Ramana Maharshi

Ramana Maharshi’s story begins not with institutions but with an interior event. As a schoolboy in Madurai, Venkataraman experienced an intense fear of death and staged, on the floor of his room, a radical experiment: he lay still, imagined the body lifeless, and asked what in him could die. What remained, he later said, was a silent, self‑luminous awareness—without which the fear itself could not have been noticed. The episode redirected his life. Soon after, he left home for Tiruvannamalai, the town at the foot of the sacred hill Arunachala—a name he would later gloss as “that which calls.” He lived first in temples and caves, lost in absorption, scarcely speaking, fed by the kindness of locals and devotees who gradually gathered. As visitors grew, so did the need for words. Ramana’s speech, when required, was lean and exact. He refused doctrinal quarrels, returning listeners to experience: the 'I' that claims, fears, judges, and seeks is a thought; trace it to its source, and it dissolves into the Self (ātman), which is not personal but the condition of all experience. He offered two main approaches—enquiry and surrender. In enquiry, one attends to the sense “I” and asks, persistently, from where it arises; attention, turned back upon itself, stills the mind. In surrender, one yields the ego to the divine—Arunachala, God, Guru—allowing life to proceed without self‑appropriation. Ramana refused a hierarchy between them: enquiry is mature surrender; surrender is enquiry enacted in devotion. The ashram that emerged—Sri Ramanasramam—was shaped by this ethos. There were no initiation fees, secret mantras, or elaborate ranks. Work in the kitchen, dairy, and garden counted as practice as surely as sitting by the hall. Ramana corrected waste and harshness, fed animals, and insisted on practical kindness. He welcomed skeptics and scholars with the same courtesy. Paul Brunton’s “A Search in Secret India” introduced him to Western readers, but the ashram never became a stage for spectacle. When devotees pressed for miracles, he demurred; when disputes arose, he returned the assembly to silence. His writings blend spare metaphysics with lyrical devotion. “Who am I?” (Nan Yar?) is a short catechism on enquiry. “Ulladu Narpadu” (“Forty Verses on Reality”) states nondual principles in disciplined Tamil verse. “Upadeśa Sāram,” composed first in Tamil and later by him in Sanskrit and other languages, distills practice: action done without doership purifies; devotion steadying the mind ripens; enquiry reveals the Self. The “Five Hymns to Arunachala” sing the hill as Guru, Lover, and Self—poetry that gives a mountain the status of a mirror. Scholars have noted how his Tamil idiom anchors Advaita in a regional bhakti sensibility, bridging song and silence. Community life around him reflected an ethic of ordinary sacredness. He broke caste etiquettes at table, defended the dignity of workers, and allowed women meaningful roles in the ashram. He preferred frugality—repairing pots, saving scraps—over ostentation. When cancer appeared in his arm in 1949, devotees begged him to cure himself. “They say I am going; where could I go?” he replied. Treatments were accepted without drama; visitors continued to file past as he blessed them with a raised hand or a look. He died in 1950 as Veda chanting rose and a meteor streaked across the sky—a coincidence soon woven into legend. Critics of quietism sometimes object that enquiry turns away from social duty. Ramana’s life suggests a different reading: stillness is not passivity but clarity; from it, work proceeds without resentment or vanity. Many disciples—householders and monastics—took this into schools, clinics, and offices. Others carried the method into Zen, Christian contemplative practice, and psychotherapy, translating the “I‑thought” into the language of self‑reference and narrative. The ashram today receives pilgrims who sit in the hall or climb Arunachala in circumambulation (giripradakshina), learning by walking and silence how attention softens into presence. In a century suspicious of metaphysics and hungry for method, Ramana left both a critique and a craft. The critique: much of our suffering is the story the “I” tells about itself. The craft: look for the teller directly. If none can be found, what remains is not nihilism but a vivid openness in which thought, sensation, and duty arise and subside without captivity. That openness—the Self—is what Ramana called our home. The door, he said, is always unlocked, because it was never shut.