Kavyakantha Ganapati Muni

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

Born in 1878 at Kalūvarāyi in Andhra Pradesh, he was a prodigy of the old Sanskrit kind — able to compose in intricate metres extempore, a feat that earned him the title Kāvyakaṇṭha, one with poetry in his throat. He had also done years of serious mantra practice, and by his own account he had got nowhere he trusted. In 1907 he climbed the hill at Tiruvannamalai to where a young man had been sitting in near-total silence for eleven years, and asked the only question worth the climb: what should I do? The answer he received was to find where the sense of 'I' arises. It reorganised his life. He gave the young man the names the world now uses — Bhagavān Ramaṇa Maharṣi — and then did the thing the tradition should thank him for most: he asked questions, persistently, and wrote the answers down. The Ramaṇa Gītā exists because of him. So, indirectly, does a good deal of what we know of Ramana's teaching in words, since Ramana himself was content to say nothing. He wrote prodigiously in his own right; the Umā Sahasram is a thousand verses to the Goddess, composed, the accounts say, largely in a rush against a deadline. His collected works run to nine volumes. He died in 1936. The great scholar's real contribution was to recognise, at once and publicly, someone with no learning at all.

The turn it rests on

He gave Ramana the title Maharṣi and Bhagavān, and made his teaching known outside the hill.

What was taught

A formidable Sanskrit scholar who received self-enquiry from Ramana in 1907 and gave him the name by which the world knows him.