Sri Ramana Maharshi

The India he was born into

He was born at the end of 1879 in the Madras Presidency, in the deep Tamil south, into a country that had just come through the worst famine of the century. The Great Famine of 1876–78 had killed millions across the Deccan and the Presidency, Lord Lytton was Viceroy, the Queen had been Empress of India for three years, and the railway, which would carry a sixteen-year-old to Arunachala, had reached Madurai only four years earlier. It was also the India in which the West was beginning to come looking: the Theosophical Society would move its headquarters to Adyar, outside Madras, in 1882; Swami Vivekananda would sail from Bombay in 1893 and return through Colombo and Madras in 1897, when the boy from Tiruchuli was already living in a cave; and by the 1930s the first Europeans would find their way to the hill with questions that had been asked in Madras drawing-rooms for fifty years.

None of that touched Tiruchuli. It was, and is, a small temple town of the old Ramnad country, in what is today the Virudhunagar district of Tamil Nadu, about forty-five kilometres south of Madurai, gathered around the Bhūminātheśvara temple of Śiva. The religion of the place was Tamil Śaivism at its most concrete: the temple's processions, the sixty-three Nāyanmār saints whose lives are told in the Periya Purāṇam, the five great Śiva shrines of the elements of which Tiruvannamalai — Arunachala, the shrine of fire — is one. The schooling of the place, by contrast, was the new Protestant mission education: he would go to Scott's Middle School and then the American Mission High School in Madurai, and learn his English there. The whole of his life can be read as what happens when a Tamil Śaiva boy with a mission-school English education stops attending either institution and sits down to find out who is doing the attending. He was the first great Indian teacher to grow up inside the modern educational system and to walk out of it in the middle of a grammar lesson.

Where the life was lived

The map of this life is the smallest of any teacher on this site, and the most exact. Tiruchuli until about eleven; a year at school in Dindigul; four years in Madurai; three days on the road; and then fifty-four years at the foot of one hill in Tiruvannamalai, in what is today the Tiruvannamalai district of Tamil Nadu, about 190 kilometres south-west of Chennai. He never travelled again — not to Chennai, not to a single other temple, not to the sea an afternoon's drive away. Visitors who wanted him to come to them were told, in effect, that he had nowhere to go; and the hill, in his hymns, is not a place he came to but a person who called him.

A house in Tiruchuli

He was born just after one in the morning on 30 December 1879, in the small temple town of Tiruchuli in what is now Tamil Nadu, and named Venkataraman. The date fell on Ārudrā Darśana, the day the tradition keeps for Śiva's appearance as the dancer, which is the sort of coincidence a tradition notices afterwards. The house is still there; it is called Sundara Mandiram now, after his father.

The family was ordinary. His father Sundaram Iyer was a pleader in the local courts. There were two brothers, Nagaswami and Nagasundaram, and a sister, Alamelu. The boy was strong, played hard, slept so deeply that friends could carry him about without waking him, and was an indifferent student with an unusually retentive memory. Nothing in the early record points forward, apart from one small story the ashram keeps: reprimanded for making kites and paper boats out of a bundle of his father's discarded case papers, he vanished, and the search failed — until the priest, in the middle of worship at the shrine of the Goddess Sahāyavallī, found him sitting silently behind the image.

His father died on 18 February 1892, when the boy was twelve. The household broke up, and he went to Madurai to live with his uncle Subba Iyer and attend school there.

The ashram's own account adds three small things to the childhood. At his birth, a woman in the house whose eyesight was poor said that the room had filled with light — which is the sort of thing a tradition remembers afterwards, and is recorded here only because the ashram records it. After the elementary school at Tiruchuli he was sent, in 1891, to Dindigul for a year in the first form, so that the move to Madurai the following year was his second uprooting, not his first. And in Madurai the family lived at first in West Chittirai Street, close to the Vaigai river, where the boy and his friends bathed daily and, when the summer dried the river, dug small wells in its bed; on holidays they walked the twelve miles to the great Viṣṇu temple at Azhagar Koil and played in its precincts. He was, until the middle of 1896, a strong, ordinary, physically fearless boy, and nobody who knew him then thought otherwise.

Two things heard in Madurai

In November 1895 an elderly relative mentioned, in passing, that he had come from Arunachala. The boy had known the name all his life as something enormous and abstract, a holy place spoken of the way one speaks of heaven; hearing that a person had simply walked there from a train produced, on his own later account, a jolt out of proportion to the words. Around the same time, or a few months after, he read the Periya Purāṇam, the Tamil lives of the Śaiva saints — the first religious book he had read for himself, and one full of people who gave up everything without hedging.

Mid-July 1896

He was sixteen, alone in an upstairs room of his uncle's house in Madurai, in good health, with no crisis under way. A violent fear of death came over him with no cause at all.

What he did next is the whole of his teaching in embryo. He did not pray, and he did not call for help. He decided to find out, immediately, what it was that was about to die. He lay down, held his limbs stiff, held his breath, shut his mouth so no sound could escape, and put the question as concretely as he could: the body is going; when the body is a corpse and burned to ash, am I gone with it? The answer, as he described it ever afterwards, was not a conclusion he reached but something that declared itself — that the body dies and the awareness in which even the body appears does not, and that this awareness was not an idea about himself but the closest thing to himself there was.

The fear did not come back. Neither did the schoolboy. He lost interest in study, food, company and status in a matter of weeks. The house in which this happened is now called Sri Ramana Mandiram.

He described it himself, many years later, in the account the ashram still prints, and it is better to have his words than anyone's paraphrase:

The visible consequences were mild and, to his family, maddening. He became meek. He no longer retaliated when other boys were unfair to him, no longer complained, no longer cared whether he ate. Almost every evening he went alone to the great Mīnākṣī temple and stood before the images of Śiva, of Mīnākṣī, of Naṭarāja and of the sixty-three saints, and wept, not from sorrow but from something he could not name and did not try to. He kept up a pretence of study. His elder brother, watching him push aside a grammar exercise one Saturday morning in late August and sit down cross-legged with his eyes shut, asked what use school was to someone like him. It was meant as a rebuke. He took it as an instruction.

Three days on the road

The note he left on 29 August 1896 survives, and the ashram prints it:

He had looked up Tiruvannamalai in an old atlas and bought a ticket to Tindivanam, which seemed to be the nearest station; an elderly Muslim scholar in the compartment, seeing a Brahmin boy sitting in silence, told him that a new line now ran from Villupuram straight to Tiruvannamalai. At three in the morning of 30 August the train reached Villupuram. He got down, walked into the town looking for the road, found a hotel, and was told to wait until midday for a meal; the proprietor, looking at a fair boy with long black hair, gold ear-rings and no luggage, refused the two annas he offered in payment. He bought a ticket as far as his money would take him, to Mambalappattu, and from there walked. By evening he had reached the neighbourhood of Tirukoilur and climbed to the temple of Arayaninallur, built on a rock, from which — though he did not know it — the hill can be seen faintly on the horizon. Inside, he sat down, and the whole place, he said, was filled with a dazzling light that had no source; he looked for it in the sanctum, found nothing, and when it faded went on sitting until the priests came to lock up. They would not feed him. The temple drummer gave him his own share of the food. Going to a house for water he fainted in the street, came round to find a small crowd looking at him, drank, ate, and slept where he lay.

The next day, 31 August, was Gokulāṣṭamī, the birthday of Kṛṣṇa. He came to the house of a man named Muthukrishna Bhagavatar, whose wife fed him and kept him until noon; he asked for a loan against his ear-rings, was given four rupees and a parcel of the day's sweets, and told them he would send for the rings, which he never did. There was no train until morning. He slept at Tirukoilur station, and on 1 September 1896, three days after leaving Madurai, he stepped down at Tiruvannamalai and walked to the temple. The three days are worth this much detail because they are the last time in his life he did anything to get anywhere. Everything after them is a matter of sitting still.

Arunachala, 1 September 1896

On 29 August 1896 he left a note, took a small sum for the fare, and went to the hill. He arrived on 1 September, went straight into the great temple of Arunācaleśvara to the inner shrine, and — this is the detail worth keeping — on being asked whether he wanted his head shaved, consented, walked to the Ayyaṅkuḷam tank, had it shaved, and threw the money he had left into the water. He was sixteen, he had no plan, and he never left the hill again in the fifty-four years that followed.

The first years were severe and are recorded in detail by the ashram. He sat in the underground cellar of the temple known as Pātāḷa Liṅga, so absorbed that he did not notice insects feeding on his legs, and had to be carried out bodily to the Subrahmaṇya shrine. Seśādri Swāmī, a local figure thought mad by the town, tried to guard him. He moved to the tower shrine, then the flower garden, then a room where the temple floats were stored, then under a tree. In February 1898 he moved to Gurumūrtam on the edge of Tiruvannamalai, and there Palaniswami began attending on him, which he continued to do for twenty-one years. From 1899 he was on the hill itself, in a series of caves, and from about then until 1916 he lived mostly in Virūpākṣa cave, using the Mango Tree cave in the hot season.

He was silent for years. Not under a vow — he said later that he simply had nothing to say and no inclination to say it.

The hill, and the people on it

The people came slowly, then not slowly. Palaniswami has been mentioned. In 1907 there arrived at Virūpākṣa cave a Sanskrit scholar and tantric of enormous learning and greater ego, Ganapati Śāstri, who had spent years in mantra practice and did not know what he had gained; he asked the young silent man, whom the town called the Brāhmaṇa Swāmī, what tapas really was, and was told — in one of the first spoken teachings anyone recorded — to watch where the "I" arises and where the sound of the mantra arises, and that the place they arise from is tapas. Ganapati Śāstri, who became Ganapati Muni, gave him the name the world uses, Bhagavān Śrī Ramaṇa Maharṣi, and later wrote down his answers in Sanskrit verse as the Ramaṇa Gītā. In 1911 the first Westerner came — Frank Humphreys, an English police officer newly posted to Vellore, who had seen the Swāmī in a vision before he arrived and wrote home about him in letters that were later published; the West's road to the hill begins with a policeman. In 1916 his mother Alagammal came to stay for good, and he moved a little higher up the hill to Skandāśramam, where she cooked for the visitors and he taught by helping in the kitchen. She died there on 19 May 1922 with his hand on her head and his other hand on her heart, and he said afterwards that she had not been reborn but absorbed; her body was buried, as a realised person's is, at the foot of the hill, and within months he had come down to live beside the grave. The ashram grew out of that shed of bamboo and palm leaves without a founding date or a plan; the ashram's own account says so.

Three incidents from the ashram years are told by every biographer, and each shows something different. On the night of 26 June 1924 thieves broke in, assuming that an ashram with so many visitors must have money. They found almost nothing, beat the residents, and struck him on the thigh with a stick; he offered them the other leg, saying that if they were not satisfied they might strike that too, and when a young devotee wanted to fight back he stopped him: they were sādhus, he said, and were not to give up their dharma because others had. He then asked that the thieves be given food. In 1926, a cow given to the ashram — Lakṣmī — attached herself to him in a way the residents found comic and then did not; she came to him at meal times, laid her head in his lap, and when she died on 18 June 1948 he sat with her as he had sat with his mother, and had her buried in the ashram with a stone that says she attained liberation. He meant it literally, and was asked about it, and did not withdraw it. And in 1931 a British journalist named Paul Brunton, who had been sent round India to look for a genuine sage and had been disappointed everywhere, sat in the hall and found that his prepared questions had gone; his book A Search in Secret India, published in 1934, ends at Arunachala and brought the first stream of Western seekers to the hill in the years before the war.

The ashram's own portrait of him in these years is the one to keep. He sat in the Old Hall on a couch he had not asked for, from before dawn until late at night, and anyone could come in at any hour; in the early years the doors were never shut. He would allow no special food, no special medicine, no first serving; when a tonic was brought for him he wanted it shared with everyone in the hall, and when the kitchen served him first he waited until everyone else had been served before eating. He made no rules, and was the first to obey any that were made. He cut vegetables in the kitchen before dawn, bound books, corrected proofs, fed the squirrels and the peacocks, and walked twice a day to the sādhus' colony at Palakottu in the grove to the west. He did not manage the ashram; his brother, Nirañjanānanda Swāmī, did, and the frictions of that management, which were real, are described later on this page. His own work, the ashram says, was purely spiritual: silently guiding the growing family around him. That phrase, from an institution not given to understatement about its founder, is worth taking at face value. It is exactly what the visitors reported.

How the teaching got written down at all

He never sat down to compose a system. Every one of the foundational texts exists because somebody asked and somebody else wrote down the answers.

Between 1900 and 1902 a devotee named Gambhīram Śeṣayya put questions to him in writing; the replies became the tract known in English as Self-Enquiry. In 1902 Śivaprakāśam Piḷḷai, a government official, brought fourteen questions; those answers became Who Am I?, which remains the shortest complete statement of the method in existence and can be read in twenty minutes. Later came the Tamil poems: Upadeśa Undiyār on the paths of action, devotion, breath and knowledge, and Uḷḷadu Nārpadu, forty verses on what is, composed in 1928 at the request of the poet Sri Muruganar. Decades of conversations with visitors were recorded by others; one collection of them, taken down over four years in the 1930s, is the book usually called Talks.

What he actually taught

One instruction, held for five decades without softening.

He said the trouble is that a single thought — the sense of being a separate someone, the "I" that claims the body and the biography — is taken for granted and never examined, and that every other thought hangs off it. So look at it. Not think about it: look. When a thought arises, ask to whom it has arisen; the answer will be "to me"; then ask what that "me" is, and keep the attention there rather than answering in words. He called the method vicāra, enquiry, and he was blunt that it is not a technique for producing a state. The self is not something absent that enquiry will fetch. It is what is looking, and the enquiry simply stops the attention running outward long enough for that to be obvious.

He was notably unromantic about the rest. Asked about postures, he said the only posture needed is steadiness in the self. Asked about the ideal place, he said the place is the self. Asked whether one must give up work and family, he almost always said no: do the work, and find out who is doing it. Asked about other paths, he did not attack them; he said devotion and enquiry arrive at the same place, since surrendering the one who would surrender is exactly what enquiry does.

And he taught mostly by sitting there. Visitors who came with prepared questions frequently reported that the questions dissolved before they were asked. That is not a claim anybody can verify from outside, but it is what the record says, repeatedly, from hostile and friendly witnesses alike.

The difficulties, which were real

The hagiography can make this look effortless. It was not.

His body took years of damage in the early period through sheer neglect. His family came looking for him: his mother Alagammal arrived with his brother in December 1898 and begged him to come home, and he would not answer her, finally writing a note saying that what is to happen will happen and that the best course is to remain silent. She eventually came to live at the hill and stayed until her death in 1922; the shrine built over her samādhi became the centre of the present ashram, and the ashram grew around a grave rather than around a plan.

As his reputation spread, an establishment assembled itself around a man who had never asked for one, and with it came the ordinary human friction of any institution: control of donations, who could approach him, who spoke for him. He refused to arbitrate, would not accept anything given for his personal use, and declined to name a successor or found an order, which is precisely why there is no organisation that owns his teaching today.

In his last years he developed a sarcoma on his left arm. It was operated on four times; it returned each time. He refused to let attendants treat his body as more important than anyone else's, continued to give darśan to the end, and when devotees wept he asked where they imagined he could go. He died on 14 April 1950 at Tiruvannamalai. He had lived at the foot of one hill for fifty-four years.

The last year deserves its dates. The growth on his left arm was noticed in February 1949; it was removed that month, again in March, again in August, again in December, and grew back each time, and the doctors then proposed amputation, which he declined. He gave darśan through the whole of it, sitting in a small room beside the hall because he could no longer walk to the couch, and let the crowds file past twice a day until the last afternoon. When the attendants asked him to spare himself he said that the body was the disease and that he did not see why he should suffer for it twice. At 8.47 in the evening of 14 April 1950, as the devotees outside sang the Akṣaramaṇamālai, his breath stopped. Witnesses across the south — in Madras, in Bombay, on the hill — reported a bright meteor crossing the sky at that moment towards the peak of Arunachala; the ashram records it, and the newspapers did, and this page merely reports that it was reported. He was buried in the ashram, beside his mother, under a shrine that is now the centre of the place. He had asked for none of it, and had said, when told the hill was full of people who could not bear his going, that he had never gone anywhere in fifty-four years and did not intend to start now.

The sayings, and what they were for

What is striking about the sayings, read together, is how little they ask you to believe. There is no cosmology in them, no ranking of religions, no promise about a next life. There is a question, an instruction to hold it, and a report that the one who holds it does not survive the holding. He said the same thing to the Sanskrit scholar, the English policeman, the cow-herd and the journalist, and when a visitor complained that he had come a long way and been given the same answer as everyone else, he agreed that he had. The sayings are not for reading. They are for doing, in the next thirty seconds, and then again.

The books, and how to read them

His own writings are short and can be read in an evening; that is the first thing to know. Begin with Who Am I? — twenty minutes, the whole method — and then Self-Enquiry, both prose, both in the ashram's English editions, and both answers to questions rather than treatises. Then the verse. Upadeśa Undiyār (in Sanskrit Upadeśa Sāram, "the essence of instruction"), thirty verses composed in 1927 at Sri Muruganar's request, sets out in order the paths of action, devotion, breath-control and enquiry and shows how each ends in the same place; Uḷḷadu Nārpadu, "Forty verses on what is," composed in 1928, with its forty-verse Supplement, is the philosophical statement, and is hard, and is meant to be returned to rather than understood at once. Then the hymns: the Five Hymns to Arunachala, above all the Akṣaramaṇamālai, the "Marital Garland of Letters," 108 verses composed around 1914 so that the devotees who went begging in the town would have something to sing — a love-song to a hill by a man who said there was no one to love and nothing to love, which is the paradox devotees have lived in ever since. He also translated into Tamil, for those who could not read Sanskrit, Sri Śaṅkara's Vivekacūḍāmaṇi, Dṛg-dṛśya-viveka and Ātma-bodha — the last in 1949, in his final illness — which tells you what he thought of Sri Śaṅkara and what he thought his devotees should read.

The conversations are where most people meet him, and they are enormous. Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, recorded by Munagala Venkataramiah between 1935 and 1939, is the largest and the most systematic; Day by Day with Bhagavan (Devaraja Mudaliar, 1945–47) and Letters from Sri Ramanasramam (Suri Nagamma) are the most domestic and show the man in the kitchen and the hall; Maharshi's Gospel (1939) is a short arranged selection and the right first book of this kind. For the life, the ashram's own pages linked below — early life, the death experience, the journey, the ashram, the timeline — are the primary account, drawn from the people who were there; B. V. Narasimha Swami's Self-Realization (1931) was the first biography and was checked by him; Arthur Osborne's Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge (1954) is the one most readers begin with. The ashram publishes all of these itself, at cost, and its online bookstore is linked below. Nothing on this page comes from anywhere else.

The timeline, plainly

• 30 December 1879: born at Tiruchuli.
• 1891: a year at school in Dindigul.
• 18 February 1892: his father dies; the family moves; he goes to school in Madurai.
• November 1895: hears that Arunachala is a place a person can walk to; reads the Periya Purāṇam.
• Mid-July 1896: the death enquiry, in an upstairs room in Madurai, at sixteen.
• 29 August 1896: leaves home.
• 30 August 1896: Villupuram at three in the morning; Mambalappattu; the vision of light at Arayaninallur near Tirukoilur. 31 August: Gokulāṣṭamī at Tirukoilur; the ear-rings pledged.
• 1 September 1896: arrives at Arunachala; shaves his head; throws away the remaining money.
• 1896 to 1899: the temple precincts, Gurumūrtam, the mango orchard, Pavaḷakkuṉṟu.
• December 1898: his mother finds him at Pavaḻakkuṉṟu; the note: what is to happen will happen.
• 1899 to 1916: the caves of the hill, mostly Virūpākṣa.
• 1900 to 1902: Self-Enquiry. 1902: Who Am I?
• 18 November 1907: Ganapati Śāstri comes to Virūpākṣa cave and gives him the name Bhagavān Śrī Ramaṇa Maharṣi.
• 1911: Frank Humphreys, the first Western visitor.
• About 1914: Akṣaramaṇamālai, the Marital Garland of Letters to Arunachala.
• 1916 to 1922: Skandāśramam, higher up the hill, with his mother in residence.
• 1922: his mother dies; the ashram forms around her shrine at the foot of the hill.
• 26 June 1924: the thieves break in; he offers them the other leg and asks that they be fed.
• 1926: the cow Lakṣmī comes to the ashram.
• 1927: Upadeśa Undiyār.
• 1928: Uḷḷadu Nārpadu.
• 1931: Paul Brunton's visit; A Search in Secret India (1934) brings the West to the hill.
• 1935 to 1939: the conversations recorded as Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi.
• 18 June 1948: Lakṣmī dies; he has her buried in the ashram.
• February 1949: the sarcoma on the left arm; four operations in the year.
• 14 April 1950, 8.47 p.m.: dies at Tiruvannamalai, of the sarcoma, having never left the hill.

Why it is usable now

Because it needs nothing. No membership, no belief, no Sanskrit, no quiet room, no free hour. It is a question you can put to yourself in a queue, in a meeting, in the middle of an argument you are losing, and the whole of the practice is to notice who is claiming the state you are in.

And because it is testable in the only place that matters. Sri Ramana's claim is not that you will feel better, though people did. It is that the one you are defending all day will not survive being looked at directly. That is a factual claim about your own experience. You can check it this evening, and no one can check it for you.

A note on the pictures

Unlike the older teachers on this site, Sri Ramana Maharshi was photographed hundreds of times, from the first pictures at Virūpākṣa cave around 1900 to the last months of his life, and the ashram's photo galleries, linked below, carry them: the young Brāhmaṇa Swāmī with the shaved head and the loincloth; the middle-aged man on the couch in the Old Hall with a towel over his shoulder; the old man walking on the hill with a staff and a water-pot. The portrait at the head of this page is one of those photographs — G. G. Welling's portrait of 1948, in his last years at the ashram, out of copyright and credited on the credits page; for the rest we link to the ashram's galleries rather than copy them. Nothing here has been generated by a machine to imitate his face; a made-up portrait of Sri Ramana would be a small lie on a page about a teacher who spent his life pointing at the one who is looking. The map above is drawn programmatically from the places named in the ashram's own account of the journey and the life, on today's Tamil Nadu.