Muruganar

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 was born in 1890 at Ramanathapuram in Tamil Nadu and became a Tamil scholar and poet formed by the Śaiva devotional canon — the hymns of the Tamil saints, a literature of extraordinary technical difficulty and emotional force. He arrived at Tiruvannamalai in his thirties, saw Ramana, and by his own account recognised immediately what his tradition's poetry had been describing. He stayed for the rest of his life, in poverty, and wrote thousands of verses: Śrī Ramaṇa Sannidhi Murai, modelled on the classical Tamil devotional forms; Guru Vācaka Kōvai, 1,254 verses recording his teacher's spoken teaching; and the notebook verses later published as Padamalai. But his most consequential act was to ask. Ramana wrote almost nothing on his own initiative. Both of the central Tamil poems — Ulladu Nāṟpadu, the Forty Verses on Reality, and Upadeśa Undiyār — exist because this poet requested them, in one case asking his teacher to put the essentials of the teaching into verse so that they could be sung. So the situation is this: the tradition's two core texts were drawn out of a silent man by a devotee who kept asking, and were preserved in a metre demanding enough that later scholars needed prose versions to study them. He died in 1973, having spent fifty years within sight of one hill.

The turn it rests on

The tradition owes its two central poems to a devotee who kept asking.

What was taught

His Tamil verses preserve much of what Ramana actually said; he prompted the composition of Upadeśa Undiyār.