Ramana Maharshi (born Venkataraman Iyer, 30 December 1879 – 14 April 1950) was a Tamil Brahmin sage of the Advaita Vedanta tradition whose teaching centred on the question nan yar, “Who am I?”. After a spontaneous death-experience at age 16 in his uncle’s house at Madurai, he left home for the sacred hill of Arunachala at Tiruvannamalai, where he remained for 54 years until his death. The ashram that formed around him, Sri Ramanasramam, attracted Indian and Western seekers including Paul Brunton, Arthur Osborne and H. W. L. Poonja, and continues to function on the southern slope of Arunachala.
Early life and the death-experience
Venkataraman was born at Tiruchuli in Ramnad district of the Madras Presidency, the second of four children. His father Sundaram Iyer was a court pleader; the family belonged to a Smarta Brahmin lineage following the Sankara tradition. The father died in 1892, and the family moved to Madurai. The young Venkataraman attended Scott’s Middle School and the American Mission High School there, with little interest in formal study.
In July 1896, sitting alone in an upstairs room of his uncle’s house at Madurai, the 16-year-old experienced a sudden fear of death without external cause. Rather than resisting, he lay down and enacted the dying process internally, asking what in him would remain when the body was gone. The answer, in his later telling, came not as thought but as a direct recognition: the body dies, the “I” does not. The experience lasted minutes, but reorganised the rest of his life. Six weeks later, on 29 August 1896, he left a note for his elder brother and took a train northward to Tiruvannamalai.
Arunachala: the 54 years
Arunachala, the volcanic monadnock that rises 800 metres above the Tamil Nadu plain at Tiruvannamalai, is identified in the Saiva tradition as a manifestation of Shiva himself. Venkataraman entered the precincts of the Arunachaleswara temple on 1 September 1896 and remained at Tiruvannamalai for the rest of his life. The 54 years divide into three phases.
- 1896–1899, temple and town: he sat in the thousand-pillared mandapa of the Arunachaleswara temple, then in the Pataala Lingam shrine below it, in near-continuous samadhi. Townspeople began bringing food.
- 1899–1922, the caves: he moved to caves on the eastern slope of Arunachala, principally Virupaksha Cave and later Skandasramam. A small group of devotees grew, including the Sanskrit pandit Ganapati Muni, who in 1907 gave him the name Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi.
- 1922–1950, Sri Ramanasramam: after his mother’s death in 1922, an ashram formed around her samadhi at the southern foot of the hill. The Mother’s Shrine (Matrubhuteswara) was consecrated in 1949.
The principal works
Ramana wrote little. The bulk of his recorded teaching consists of his replies to questions, taken down by visitors and disciples and published as Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Day by Day with Bhagavan, and similar collections. His own compositions are short and concentrated:
- Nan Yar (Who Am I?): the prose answers given to Sivaprakasam Pillai in 1902, later edited by Ramana himself. The foundational text of the atma-vichara method.
- Five Hymns to Arunachala: Tamil devotional poems composed between 1914 and 1917. The Aksharamanamalai (Marital Garland of Letters), 108 verses, is sung daily at the ashram.
- Upadesa Saram: 30 Sanskrit verses (with Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam versions also by Ramana) composed in 1927, summarising the path from karma to jnana.
- Ulladu Narpadu (Forty Verses on Reality): 1928, the most condensed statement of his metaphysics.
Method: self-inquiry
The practice Ramana taught is simple to describe and difficult to sustain. The seeker turns attention away from outward objects and inward thoughts to the source of the “I”-thought itself, asking “to whom does this thought arise?” and tracing the answer back to its origin. The aim is not to produce an experience but to remain as the experiencer, the unbroken awareness in which all states arise. Ramana held that this method is suitable for committed seekers across traditions and does not require formal initiation, scriptural learning, or renunciation of household life.
For what it’s worth, the surface simplicity of the method has produced both its appeal and its misunderstanding. Visitors often reported that asking “Who am I?” produced no result; Ramana’s response was that the question is not a mantra to repeat but a redirection of attention, and that the redirection becomes natural with practice rather than with intellectual effort.
Final years and death
A sarcoma appeared on Ramana’s left arm in late 1948. Four surgical operations between February 1949 and December 1949 failed to halt its spread. He declined intensive treatment and refused to leave the ashram. He died on the evening of 14 April 1950, seated in a small room adjoining the new hall, in the presence of attendants and devotees. The official samadhi shrine was built over his burial spot at the ashram and is the principal site of pilgrimage today.
Common questions
Did Ramana receive formal initiation or have a guru?
No. He maintained that his guru was Arunachala itself, the hill identified with Shiva. He took no sannyasa diksha, wore no formal monastic dress beyond a loincloth, and did not initiate disciples in the conventional sense. The lineage he is most often placed in is the Advaita Vedanta of Adi Shankara, but he did not derive his teaching from study of Shankara’s bhashyas; the convergence was recognised later, when his replies were compared with the classical texts.
Why is Arunachala considered special?
The Skanda Purana’s Arunachala Mahatmya identifies the hill as the lingam of fire that Shiva manifested in the contest between Brahma and Vishnu over supremacy. The annual Karthigai Deepam festival, in November-December, lights a great fire on the summit visible across the plain. Pradakshina of the 14-kilometre circumambulation path is performed by devotees on every full moon. Ramana himself walked the giri-pradakshina many times before his health declined.
Where can visitors go today?
Sri Ramanasramam at Tiruvannamalai is open to visitors and offers basic accommodation by prior booking. Virupaksha Cave and Skandasramam, the two caves where Ramana lived for over twenty years, are reached by a stone path of about thirty minutes’ climb from the ashram. The Arunachaleswara temple in the town and the giri-pradakshina path can be combined with the ashram visit. Tiruvannamalai is connected by bus from Chennai (about 185 km) and Bengaluru.
One limitation worth noting
The English-language record of Ramana’s teaching is filtered through devotees who recorded conversations in Tamil, Telugu and English, often years after the fact. The standard collections such as Talks and Day by Day are not verbatim and should be read alongside Ramana’s own short compositions, which he wrote and corrected himself. The biographical and doctrinal material is summarised at the Ramana Maharshi entry on Wikipedia, and the ashram maintains a primary archive of his works at the Sri Ramanasramam official site.
