Ramana Maharshi 1879 – 1950

Ramana Maharshi was an Indian Hindu sage and one of the most influential teachers of Advaita Vedanta in the twentieth century. At sixteen he experienced a spontaneous identification with what he called the Self and travelled south to the holy mountain of Arunachala, where he lived for the rest of his life in silence and later in dialogue with disciples and visitors from around the world. His central teaching is the practice of self-inquiry: the patient asking of the question who am I until the apparent ego dissolves into the Self that alone is real. His simple ashram became a major center of Indian spiritual life.

Ramana Maharshi — born Venkataraman Iyer in 1879 at Tiruchuzhi in Tamil Nadu — was the second son of a country lawyer. At sixteen, while a schoolboy in Madurai, he underwent a sudden fear of death that led him to lie down and inquire directly into the nature of the self; the experience left him with a lasting recognition of pure awareness. Within weeks he had left home for the holy mountain Arunachala at Tiruvannamalai, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

He spent his first years in temple precincts and caves on Arunachala, observing prolonged silence; an ashram grew up around him in the late 1920s after his mother's death and burial there. His teaching was given chiefly in the vernacular conversations and answers recorded by visitors such as Munagala Venkataramiah and David Godman, and in a small body of his own writings — the Forty Verses on Reality, Self-Inquiry, Spiritual Instruction, and his Tamil and Sanskrit hymns to Arunachala.

Ramana's central practice was atma-vichara, self-inquiry: the direct interrogation of the 'I'-thought in order to recognize its source. His simple presentation of Advaita Vedanta as the immediate recognition of the self drew Indian and Western seekers — among them Paul Brunton, Arthur Osborne, and the early generation of postwar interest in non-dual traditions — and made him one of the most influential modern teachers of Vedanta. He died at the ashram in April 1950.