H. W. L. Poonja (Papaji)

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 1910 at Gujranwala, in the Punjab that was then undivided, and he was a devotee of Kṛṣṇa from childhood, given to visions. He became an army officer and later worked in mining near Bengaluru — a married man with a family to support, travelling the country looking for someone who had actually seen God rather than someone who talked about it. In 1944 he was directed to Tiruvannamalai. He put his challenge to Ramana, who did not dispute it and did not produce a vision. He turned it around: you say you see God — now find out who is seeing. That reversal is the whole of the method, and it landed. After Ramana's death in 1950 he went back to work and supported his family for years, through Partition and its aftermath, which is a detail worth keeping in view: the years of ordinary obligation are not an interruption of the path in this lineage's telling. Later he received seekers at Lucknow and Haridwar, and in the 1980s and 1990s large numbers came, many of them from Europe and America, and carried the enquiry back with them — often in simplified forms he would probably not have recognised. His own careful account of his meetings with his teacher, Face to Face with Sri Ramana Maharshi, is the most valuable thing he left. He died in 1997.

The turn it rests on

He asked for a vision and was given an enquiry instead.

What was taught

Met Ramana in 1944 and later taught thousands of seekers from India and the West to look directly for the 'I'.