Person · Advaita sage
Ramana Maharshi
/ˈɾɐ.mɐ.ɳɐ mɐˈɦɐɾ.ʂi/
Also known as Ramaṇa Maharṣi, Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, Venkataraman Iyer, Arunachala Ramana
Ramana Maharshi, born Venkataraman Iyer at Tiruchuli in 1879, had a sudden 'death experience' at sixteen in Madurai and left for the holy hill of Arunachala at Tiruvannamalai, where he stayed until his death in 1950. His teaching was a single question, 'Who am I?', given largely in silence. Rooted in Tamil Shaiva devotion yet read as Advaita, he became, through Paul Brunton's 1934 book, one of the best-known Indian teachers in the West.
- Date
- 1879–1950
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
He spent his first weeks at Tiruvannamalai in the underground Patala-lingam vault of the Arunachaleswara temple, so absorbed that he did not notice vermin biting him; Somerset Maugham, who visited in 1938, modelled the holy man of The Razor's Edge on him.
Connections (5)
- Associated withTiruvannamalai
Ramana reached Tiruvannamalai on 1 September 1896 and never left. He first sat in the thousand-pillared hall and then the underground Patala-lingam vault of the Arunachaleswara temple, then moved up the hill, living in Virupaksha Cave from 1899 to 1916 and at Skandashram until 1922. He said other holy places are Shiva's abodes but Arunachala is Shiva himself, walked round the hill in pradakshina, and wrote the Five Hymns to Arunachala.
- Buried atRamana Ashram, Tiruvannamalai
Sri Ramanasramam grew from a single hut beside the samadhi of Ramana's mother Alagammal, who died in May 1922; in December that year he settled there instead of returning to Skandashram, and he lived there until his death on 14 April 1950. His body is enshrined in a samadhi hall in the ashram. He took a close hand in planning its buildings, and in 1938 willed the properties to his brother Niranjanananda's line, which still administers the ashram as a public religious trust.
- Historical linkMadurai Meenakshi
Ramana's awakening happened in Madurai, where he lived with his uncle from 1891. In July 1896, aged sixteen, a sudden fear of death turned into the enquiry into what it is that dies. In the weeks that followed he went daily to the Meenakshi temple, weeping before the images of the sixty-three Nayanmars and of Nataraja and praying for the grace shown to those saints, until he left for Tiruvannamalai on 29 August.
- TransmissionAdvaita Vedanta
Ramana did not call his teaching Advaita, saying dvaita and advaita are relative terms, yet his followers and most advocates of Advaita regard him as a jivanmukta. Arvind Sharma calls him the chief exponent of an experiential Advaita, as against Shankara's doctrinal kind, and he used Shankara's Dakshinamurti Stotram to explain his insights and read Shankara's Vivekachudamani with his attendant. Through Paul Brunton and later the students of H. W. L. Poonja, his self-enquiry became the basis of Western neo-Advaita.
- Historical linkParamahansa Yogananda
Paul Brunton's best-seller A Search in Secret India, published in 1934 after his visit of January 1931, made Ramana known abroad, and the visitors who followed included Paramahansa Yogananda, who by then had built the Self-Realization Fellowship in America. The two stand for opposite routes by which Indian teaching reached the West in the 1930s: Yogananda travelled to America to teach, while Ramana never left Tiruvannamalai and the West came to him.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Ramana Maharshi", "Sri Ramana Ashram" and "Arunachala". Arthur Osborne, Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge (1954); B. V. Narasimha, Self Realisation (1931); Paul Brunton, A Search in Secret India (1934).
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