Ramana Maharshi

Ramana Maharshi was born Venkataraman Iyer in 1879 at Tiruchuli, near Madurai in Tamil Nadu. In 1896, at the age of sixteen, he had an experience he later described as a sudden fear of death: lying still, he enacted his own death and found that what he was remained untouched. Weeks later he left home for the holy mountain Arunachala at Tiruvannamalai, and never left it again.

For years he lived in silence in temples and caves on the mountain, attracting a growing number of visitors. In 1901–1902 he answered in writing the questions of an early visitor, Sivaprakasam Pillai; these answers became the short text Who Am I? An ashram, Sri Ramanasramam, grew around him at the foot of the hill, where he lived until his death on 14 April 1950. Paul Brunton’s A Search in Secret India (1934) made him known in the West.

Ramana wrote little: a few short works in prose, hymns to Arunachala, and verses on the self. Most of his teaching survives in records of conversations kept by visitors. He taught in Tamil and, by his own account, most of all in silence. He did not found a school, and spoke of his teaching as the essence of Advaita, though he came to it, he said, by experience rather than study.