Sri Muruganar

The Tamil country he was born into

He was born in 1890 in the Rāmnād district of the Tamil country — the dry, hot south-east of the Madras Presidency, between Madurai and the sea, a land of tank-fed rice, palmyra palms and small zamindaris under a Rāja at Rāmanāthapuram — and his parents named him Sāmbamūrti. He became known as C. K. Subramaṇia Iyer, and later, under the name he took as a poet, Muruganār. The Tamil country of 1890 was in the middle of a revival. The great medieval poems of Tamil devotion — the Tēvāram hymns to Śiva, the Tiruvācakam of Māṇikkavācakar, the Tiruvāymoḻi of Nammāḻvār — were being printed, edited and taught by scholars like U. V. Swāminātha Iyer, who was recovering the classical Saṅgam literature from palm-leaf manuscripts in the same decade; Tamil scholarship, which had been the possession of temple schools and maṭhas, was becoming a profession, with examinations, committees and salaries. A boy from a poor Brahmin family in Rāmnād with a gift for the language could hope, for the first time, to live by it.

He lost his father early — the ashram's own account says only that — and was educated at Coimbatore, where he specialised in Tamil. The account describes him as a young man "reputed for proficiency and spotless character", an ardent nationalist and reformer who took, in the years around the First World War, a passionate interest in Gandhi's movement and wrote songs about it: songs in praise of Gandhi and of his constructive programme, published in the Tamil periodicals of the day and later collected as the Swatantra Gītam, "the song of freedom". Before he was a devotee he was a patriot, and before he was a patriot he was a poet, and the poet was the constant.

Where the life was lived

His life ran from Rāmnād to Coimbatore for his schooling, to Madras for his work, and then — from 1923 — to Tiruvaṇṇāmalai, where he stayed for fifty years and where he died. The map shows these on present-day coordinates.

The Tamil pandit

By the early 1920s he was in Madras, a Tamil scholar of standing. He served for some years as a teacher of Tamil at a girls' high school in the city, and — this is the appointment that marks his rank — he was a scholar-member of the Tamil Lexicon Committee of the University of Madras, the body that over the 1920s and 1930s produced the multi-volume Tamil Lexicon that is still the standard dictionary of the language. He worked, the ashram's account says, under its chairman Dr J. S. Chandler, in the company of the finest Tamil scholars of the age. He knew, in other words, every word in the language and where it had come from. It is the necessary background to what happened next, because what happened next was that a man who knew every word met a man who did not speak.

His father-in-law, Daṇḍapāṇi Swāmi, was a devotee of a sage on the hill at Tiruvaṇṇāmalai, and he gave his son-in-law two small Tamil books: the Five Hymns to Aruṅācala — Sri Ramaṇa Maharṣi's own poems to the mountain — and Who Am I?, the pamphlet of the sage's answers to a visitor's questions. Muruganār read them. He was a devotee of Śiva by upbringing and a poet by nature, and the Hymns, which are in the classical metres and the classical manner of Tamil devotional verse and yet sound like nothing before them, did something to him that the account does not try to explain. In September 1923 he took the train to Tiruvaṇṇāmalai.

September 1923

The ashram's account of that day, published in its journal in the month he died, is the source for what follows. He went first to the great temple in the town — as a devout worshipper of Śiva he could not have done otherwise — and there, before going up to see the sage, he was troubled by a scruple: one did not come to a sage empty-handed, and he had brought nothing. So he sat down in the temple and wrote a poem. It was eleven verses, and it followed the pattern of Māṇikkavācakar's Tiruvācakam, the ninth-century hymns that are the summit of Tamil devotion — the same Māṇikkavācakar whom Śiva, in the legend, had come down from Kailāsa to teach in person at Perundurai. The poem addressed Ramaṇa as Śiva come again: "Guru Ramaṇa, Śiva, as once you left Mount Kailās and the company of Gods, and came to cool Perundurai to drink in the sparkling words of Vācakar, now again you have come to fair Aruṇa Town, wishing to hearken to this fellow's puerile words." The other verses follow: Śiva who has hidden his matted hair, his crescent moon, his third eye, his blue throat, and "assumed a humble human form"; Śiva who slew the god of love with a glance and for whom even a loincloth "is sheer excess indeed"; and then the plea — "revive me; sustain me with one whispered 'Fear not' " — and the ending, in which the poet is a stray dog begging for leavings at the feet of the one who can give him a new home.

He carried the poem up to the ashram, which in 1923 was a thatched shed at the foot of the hill where Ramaṇa and a handful of others lived beside the new shrine over his mother's grave. He did not know the etiquette; he did not know whether there were rules, as at a maṭha. As he reached the entrance of the shed, Ramaṇa came out of it and looked straight at him. The account calls what happened a miracle and does not elaborate, except to say that the look "kindled in him the fire of poesy" and that the fire never went out. Ramaṇa said one word: "What?" Muruganār, in the account's phrase, "became totally absorbed in Him", and when he came back to himself he began to sing the verses he had written in the temple, in the rāga he had set them to. He got a little way and could not go on for weeping. Ramaṇa said: "Can't you read? Give it to me. I shall myself read it." And he did.

Muruganār said afterwards that he had set a tune for every one of the thousands of verses he wrote in the next fifty years, and that this was the only time — the first and the last — that he ever sang one of them to Ramaṇa in its rāga; after that day he could not sing at all. He said something else, which the ashram's account preserves: that from that day "he was made a non-entity" and lost his separate individuality. The devotees, watching him over the years, gave him a name for it. They called him the shadow of Bhagavān.

The shadow

He went back to Madras, and for three years he went back and forth. In 1926 he came for good, leaving the Lexicon, the school and his household behind him — a decision that cost his family dearly and that the ashram's accounts have never glossed over — and from then until Ramaṇa's death in 1950 he did one thing: he wrote verses about Ramaṇa and Ramaṇa's teaching, and Ramaṇa read them. The account puts it exactly: he was "totally content with composing poems and having them read by Sri Bhagavān", and he considered that there was no "wider public" to whom the poems needed to be brought. He never again wrote on any other subject. The nationalist songs stopped. The scholarship stopped. What remained was a man who sat in the hall or on the hill, wrote, and took what he had written to be read.

The devotees who knew him in those years describe someone who had made himself as small as a person can be made: he kept to the edge of the hall, wanted nothing, asked for nothing, avoided every position and every honour, and was identified so completely with his teacher that his own voice, in the poems, is almost impossible to find — they speak of Ramaṇa, in Ramaṇa's words, and the poet is a grammatical necessity. The one thing he did not do was write for readers. The manuscripts piled up. The bulk of them, the ashram said at his death in 1973, had never been printed, and a good part of it has been printed only since.

The books he caused to be written

He did something else, though, that no one else did, and the tradition has understood its importance only slowly. He got Ramaṇa to write. Ramaṇa did not write books; he answered questions, and his few compositions before 1923 were the hymns to the hill and short verses made for an occasion. Muruganār — a poet who knew that a teaching lives longer in a verse than in a conversation, and a scholar who knew that the Tamil tradition preserved its philosophy in metre — asked him for more, and kept asking. In 1927 he began a poem on Śiva's visit to the Dāruka forest, where the sages who believed that ritual action alone was sufficient were taught otherwise, and when he came to the point where Śiva gives the teaching, he stopped and asked Ramaṇa to write it, since only Śiva could speak as Śiva. Ramaṇa wrote thirty Tamil verses. They are the Upadeśa Undiyār — the Upadeśa Sāram in its Sanskrit form — the most compressed statement of the whole path from action through devotion and breath and meditation to enquiry and the Self that the tradition possesses. In 1928 Muruganār pressed him again, this time to gather the scattered verses he had composed over the years and add to them until they made a whole, and the result was Uḷḷadu Nārpadu, the Forty Verses on Reality, with its forty supplementary verses — the text the tradition treats as Ramaṇa's central philosophical work. The ashram's account is exact about it: "he it was who implored Sri Bhagavān" to make the Forty Verses, and "it was at his entreaty" that the Upadeśa Sāram was given. Without the Tamil pandit, the two texts by which the tradition knows Ramaṇa as a teacher and not only as a presence would very probably not exist.

The Garland of Guru's Sayings

His own great work grew from the same instinct. Sitting in the hall, hearing Ramaṇa answer visitors day after day, he did what a Tamil scholar would do: he put the answers into verse — the four-line veṇbā of the classical didactic tradition, the metre of the Tirukkuṛaḷ — and he took each verse to Ramaṇa, who read it, corrected it where it had missed the point, and approved it. Over the years the verses accumulated into the Guru Vācaka Kōvai, "the garland of the guru's sayings", which by the ashram's count in 1973 "now consists of 1,254 stanzas" and forms, in the account's words, "a clear and comprehensive redaction of Bhagavān's teachings". It was first printed in 1939. It is, in the judgement of everyone who has studied it, the most authoritative record of Ramaṇa's teaching in existence, because every verse in it was checked by the teacher; and it is arranged not chronologically but by subject, so that it reads as the systematic philosophy Ramaṇa never wrote. Ramaṇa himself added twenty-eight verses to it. The English translations by Sadhu Om and Michael James, and by T. V. Venkatasubramanian, Robert Butler and David Godman, are linked below.

The other works came in the same way. Sri Ramaṇa Sannidhi Muṛai, "the order of worship in Ramaṇa's presence", his great collection of devotional poems on the pattern of the Tiruvācakam, was published in 1933. Sri Ramaṇa Anubhūti, "the experience of Ramaṇa", ran to several volumes, of which only two had appeared at his death. Ramaṇa Purāṇam, a long poem in the manner of the ancient purāṇas, he began and Ramaṇa completed. His prose commentary on Ramaṇa's Akṣaramaṇamālai, the Marital Garland of Letters, was published by the ashram. And the Pādamālai, "the garland to the feet" — more than three thousand two-line verses recording Ramaṇa's sayings, most beginning with the word "Pādam", the Feet, as the speaker — lay in manuscript until it was edited and translated, with the other unpublished verses, after his death; the edition by Venkatasubramanian, Butler and Godman appeared in 2004 and is linked below. The ashram said in 1973 that "the bulk is yet to see the light of day." Much of it now has.

The years after 1950

Ramaṇa died on 14 April 1950. Muruganār was sixty. He stayed. For the next twenty-three years he lived in Tiruvaṇṇāmalai — in the early years in the sādhus' colony at Pālakōttu, in the grove beside the ashram, and later within the ashram itself — and he did two things. He went on writing, more than before: "during the last twenty years of his life," the ashram's account says, "Sri Muruganār composed thousands of poems." And he taught, in the only way he would allow himself to teach. He expounded Ramaṇa's works — the collected writings the Tamil tradition calls the Nūl Tiraṭṭu — to anyone who asked, verse by verse, with the authority of the man who had heard them explained by their author. He directed anyone who came to him for guidance back to Ramaṇa. He did not claim anything for himself, and he did not regard anyone as his disciple. When, in 1953, a devotee named Sri Nāṭanānanda printed a small booklet of verses in tribute to him, he is said to have been embarrassed by it.

He died at Sri Ramaṇāśramam at a quarter to eight on the morning of 28 August 1973, at eighty-three, calm, the ashram said, "and peaceful to the last", while the devotees around him chanted the names of Aruṅācala and Ramaṇa. The ashram's journal called him "the Nightingale in the garden of silence", and said that Ramaṇa's devotees had lost "their beloved elder brother and the world of Tamil scholarship a lyrical and metaphysical poet of outstanding excellence". His shrine is in the ashram grounds, a few yards from the hall where he sat.

The difficulties, which he did not hide

He gave up a career at the top of his profession, a salary, a household and a wife — the accounts do not soften what that meant for those he left — to sit on the floor of a shed and write poems for one reader. He lived for fifty years on almost nothing; he was, by every account, a man who had made himself deliberately unimportant, and who suffered from the ordinary consequences of that in a world that measures worth by importance. He outlived his teacher by twenty-three years, and the poems of those years — some of them are in the Pādamālai — do not pretend the loss was easy.

What he did with it is the teaching, and it is the same teaching the poems carry. He treated the loss of his own individuality as the one good thing that had ever happened to him, and said so, plainly, in prose and in verse: from the day of the look he had been "made a non-entity", and the rest of his life was the demonstration that a non-entity can write thirty thousand verses, save a tradition's central texts from never being written, and be, to a whole community, its elder brother. Advaita says the individual is not real. Muruganār is what it looks like to live as if you believed it.

The sayings, and what they were for

He did not make sayings; he made verses, and the verses are Ramaṇa's teaching in his metre. Here are three from the Guru Vācaka Kōvai and the Pādamālai, in close English rendering, followed by two lines of his own from the first hymn.

The verses are for the seeker who learns through poetry rather than argument, and for anyone who wants to know what Ramaṇa actually said, checked by Ramaṇa. That is what they are: the teaching, in the words of a man who had made himself transparent enough to carry it without adding anything.

The books, and how to read them

Begin with the Guru Vācaka Kōvai. The translation by T. V. Venkatasubramanian, Robert Butler and David Godman — "The Garland of Guru's Sayings", with Muruganār's own explanatory notes and Ramaṇa's added verses marked — is the fullest, and Sadhu Om and Michael James's earlier translation is the alternative; both are linked below, the first through Godman's own site and the second through the site of Sri Ramaṇa's teachings. Read it by subject, not from the front: the sections on the Self, on the mind, on enquiry and on grace first. Then read the Pādamālai, in the same translators' edition of 2004, which is arranged in the same way and is, if anything, more direct. Then go to the two texts he caused to be written — Ramaṇa's Upadeśa Undiyār and Uḷḷadu Nārpadu, on this site under Scriptures — knowing now how they came to be. His devotional poetry, the Sannidhi Muṛai and the rest, is largely untranslated and is Tamil at its most demanding; Robert Butler's translations of parts of it are the way in. David Godman's page on him, linked below, gathers translations and reminiscences by people who knew him, and the ashram's obituary in The Mountain Path for October 1973, also linked, is the source for the dates on this page.

The timeline, plainly

• 1890 — born in the Rāmnād district of the Tamil country; named Sāmbamūrti; later known as C. K. Subramaṇia Iyer. Loses his father early.
• c. 1900s–1910s — educated at Coimbatore, specialising in Tamil.
• c. 1915–23 — in Madras: teacher of Tamil at a girls' high school; scholar-member of the Tamil Lexicon Committee of the University of Madras; nationalist songs in praise of Gandhi, later collected as Swatantra Gītam.
• September 1923 — his father-in-law Daṇḍapāṇi Swāmi gives him Ramaṇa's Five Hymns and Who Am I?; he goes to Tiruvaṇṇāmalai, writes the eleven-verse hymn in the temple, and meets Ramaṇa.
• 1926 — settles at Sri Ramaṇāśramam for good.
• 1927 — asks Ramaṇa to complete his poem on the Dāruka forest with Śiva's teaching; Ramaṇa writes Upadeśa Undiyār.
• 1928 — at his entreaty Ramaṇa gathers and adds to his verses to make Uḷḷadu Nārpadu, the Forty Verses on Reality.
• 1933 — Sri Ramaṇa Sannidhi Muṛai published.
• 1939 — first edition of Guru Vācaka Kōvai; it grows to 1,254 verses, each checked by Ramaṇa.
• 14 April 1950 — Ramaṇa dies. Muruganār remains at Tiruvaṇṇāmalai.
• 1950–73 — lives at Pālakōttu and then in the ashram; composes thousands more verses, including the Pādamālai; expounds Ramaṇa's collected works; refuses disciples.
• 1953 — Sri Nāṭanānanda's booklet of verse tributes to him.
• 28 August 1973 — dies at Sri Ramaṇāśramam at 7.45 in the morning, aged eighty-three; his shrine is in the ashram grounds.
• 2004 — Pādamālai published in English by Venkatasubramanian, Butler and Godman.

For the seeker now

He is the teacher on this site for two kinds of reader. The first is the one who wants to know what Ramaṇa taught and is uneasy about the reminiscences and recorded talks, which are other people's memories of what he said. The Guru Vācaka Kōvai is not a memory. Every verse was read and passed by Ramaṇa, and it is the closest thing to a systematic statement of his teaching in his own authority. If you want the source, this is it.

The second is the one who has a gift and wonders what to do with it. Muruganār had the finest gift for Tamil verse of his generation and he gave it, entirely, to saying one thing about one person for fifty years, and the result is that the thing is still said. He did not use the gift to become someone. He used it to disappear into what he loved, and the disappearance turned out to be the most useful thing he could have done for everyone who came after. That is a kind of instruction too.

A note on the pictures and the dates

No portrait of him is used on this page; photographs of him with Ramaṇa exist and are kept by the ashram. Dates and the account of his first meeting with Ramaṇa follow the ashram's obituary of him in The Mountain Path for October 1973; the years 1927 and 1928 for the composition of Upadeśa Undiyār and Uḷḷadu Nārpadu are the ashram's standard dates for those texts, and the details of his work on the Tamil Lexicon follow the same account. The verses given in rendering from the Guru Vācaka Kōvai and Pādamālai are close paraphrases of the sense, not any single translator's wording; the hymn is as the ashram printed it. The map is drawn on present-day coordinates.