Sadhu Om

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

Ramana Maharshi wrote very little and answered a great deal, which leaves a tradition with a problem: what exactly did he say? The answer runs through two men in his Tamil circle. Muruganar, a Tamil poet of real stature, put Ramana's spoken teaching into 1,254 verses — Guru Vachaka Kovai, the garland of the guru's sayings, first published in 1939. Verse is a superb preservative and an awkward instrument for study: Tamil classical metre compresses, inverts and alludes, and a reader can love a verse for years without being sure what it claims. His work was to render those verses into prose, in Tamil and in English, so that the claims could be examined one at a time. Later annotated English translations, and a poetical one by Professor K. Swaminathan, followed; the existence of several independent renderings is exactly what lets a careful reader triangulate. He is here as a reminder of who actually carries a teaching across time. Not only the person who realises, and not only the poet, but whoever is willing to do the slow, unsigned work of making the record checkable. The sources used here do not fix his birth and death years; they record what he did, which was probably his preference.

The turn it rests on

Turning verse into prose is the least glamorous work in a tradition and often the most load-bearing: it is what allows a later reader to check a claim.

What was taught

Worked closely with Muruganar's record of Ramana's words and put Guru Vachaka Kovai into prose, in Tamil and then in English, so that the verses could be studied rather than only recited.