Ramana Maharshi

Venkataraman Iyer was born on December 30, 1879, in Tiruchuli, a small town in the Madurai district of what was then the Madras Presidency of British India ^[1]. His father, Sundaram Iyer, worked as an uncontracted pleader, a kind of rural legal advocate, and the family belonged to a Tamil Brahmin community of modest means. Venkataraman was the second of four children ^[2].

Nothing in his childhood suggested a future sage. He was an indifferent student with a strong physique, fond of wrestling and swimming, and known among schoolmates for an unusually deep sleep from which he could hardly be roused ^[2]. When his father died in 1892, the twelve year old boy was sent with his elder brother to live with an uncle in Madurai, where he attended Scott's Middle School and then the American Mission High School ^[1].

Two small events later took on significance in accounts of his youth. Around 1895 a relative mentioned having returned from Arunachala, a hill temple town he had never seen, and the name stirred him in a way he could not explain. Soon afterward he read the Periyapuranam, a Tamil collection of the lives of the sixty three Shaiva saints, his first sustained contact with devotional literature ^[3].

In July 1896, at the age of sixteen, Venkataraman experienced what he later described as a sudden and overwhelming fear of death while sitting alone in his uncle's house in Madurai. Rather than fleeing the fear, he lay down and enacted death, asking what exactly would die. The body would perish, he concluded, but the sense of I remained untouched. The episode lasted perhaps half an hour, and by his own account the awareness it revealed never left him afterward ^[1].

His behavior changed at once. Schoolwork lost all interest, he began slipping away to the Meenakshi temple, and family reproaches had no effect. On August 29, 1896, after his brother scolded him for neglecting his studies, he quietly left home with three rupees taken from money set aside for a school fee. He left a short note saying he was going in search of his father and asking that no one look for him ^[2].

After a journey of three days by train and on foot, he reached Tiruvannamalai on September 1, 1896, and went straight to the great Arunachaleswara temple. He discarded his remaining money, his sacred thread, and most of his clothing, and settled into silent absorption in and around the temple precincts ^[3]. For several weeks he sat unmoving in the thousand pillared hall and later in an underground vault called the Patala Lingam, so indifferent to his body that insects wounded his legs while devotees had to feed him by hand ^[1].

Venkataraman never left Tiruvannamalai again. For the next quarter century he lived at a succession of shrines and caves on and around Arunachala, the hill he regarded as the physical form of the god Shiva. From 1899 to 1916 his principal home was Virupaksha Cave on the eastern slope, followed by six years at Skandashram, a hermitage slightly higher up the hill ^[3].

During the early years he kept an almost total silence, though observers noted this was a practical habit rather than a vow. A local devotee named Palaniswami became his first attendant, and a gradually widening circle of seekers gathered around the young ascetic they called Brahmana Swami. In 1907 the Sanskrit scholar and poet Kavyakantha Ganapati Muni sought him out, received an answer to a question about the true nature of spiritual practice, and proclaimed him Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, the name by which he was known thereafter ^[2].

His mother, Alagammal, traced him to Tiruvannamalai in 1898 and pleaded with him to return home. He refused, responding in writing that whatever is destined to happen will happen, and that silence is best. She returned in 1916, this time to stay, and lived under his guidance until her death in 1922. Ramana attended her final hours himself and declared her liberated at death. Her burial site at the southern foot of the hill became the nucleus of the community that followed ^[1].

The core of Ramana Maharshi's teaching was the practice he called self-inquiry, in Tamil atma vichara. Instead of prescribing rituals, breath control, or scriptural study, he directed seekers to trace the sense of I back to its source with the question who am I. He held that the individual self, examined closely, dissolves into the underlying awareness that he identified with the Self of the Advaita Vedanta tradition ^[4]. Although his conclusions matched classical nondualism, he insisted that he had reached them through direct experience at sixteen, before he had read the texts ^[1].

He wrote very little, and almost always at the request of devotees. His earliest prose teaching, Nan Yar (Who Am I?), grew from written answers given around 1902 to the questions of Sivaprakasam Pillai, since in those years Ramana rarely spoke. His most systematic work, Ulladu Narpadu (Forty Verses on Reality), was composed in Tamil in 1928, and he also wrote five hymns to Arunachala, including the much loved Aksharamanamalai ^[4].

Most of what circulates under his name consists of recorded conversations. Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, compiled from dialogues between 1935 and 1939, and Day by Day with Bhagavan preserve his answers to visitors ranging from villagers to philosophers ^[5]. He spoke Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam, read English, and answered every questioner in plain language, frequently turning abstract inquiries back to the practical question of who is asking. Among Ramana Maharshi facts often noted by biographers is that he claimed no disciples, founded no formal lineage, and accepted no personal property ^[4].

After his mother's death in 1922, Ramana moved down the hill to the site of her samadhi, and Sri Ramanasramam grew up around him there. Managed from 1930 onward by his younger brother Niranjanananda Swami, the ashram expanded to include a shrine over the mother's tomb, a dining hall, a dispensary, and lodgings for the visitors who arrived in growing numbers ^[3].

Western attention came chiefly through the British journalist Paul Brunton, whose 1934 book A Search in Secret India described his meetings with the Maharshi and presented him as the most impressive holy man the author had encountered. The book sold widely in Europe and America and brought a stream of foreign visitors to Tiruvannamalai ^[5]. Among those influenced by accounts of his teaching were the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who contributed a foreword to a 1944 German collection of the sage's teachings, and the writer W. Somerset Maugham, who visited in 1938 and later drew on the experience for the guru figure in his novel The Razor's Edge ^[5].

Through all of this the daily pattern barely changed. Ramana sat on a couch in the ashram hall, available to anyone at almost any hour, reading proofs, correcting manuscripts, helping in the kitchen, and showing a marked tenderness toward the ashram's animals, including a cow named Lakshmi whose death he formally marked in 1948. He accepted rich and poor, Indian and foreign, on identical terms, and turned away from every attempt to organize a movement around him ^[2].

In late 1948 a small lump appeared on Ramana's left arm. It was diagnosed as a sarcoma, and despite four operations and treatments ranging from radium to Ayurvedic poultices, the tumor kept returning ^[1]. He refused suggestions that the arm be amputated and met the illness with the same detachment he taught, telling grieving devotees that the body itself was the disease and asking where they imagined he could go ^[2].

He died at Sri Ramanasramam on the evening of April 14, 1950, at the age of seventy. Devotees present reported that at the moment of death a bright meteor or shooting star crossed the sky over southern India, an event mentioned in press accounts of the time, including the report of his death carried by The New York Times ^[6]. His body was interred within the ashram grounds, where a shrine now stands over the samadhi.

By his final months the sage who had arrived in Tiruvannamalai as a nameless sixteen year old was among the most widely revered religious figures in India. Crowds numbering in the thousands filed past him during his last days, and messages of condolence after his death came from national leaders, including Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru ^[6].

Any full Ramana Maharshi biography has to reckon with an unusual fact: he built no organization, trained no successors, and initiated no one, yet his influence has grown steadily since his death. Sri Ramanasramam continues to operate at the foot of Arunachala, maintained by descendants of his brother's family, and receives visitors from around the world. The hill itself, which he encouraged devotees to circumambulate, draws large crowds for the monthly full moon walk of about fourteen kilometers ^[3].

His method of self-inquiry passed into global spiritual culture through books, translations, and teachers who cited him. Scholars of modern Hinduism treat him as a central figure in the twentieth century revival of Advaita Vedanta, notable because his authority rested on reported experience rather than institutional position or scholastic training ^[4]. Later teachers associated with the so called Neo-Advaita movement, including H. W. L. Poonja, traced their approach to time spent with him, though academic observers have questioned how faithfully the simplified versions reflect his teaching ^[4].

Among Ramana Maharshi achievements, the most durable may be the demonstration, witnessed by thousands over five decades, that the classical Indian ideal of the liberated sage could be met in person in the modern age. Government of India commemorations, a steady output of scholarly studies, and the continuing worldwide readership of Who Am I? and Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi all point to a reputation that has outlasted the man by three quarters of a century ^[5].