Vedic tradition rather than as something apart from it. The Ramaṇa Gītā’s questions are a scholar’s questions: about the relation of self-enquiry to the classical disciplines, about the status of the householder, about the fate of the knower’s body, about whether women may renounce, about the heart-centre and its place in the body, about the relation of the individual to the world after realisation. Bhagavān’s answers, as the Muni recorded them, are consistently practical and consistently free of contempt for the forms: worship, japa, the śāstras, family life are not dismissed but put in their place, as means whose end is the abidance in the Self that the enquiry reaches directly. That is why the Muni, who never gave up his mantra, could be Sri Ramana’s disciple without contradiction; and why his letter of 1931, choosing devotion, is not a defection.

His own conviction, everywhere in the record, was that the Vedic culture of India was a living thing that could be revived, that Sanskrit was its vehicle, that the Goddess was its strength and that strength was needed — for the country, and against the injustice of caste exclusion. He believed, as the introduction puts it, in a “dharmic insight and impetus to shape the destiny of India forward according to its yogic values”. He was not a quietist. He took the teaching of the source of “I” and went to Congress meetings with it. Whether the two belong together is a question the reader may hold open; the Muni did not think it a question.

The sayings, and what they were for

The sayings preserved of him are few and mostly in letters; he was a maker of verses, not of aphorisms. But four sentences in these sources carry his mind, and each was said for a purpose.

“Yet I have not up to this time understood what tapas is.” Said at the feet of a silent man twelve years his junior, by a scholar with a title from Navadvīpa. It was said to get an answer, and it did. Its use for a reader is as a model of the only question that opens the door: not “what more should I learn?” but “what have I not understood?”

“Yes, Bhagavan! All that you have said has been received!” Said at midnight on 15 December 1907, after dictating three hundred verses in four hours to a guru who had not spoken. It was said to acknowledge where the verses came from. Its use is as a definition of the relation between a disciple’s work and a guru’s silence, in which the work is the disciple’s and the source is not.

“Still I was not satisfied. Now I want to get satisfaction only through devotion.” Written from Sirsi in July 1931, after a list of attainments that most seekers would take for the goal. It was written to report the truth to his guru. Its use is as a corrective to the idea that the path ends in an experience; the Muni had had the experiences and said they were not the end.

“Japa, dhyana and worship of the Lord are great and should be performed daily.” Said to his son at half past two on the afternoon of 25 July 1936, in answer to the question “Father, what is your message to me?”, a moment before he died. It was said to a young man who needed a rule to live by. Its use is that it is what the most learned disciple of the most silent teacher of the age chose to say last: not a doctrine but a daily practice.

The books, and how to read them

The Muni wrote in Sanskrit, prodigiously, and most of it was unpublished at his death. Most of the manuscripts, the editor records, came to him from the late D. S. Viswamitra of Sirsi, who had collected them from the Muni’s son Mahadeva Sastry, and whose family’s hospitality he enjoyed for months at a time while he sat and copied them; the editor was K. Natesan of Sri Ramanasramam, who, as the ashram’s publisher puts it, dedicated himself to the compilation, editing and publication of all the Muni’s works. The result is the Collected Works of Vāsiṣṭha Kāvyakaṇṭha Gaṇapati Muni in twelve volumes, published by the ashram, with Natesan’s preface to the eleventh volume dated 17 November 2008, the hundred-and-thirtieth anniversary of the Muni’s birth. The ashram lists the twelve volumes on its site, and a scan of the whole set is on the Internet Archive; both are linked below. The volumes gather, among much else, the Umā Sahasram, the Indrāṇī Saptaśatī, the Pracaṇḍa Caṇḍī Triśatī, the Indra Sahasranāma, the Ramaṇa Gītā, the Ramaṇa Catvāriṁśat — which, the preface to the eleventh volume says, is chanted daily at Sri Ramanasramam and in innumerable devotees’ homes — the Sat-Darśanam, the Viśva Mīmāṁsā, the Tattvaghaṇṭā Śataka, the treatise on Lāli Bhāṣā, and the eleventh volume’s gathering of his prose.

For a reader of this site the order is clear. Begin with the Sri Ramaṇa Gītā, in the ashram’s edition with Sanskrit text and English translation; it is short, it is Sri Ramana’s teaching in answer to real questions, and the Muni is present in it as questioner and scribe. Read the second chapter first, for the one verse Bhagavān composed himself, and then the whole. Then the Sat-Darśanam, alongside the Tamil Uḷḷadu Nārpadu in any translation, to see what a Sanskrit master made of his guru’s forty verses in four days; Kapali Sastry’s Sat-Darshana Bhashya is the commentary the Muni approved. Then the Epistles of Light, the letters of 1931, which are the Muni speaking to his guru in his own voice about his own practice and are the most intimate document in the set. The Umā Sahasram is for those with Sanskrit or with patience: it is the poem of his life, and the introduction is right that its final version is a reconciliation of the Vedic, Upaniṣadic and Tantric ways of speaking about the Goddess, but it does not yield to a hurried reading in translation.

The biography, Mahatapasvi, should be read as what it is: a grandson’s life of his grandfather, written from family memory and papers, with a devotee’s reverence and a Telugu family’s exactness about dates. It records visions, mantras revealed, a skull that split and a death foretold to the half-hour, and it records them as facts. This page has reported them as the family’s account and has not asked the reader to believe or disbelieve. What can be checked — the dates, the letters, the works, the ashram’s own statements — has been checked against the ashram’s introduction, and where the two differ, the difference is noted.

For the seeker now

The Muni’s life is useful to a modern reader in three ways, none of them the obvious one. First, it shows that learning is not the obstacle it is sometimes made out to be, and not the goal either. He had read everything and knew it was not enough, and he went and asked. The tradition’s respect for him rests on the asking, not on the reading; but it was the reading that let him understand the answer at once, put it into Sanskrit and defend it before the learned. A seeker who has studied need not apologise for it; only for stopping there.

Second, it shows what discipleship to a silent teacher looks like from the disciple’s side. The Muni asked questions and wrote the answers down; that is why the Ramaṇa Gītā exists. He took his guru’s Tamil and made it Sanskrit; that is why the Forty Verses reached the rest of India. He wrote to his guru every week and told him the truth about his practice, including that he was not satisfied. None of this is passive. A reader who thinks that the presence of a realised teacher makes effort unnecessary should read the Sirsi letters.

Third, it shows a devotional Advaita that did not despise forms and did not despise the world. He kept his mantra, his Goddess, his Indra, his country, his family and his politics, and Bhagavān never told him to give any of them up; he told him where to put his attention while keeping them. For a seeker who is not going to become a renunciate — which is nearly every seeker — this is the most important thing on the page. The instruction of 18 November 1907 was given to a married man with a job, and it was given in two forms so that he could use it while repeating a mantra. It still works that way.

And there is the last saying. A man who had experienced the splitting of the skull and the ocean of electric power, who had reached the source of “I” and seen all things as one, told his son on his deathbed to do japa, meditation and worship every day. The seeker who finds the higher teaching of Advaita hard to hold on a Tuesday afternoon may take comfort in that. The Muni did not think daily practice beneath him at the end. Neither need anyone.

A note on the pictures and the dates

No portrait of him is used on this page. Photographs of the Muni exist, alone and with Bhagavān, and the ashram publishes them in Mahatapasvi and the Collected Works; they are the ashram’s copyright, as the Collected Works state, and this site uses only pictures that are in the public domain or under a free licence. The one freely licensed image this site found under his name proved, on inspection, not to be a portrait at all, and it has been taken down. The lamp stands where his face would be, as it does for the other teachers of whom no free portrait exists; a reader who wants to see him should open the biography linked below, which reproduces the ashram’s photographs. The dates follow Mahatapasvi (A. V. Ramana, translated by Sonti Anasuyamma, Sri Ramanasramam, 2005; second edition 2009) where it gives them, checked against K. Natesan’s introduction to the Collected Works; the two agree on the birth on 17 November 1878, the meeting of 18 November 1907, the meeting with Sri Aurobindo on 15 August 1928 and the year of death, and the introduction gives no day for the death, which is the biography’s. The introduction places the kapāla bheda in “the summer of 1922” and the biography on 20 August 1922; they are the same event. The place of birth is described differently by the two sources, as noted above: Kalavarayi near Bobbili in the introduction, the mother’s home at Logisa Agraharam by implication in the biography. The Navadvīpa title is dated by the introduction to his twenty-second year. All quotations are from the English of these two ashram publications and of the Epistles of Light, and where the biography and the introduction render the same Sanskrit differently, both renderings are given. The map is drawn on present-day coordinates.

The timeline, plainly

• February 1878 — the family’s vow at the Sun temple of Arasavalli; the mother’s vision. 17 November 1878 — born at his mother’s parental home (Kalavarayi near Bobbili in the introduction; Logisa Agraharam by the biography’s account), two hours after sunrise, while his father sits before Ḍhuṇḍi Gaṇapati at Kāśī; named Sūrya Gaṇapati; the middle of three sons of Nrisimha Sastry and Narasamamba.
• To his sixth year — does not speak. By eight — the basic Sanskrit texts by heart; at nine or ten — makes an almanac by his own method; educated wholly at home.
• In his twelfth year — married to Visalakshi, aged eight; his one question, whether marriage hinders tapas. From about eighteen — tapas at holy places; the vision at Bhubaneswar.
• 14 February 1899 — son Mahadeva born. 1900 — from Kāśī to the scholars’ assembly at Navadvīpa; the title Kāvyakaṇṭha; a verse to Kālī at Dakṣiṇeśvar.
• September 1903 — first to Arunachala, from Kanchipuram, with his brother Sivarama; two visits to Brāhmaṇa Swāmi. 1904–07 — Telugu Pandit, Vellore Christian College; the Indra Senā. Navarātri 1906 — first to Padaiveedu; December 1906 — forty days’ tapas there and the vision of Reṇukā.
• 18 November 1907 — Virūpākṣa cave: “pray enlighten me about the nature of tapas”; the answer; the name Bhagavān Sri Ramaṇa Maharṣi. 15 December 1907 — the last three hundred verses of the Umā Sahasram dictated to five scribes in four hours; “Nayana! Have you taken down all that I have said?”
• After December 1907 — the Pachaiamman temple discourses on the Umā Sahasram; sixteen days in the Gaṇeśa shrine at Tiruvottiyur, and Bhagavān’s appearance there; the Governor orders the poem banned and the Muni arrested, and the arrest does not take place. 1910 — his father has Sri Ramana’s darśan in silence.
• November 1911 — takes F. H. Humphreys, the Vellore policeman, to Sri Ramana. 1912 — pilgrimage to Kāladi and Gokarna; the Veda gathering; 5 December 1912 — his father dies at Kaluvarai.
• 29 December 1913 — the first seventeen verses of the Sri Ramaṇa Gītā. 1916 — Alagamma comes to live with Sri Ramana. 7 July 1917 — the fortnight of dialogues that complete the Gītā; Bhagavān’s verse hṛdaya-kuhara-madhye; tapas with Daivarāta at Padaiveedu and the mantras.
• 20 August 1922 — kapāla bheda in the Mango-tree cave; castor oil; the wooden sandals; 22 August — the letter to his uncle.
• 1923–24 — Congress speeches; the inaugural at Tiruvannamalai; December 1924 — Belgaum, against Hindi and for Sanskrit; Lāli Bhāṣā.
• 26 July 1926 — Visalakshi dies at Arunachala. 25 February 1927 — the untouchability meeting at Madapati Hanumantha Rao’s house; the Indra Sahasranāma completed and shown to Bhagavān.
• 15 August 1928 — meets Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry; a fortnight there; the Mātṛtattvaprakāśikā. 17 October 1929 — at Arunachala, Bhagavān confirms the Tiruvottiyur appearance and recounts his own experience of white light. 7 February 1930 — Sivarama dies in his arms.
• 1931 — to the Ānandāśramam at Sirsi, at Daivarāta’s invitation and with Bhagavān’s encouragement; the weekly letters. 14 March 1931 — Sat-Darśanam completed in four days; 17 March — “I am seeing all things as one”; 22 July — “Still I was not satisfied.”
• 1932–34 — at Kaluvarai; the Daśa-mahāvidyādi-sūtra; the novel Pūrṇā begun; the Andhra University invitation. 14 September 1934 — “the call comes, I have to leave”; 24 November 1934 — reaches Calcutta, lodged with Guntur Lakshmikantam.
• Third week of August 1935 — brought to Kharagpur; 1 September 1935 — worshipped on the Gaṇapati festival in the Andhra Pathasala; 25 April 1936 — enters the Kharagpur ashram. 21 July 1936 — very weak; 23 July — Mahadeva arrives: “you can have a holiday”; 24 July — “Tomorrow is Saturday. Moving out at 2-30 p.m. would be nice.”
• Saturday 25 July 1936, 2.30 p.m. — dies at Kharagpur: “Japa, dhyana and worship of the Lord are great and should be performed daily.” 26 July — the telegram at Arunachala; Bhagavān wipes a tear.
• 1978 — the 1931 letters published as Epistles of Light; 2005–09 — Mahatapasvi in English; 2008 — the twelve-volume Collected Works completed by Sri Ramanasramam.