Ramana Maharshi

Venkataraman Iyer was born on 30 December 1879 in Tiruchuli, Tamil Nadu. At sixteen, a sudden terror of death came over him. He lay down, enacted dying, and asked what it was that died. The body could go. The ‘I’ that knew the body could not. What remained was the Self — not as an idea, as a fact. Shortly afterwards he left home for the holy hill Arunachala at Tiruvannamalai, and never really left it again.

For years he sat in silence in the temple and in the caves of the hill — Virupaksha, then Skandashram. Devotees gathered. He did not found an order. He answered questions when they were real, and was silent when they were not. The method he gave, when one was needed, was ātma-vichāra: Self-enquiry. Trace the ‘I’-thought to its source. Do not decorate the person. Remain as that which is aware.

Sri Ramanasramam grew at the foot of the hill. He wrote little — Who Am I?, a few hymns to Arunachala, some verses. People of every religion came. He treated the hill as God in form, and the Self as God without form, and saw no argument between them. In 1948 a tumour appeared on his arm. He submitted to treatment without fuss and continued to sit with whoever came.

He left the body on 14 April 1950. A meteor was seen over Arunachala. The ashram remains; the hill remains; the enquiry remains. You are not the person who seeks. You are the awareness in which the person appears. Trace the ‘I’ home.