Sri Ramana Maharshi

An abridged retelling of the early chapters of B. V. Narasimha Swami's Self-Realisation: Life and Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi.

The garden under the hill

Tiruvannamalai is a small town in a corner of North Arcot, and the hill of Arunachala above it is sacred to Hindus across the Madras Presidency, above all to the followers of Shiva. In the festival of Kartikai, in November and December, the roads fill day and night with pilgrims. On the tenth night, at six in the evening, God Arunachala is carried out of the temple in a palanquin and a great fire of ghee and camphor is lit on the crest of the hill. People who see it from anywhere around bow to the ground, for the hill is held to be the Lord in the form of light.

On the same evening, a stream of men, women and children turns off the Chengam Road towards a garden by the Palitirtham tank, where a few old thatched cottages and a new tiled building stand at the foot of the hill. On a raised platform in front of the southern cottage a man sits on a tiger-skin, past middle age, fair but sun-browned, with a shaven head and face, dressed only in a loincloth. He sits as still as a Roman philosopher's statue and looks at nothing in particular, while hundreds file past him, prostrate, leave gifts of coconuts, plantains and flowers, and receive back part of them as blessed food. No one speaks and he says nothing. When the fire appears on the hill, the crowd bows to it and then to him, and a chant of the Tamil hymn Aksharamanamalai begins, in praise of Arunachala, with cries for the realisation of the Self. A visitor who watches may ask who this man is and how he came to be so revered.

A village near Madura

Tiruchuzhi is a village about thirty miles from Madura, with an old temple praised in the songs of the Tamil saints Sundaramurti and Manikkavachakar. In 1879 it had five hundred houses or more. In one of them lived Sundaram Ayyar, an uncertified pleader who had started life as a village accountant's clerk at twelve for a salary of two rupees a month, and had worked his way to a practice before the local magistrate. He kept an open house. Clients and their friends ate at his table, newly arrived officers stayed with him until they found quarters, and even highwaymen respected him and let his cart pass. He had nothing remarkable in the way of religion: a priest worshipped small images at home, he went occasionally to the temple, and he listened to readings of the epics.

There was one thing about his family that people mentioned. In each generation one member had given up home and put on the ochre robe. One of Sundaram Ayyar's uncles had done so, and his own elder brother had suddenly left the village to live as an ascetic. The old people told a story to explain it: an ascetic had once come to the house and been given no respect and not even a meal, and he had left a curse that one member of the family in every generation should wander in search of food.

Sundaram Ayyar died in 1892 and left three sons. Nagaswamy was fourteen, Venkataraman was twelve, and Nagasundaram was six. None of them showed a sign of anything but the ordinary life.

The second son

Nagaswamy was a fair student, and the family hoped he would end in a government post. Nagasundaram was too young to be judged. Venkataraman looked the least promising of the three. He was indifferent to study. He would listen once while another boy repeated the day's passage, say it back from memory in class, and forget it before class was over. He liked boxing, wrestling, swimming and football, and he grew strong enough that older boys were wary of him. His family thought of him as a doubtful investment.

He had been born at one in the morning on 30 December 1879, on the day of Arudra Darsanam, when Shiva comes out in his procession through the streets before returning to the temple at midnight. It is a day on which the pious bathe in the sacred tanks and the crowds throng the temple. His early years gave no sign of this. He played his pranks on the sacred and the ordinary alike. He had no training in the Vedas. He learned his reading and writing in Tiruchuzhi, spent a year in Dindigul, then went to the Scott's Middle School and the American Mission High School in Madura, where he had the only religious instruction he ever had, in the Bible class, which he paid little attention to. Until nearly the end of his schooldays he cared, at heart, for nothing at all, not even for games.

Arunachalam

In November 1895 an elderly relative from Tiruchuzhi came to Madura. Venkataraman asked him where he had come from. "From Arunachalam," the relative said drily. The word, which he had heard all his life without feeling anything, went through him with awe and joy. He saw, dimly, a holy place somewhere far off, behind high walls and towers, where every clod of earth was sacred. "What! From Arunachalam! Where is it?" The relative was surprised and said: "Do you not know Tiruvannamalai? That is Arunachalam." The spark seemed to go out, and for a long time he thought no more of it.

At about the same time he found a copy of the Periapuranam at home, which his uncle had borrowed. It was the first religious book he had read apart from school work. It tells of the sixty-three Tamil saints, with their sudden faith, their love of God, their self-sacrifice. He read it as another boy might read the Arabian Nights, and for a short time it carried him into another world. When he put the book down, the feeling went, and he went back to his sixth-form school work and his chores.

Death

In the middle of 1896, when he was in his seventeenth year, the change came. He described it afterwards to his devotees, and the author gives it in substance, noting that his exact words were never recorded.

About six weeks before he left Madura, he was sitting alone on the first floor of his uncle's house. He was in his usual health. Suddenly a fear of death seized him, with no cause in his body. He felt that he was going to die. He did not think of calling a doctor or an elder. He thought: now death has come, what does it mean, what is it that is dying? He stretched out his limbs and held them rigid, as in a corpse. He held his breath and pressed his lips together so that not even the word "I" could slip out. He said to himself that this body would be carried to the burning ground and become ashes. Was he dead with it? The body was silent and still, yet he felt the full force of his own self, and even the sound of "I", apart from the body. He was a spirit that the body does not touch. It was not an argument. It was something he saw directly, and the "I" was the only real thing there. The fear of death was gone, for good.

From that moment he stayed fixed on that "I". He later compared other thoughts to the notes of a musician and this to the steady drone note that blends with all of them. He lost his interest in friends and relatives and in studies, and he went through his books mechanically, keeping a page open to please his elders. He grew meek. When boys teased him or gave him a heavy share of work he no longer answered back. He stopped going out to play, and he sat alone, with his eyes closed, in meditation. His elder brother mocked him and called him Jnani, and Yogiswara, and told him to go to the forest like the sages of old. He no longer minded what he ate.

He began to go to the Meenakshi temple almost every evening, alone. He used to go rarely, with friends, put on the ashes and the vermilion and go home. Now he stood in front of Shiva, Meenakshi, Nataraja and the sixty-three saints for long periods, and waves of feeling went through him, and tears flowed. He later said that he did not pray, most of the time; sometimes he asked that his devotion should become constant like that of the saints, and mostly he let what was inside him flow into what was outside. He had read nothing but the Periapuranam, his Bible school work, and a few pieces of Tayumanavar and the Tevaram. He had never heard the words Brahman or Samsara. When he later heard the Ribhugita at Tiruvannamalai, he found the books named and analysed what he had felt without a name.

The brother's question

His uncle and brother thought it a pity that so good a mind was being wasted on what they took for idle religiosity, and scolded him. His schoolmaster gave him impositions for neglected work. On Saturday 29 August 1896 he had been told to copy a passage from Bain's grammar three times. He copied it twice, and began the third copy. Suddenly his soul rebelled against the dull exercise. He pushed Bain and the papers aside, sat bolt upright and closed his eyes. His brother, who was watching, said what he had said several times in the last weeks. In Tamil, it means: "Why should one who behaves like this keep all this?" This time it went home. He thought: what my brother says is true; what business have I here?

At once the thought of Arunachala, which had thrilled him the previous November, rose and took hold of him. It was the call of the Father. He had to go there, in secret, so that no one could drag him back. He told his brother he would go to school at noon for a special class on electricity. His brother, not knowing that he was helping, told him to take five rupees from the box below and pay his college fees. He went downstairs, ate his meal, and his uncle's wife gave him the five rupees. He looked at an old atlas that did not show the Tiruvannamalai branch line. It showed Tindivanam as the nearest point, so he decided that three rupees would take him as far as there. He left the other two rupees in a place where they would be found, with a letter among his brother's books, and left Madura for good.

The letter, in Tamil, said that he had gone in search of his father, in obedience to his command. It said that this was a virtuous undertaking and that no one need grieve. It said that no money should be spent trying to find him, that the college fee had not been paid, and that two rupees were enclosed. It had no signature, only a row of dashes. The author notes that the letter says "this" where one expects "I", as if only the body went on the journey.

The road to the hill

He walked a mile to the station. The train was late. He bought a ticket to Tindivanam for two rupees and thirteen annas, never noticing that Tiruvannamalai was on the list a few lines lower, for three rupees. He tied the three remaining annas into a corner of his cloth, got on the train, and sank into himself. An old Muslim scholar with a silver beard was talking with other passengers about saints. He noticed the silent young Brahmin and asked where he was going. "To Tiruvannamalai," said the youth. The old man said he was going as far as Tirukoilur. "Does the train go to Tiruvannamalai?" the youth asked. "A strange passenger you are," said the old man, and told him he must get down at Villupuram and change trains.

He had not noticed that he was hungry until Trichinopoly, at sunset. He bought two country pears and ate one, and at the first mouthful his hunger vanished, and he could eat no more. He hardly knew the difference between sleep and the state he was in. He reached Villupuram at three in the morning. He walked up and down the streets looking for the road to Tiruvannamalai but was too shy to ask anyone, and found only signposts to other places. At a hotel the owner told him to wait until noon for his meal. He sat there and fell into samadhi. When he offered two annas after the meal, the owner asked how much he had. "Two and a half annas," he said. "Keep it," said the owner. He bought a ticket to Mambalapattu with the money, reached it that evening, and walked on.

After ten miles he came to a hill and a temple at Arayaninallur, and sat in a pillared hall that was not wholly dark. A vision of dazzling light streamed through the place. He went into the inner sanctuary to see if it came from there, and found no light, and it had gone. The priest told him there was no food for him and no one was allowed to stay. He followed the others to the temple at Kilur, six furlongs on. The priest there also refused food. The temple drummer, who had been watching, said: "Why, sir, give him my share." With a plate of boiled rice he was led to a house nearby to get water, but while he waited he fell asleep and, walking in his sleep, fell down. When he woke, a crowd had gathered, wondering at the handsome boy who had asked for water, fallen, and lost consciousness. He ate some of the rice that was scattered on the ground and slept there.

The next morning was Monday 31 August 1896, the birthday of Krishna. He still had twenty miles to go and could not find the path. He pulled off his gold ear-rings, set with rubies, worth about twenty rupees, thinking he could pledge them for fare. He walked to the house of Muthukrishna Bhagavatar and begged for food. The lady of the house was glad to have a guest on Krishna's birthday and gave him a large cold meal, and insisted that he eat all of it. He told the Bhagavatar that his luggage had been lost on the way and he needed to pledge the ear-rings to continue his pilgrimage. The Bhagavatar found them real, advanced four rupees, and exchanged slips with their addresses. They also gave him a packet of sweets meant for Krishna. As soon as he was out of the house, he tore the slip to pieces. On 1 September he bought a ticket for four annas and reached Tiruvannamalai in an hour.

At the Father's feet

He saw the towers of the temple of Arunachaleswara from the station. With quick steps and a beating heart he went straight there. The gates of all three high walls and the inner doors stood open, and there was not a soul in the place. He walked into the innermost shrine and said: "O God, obedient to Thy call, here have I come, deserting all." At that moment all his excitement vanished, and a great peace filled him. The author calls it the supreme moment of his life. He then left the sanctuary, and it was three years before he went into it again, since he felt the presence in his heart without it.

He walked to the Ayyankulam tank and threw the packet of sweets in the water, telling his body, "To this block why give any sweetmeats?" On his way back someone asked him if he wished to have his tuft of hair removed, and took him to a barber, and the long black hair he had been proud of was shaved off. He tore his cloth into strips and wore one as a loincloth. He threw away the rest, with his three and a half rupees, and also his sacred thread. He did not touch money again. On the way to the temple, heavy rain soaked him, though he had decided not to bathe.

He made his home first in the thousand-pillared hall of the temple, sitting in samadhi, with no mat, his arm for a pillow and his palm for a plate. The town boys, who had been calling a half-mad wanderer named Seshadri a crazy fellow for four or five years, called the newcomer "Chinna Seshadri", Seshadri the Younger, and threw stones at him. He moved into a dark pit in the hall, the Patala Lingam, to avoid the stones. The pit was damp and never cleaned, and scorpions, ants and mosquitoes fed on him until the backs of his legs and thighs were running with blood and pus, and he did not notice. A woman named Ratnammal went down to bring him food, pointed out the pests, invited him to her house and left a clean cloth. He did not answer or touch it. The boys, afraid of the dark, stood at a distance and threw broken pots into the pit.

One noon a man named Venkatachala Mudali, passing the hall, found a group of boys, mostly Muslims, hurling stones at the pit. He drove them off with a twig. The wandering Seshadri came out of the darkness. When Mudali asked if the stones had hurt him, he said, "Oh no, but go and see the Chinnaswami there." Mudali could see nothing at first, then slowly made out a young face in the pit. He fetched some sadhus from the flower garden next door, and they lifted the swami, who did not stir, and carried him up the steps to a shrine of Subrahmanya. They saw the sores, and said nothing, and left.

The silent swami

Now he was called Brahmana Swami, and he kept silence. A swami who lived in the Subrahmanya shrine, and a group of sadhus in the garden, looked after him. Sometimes food had to be put in his mouth. For about a month at the end of 1896 he wore no cloth at all. He was given the milk that drained from the washing of the Goddess's image, a mixture of milk, water, turmeric, sugar and plantain, and drank it without any sign. When the priest learned of it he ordered that the pure milk should be sent to him each day. He moved from the shrine to the oleander bushes, where he would sit in samadhi and find, at the end, that he was under a different bush many yards away. Then he moved to the hall of the temple chariots, and under the wheels, and to the foot of a bel tree and an iluppai tree. In the Kartikai season of 1896 crowds began to come to see him.

At the iluppai tree the first permanent attendant came, Uddandi Nayinar, a pious scholar who had read the sacred books and found no peace in them. He saw the young swami in ecstasy under the tree and thought: here are realisation and peace. He stayed to look after him, reciting the Vasishtham and the Kaivalya Navanitam and hoping for a word of instruction. When he was away, the mischief began again. One day a boy came up from behind while he sat in samadhi and did something filthy to him. When he came to himself and found his rags wet, he guessed what had happened, and felt no anger.

A Tambiran named Annamalai, who sang the Tevaram and kept a shrine to his guru called Gurumurtam in a quiet place outside the town, saw him and brought him there, in February 1897. The Tambiran recited hundreds of hymns every day. The swami neglected himself so completely that his hair matted into one mass and his nails grew long and curled. He sat for weeks on a floor swarming with ants, leaning on the wall, and left the mark of his back on it, which can still be faintly seen. Visitors who could not bear the ants for a few minutes marvelled at him. People came with offerings and asked him for wealth, health, children and salvation. A bamboo fence was put around him.

The Tambiran grew over-zealous. One day he prepared oil, sandal paste, milk and food to treat the young swami exactly as the idol in a temple is treated. The swami did not like this. The next day, before the Tambiran arrived with food, he wrote on the wall with charcoal four Tamil words, which mean: "This food alone is the service needed for this body." The Tambiran saw it and understood. The people of the town found out, from this, that he could write, and that he could write good Tamil. A taluk head accountant, Venkatarama Iyer, began to ask him his name and his village. The swami was silent. The old man said he would not move until he was told, even if it cost him his job and his dinner. At last the swami wrote in English: "Venkataraman, Tiruchuzhi". The officer had never heard of Tiruchuzhi. The swami took up the Periapuranam lying beside him and showed him the village's name in it, as a place honoured in Sundaramurti's song.

One day when the keepers were away a gang of thieves came to collect the tamarind fruit. They saw the silent swami at the foot of the tree and one of them said: bring some of that corrosive milk juice and throw it in his eyes to see if he will speak. He neither spoke nor moved. Another said: leave him, what harm does he do us? They took the tamarinds and went.

His daily life, there, was samadhi, broken only by visitors and a cup of food, which was his only meal. He grew as thin as a skeleton. When he tried to stand he would rise a few inches, feel giddy, and sink back. Once he reached the door and found Palaniswami holding him with both arms. "Why do you hold me?" he asked. "Swami was about to fall," said Palaniswami.

Palaniswami was a Malayali who worshipped a stone Ganesha in the town, living on that god's food as his only daily meal, without salt. A man named Srinivasa Iyer told him: why spend your life on a stone swami when there is a young swami in flesh and blood at Gurumurtam? Palaniswami went, saw him and knew he had found his saviour. He stayed with him for nearly twenty-one years. He followed him like a shadow, mixed the offerings into a cup of food at noon, and returned the rest to the givers as the swami's blessing. He often locked him in when he went out, to keep off visitors.

After eighteen months at Gurumurtam the two moved to a mango grove next door, and lived in two watchmen's lofts under the trees. Visitors were not allowed without the owner's permission. Six months passed happily. Palaniswami brought Tamil books on Vedanta from a library in the town and struggled over them word by word in the swami's presence. The swami took each book, absorbed it quickly, and gave him the gist of it. The author says that none of this was needed for his own realisation, which was complete. It was for answering questions from those who came with books. In the same way he picked up Sanskrit, Telugu and Malayalam from people who knew them.

His mother

When Venkataraman left Madura, the letter was found among his brother's books. It fell on the family like a bomb. Nothing harsher than the usual scolding had been said. They searched, and told his mother, Alagammal, at Manamadura. Days, weeks and months passed. A rumour said he had joined a drama troupe at Trivandrum. An uncle, Nelliappier, went, and then Alagammal herself went on a second search, and saw a boy of the same age and height with the same hair, turned away from her, and could not reach him. They returned in despair.

In 1898, on 1 May, an uncle died at Madura, and at the funeral a young man from Tiruchuzhi told them that Venkataraman was a revered saint at Tiruvannamalai. He had heard Annamalai Tambiran describe the sanctity of a young swami from Tiruchuzhi. Nelliappier left at once with a friend. At the mango grove the owner would not let them in: the swami was a silent saint, why trouble him? Nelliappier wrote a chit: "Nelliappier, pleader of Manamadura, wishes to have your darshan." The swami noticed that the paper was from the Registration Department, with an office note on one side in his elder brother Nagaswamy's handwriting, so he knew his brother had become a clerk there. He let his uncle come in. Nelliappier found his nephew in the dirt, with matted hair and long nails, and was torn between joy and sorrow. He pleaded that the swami should live near the relatives at Manamadura, where there was the tomb of a great saint, and could remain silent and an ascetic. The swami sat like stone and showed no change in his face. After five days Nelliappier went back to Alagammal with the news that he had been found and that he was altogether changed.

The swami moved to a small temple of Arunagirinathar. He told Palaniswami to go one way and beg his own food, and he would go another. In the evening Palaniswami came back. "Where can I go? You have words of life." After a month, and a week in the towers of the big temple and in a garden, he went to Pavazhakkunru, one of the spurs of the hill, where there was a shrine and a cave and a spring.

There, Alagammal came. She waited for the Christmas holiday so that her eldest son Nagaswamy could come with her, and they climbed up and found him lying on a rock. She knew him at once, despite the matted hair, the dirt, the long nails and the filthy loincloth. She wept and asked him to come back, and he sat unmoved. Day after day she and Nagaswamy came with sweets and appeals. One day, as she scolded him for his indifference, she burst into tears, and he could bear it no longer, got up and walked away. On another day she told her story to the people who had come to see him and asked them to speak for her. One of them, Pachaiyappa Pillai, said: "Your mother is weeping and praying. Why do you not answer her? Swami need not break his vow of silence. Here are pencil and paper." He took them and wrote in Tamil: "The Ordainer controls the fate of souls in accordance with their past deeds. Whatever is destined not to happen will not happen, try how hard you may. Whatever is destined to happen will happen, do what you may to stop it. This is certain. The best course, therefore, is for one to be silent."

She had no answer. The holiday was over, and Nagaswamy had to go back. "Is it for this that we came?" she sighed, and they went down the hill and left for Manamadura with heavy hearts.

The caves

Soon after, the swami left Pavazhakkunru and climbed the hill itself. He moved from cave to cave, which the author calls the mansions in his Father's house. The first was the Virupaksha cave, shaped like the sacred Om, with the tomb of a saint. Two parties were quarrelling in court over its income, and neither came up, so for some years the swami lived there undisturbed. When the case ended, the winning party returned for the Kartikai festival and began to charge three pies from each visitor. Crowds came to see him, and many turned back unwilling to pay. When the swami heard, he left the cave for the open ground in front, and when the agent moved his collection there, he went to a lower cave, and then to another. The agent found that the visitors had flown to the lower hives. In the end they told him they would charge no fee as long as he lived there, and asked him back. He returned.

For the summer he went to a cave near the Mulaipal tank, under a mango tree, which two brothers had made fit to live in by blasting the overhanging rock and building a front wall with a small door. The tank gave him water all year. Wherever he went Palaniswami went with him, and others began to attach themselves to him and live with him. His rule was share and share alike. The followers went down to town to beg, calling on God and blowing a conch, and one of them asked him to write a song for the purpose. He composed the poem Aksharamanamalai, full of pathos and philosophy.

In the caves his days were as before, mostly in meditation. When visitors came and wished to clear a doubt, usually from a book they had read or brought, he read the book and explained it simply, from the book and from his own experience. A pandit from Chidambaram left a copy of the Vivekachudamani of Sankara. With a Tamil verse translation that Palaniswami brought, he mastered it quickly, and later, at the request of devotees, put it into easy Tamil prose.

The author writes that happy are those who have no history to be written, and that from the day he went up the hill, the swami's story became the story of those who came to him. Uddandi Nayinar, the first of them, went back to his monastery in 1897 and came again seven years later, having given away most of his possessions. He brought a hundred rupees for the swami, as a teacher's gift. The swami, who kept his vow of poverty, refused it. Nayinar left the money with another devotee without his knowledge, to be used for anything the swami would approve. It lay idle for some years. Meanwhile the half-finished Tamil translation of the Vivekachudamani was picked up and completed, and the hundred rupees paid for printing it, and Nayinar was glad.

Who am I

M. Sivaprakasam Pillai was a graduate in philosophy who worked in the Revenue Department of the South Arcot Collectorate. The question "Who am I?" had come up in his college studies, and he had not pursued it. In 1902 he came to Tiruvannamalai on official work, heard of the swami, and visited him. The swami was keeping silence then, so he answered by gestures, or wrote on the floor or on a slate. Pillai put fourteen questions, and wrote the answers down afterwards from memory, and published them in 1923.

To the first, how a person gains release, the swami answered that by pursuing within oneself the inquiry "Who am I?" one comes to know one's true self. Asked what the self is, he said it is not the body, the senses, the breath, the mind, or even the deep sleep in which none of these is known. Strike out each one with the words "this is not I", and what remains is consciousness. Asked how to reach it, he said that when the objects disappear the true nature of the seer is seen, and that this happens when the mind sinks into the Self. Mind is only thought. The inquiry "Who am I?" is itself a thought, and it destroys all other thoughts, as the stick that stirs a funeral pyre is itself burned up when the pyre is consumed. Pillai asked whether there were other methods. The swami said that other means may quiet the mind for a while, but it springs up again. Pillai asked whether it was possible to root out all the tendencies of many births. "Never give room for such doubts," he said. "Whenever you feel any doubt, do not try to clear it, but try to know him who feels the doubt." Thoughts, he said, are like enemies in a citadel: if you kill each as he comes out, the citadel is yours in the end. Asked whether the world is the result of God's will, he compared God to the sun, which rises without desire or purpose, and in whose light the lotus opens, water evaporates and every living being goes about its work, though the sun is not touched by any of it.

Pillai took the visits seriously, though nothing in his life changed at once. In 1910 he resigned from his post. By 1913 he was a widower and could not decide whether to marry again or live as a hermit. One night he went to the temple of Vighneswara and left four written questions at the feet of the image, asking whether he would marry, how to meet the expense, and how to be free of sorrow. He asked for a vision or for answers to appear on the paper by dawn. Morning came and the paper was blank. He went to the swami at the Virupaksha cave and said nothing of his troubles. He stayed, and listened to the swami speak with visitors of nothing but the realisation of the Self, and saw that the swami's own life answered what he had not asked: he lived in celibacy, free of passion, and never mentioned money, and was happy. On 4 May 1913, as he sat watching the swami, Pillai saw a golden child come out of his head and go back in, several times. He sobbed and could not speak. The others in the room saw nothing, and afterwards joked at his expense. The next evening he saw a halo around the swami like a number of full moons, and two days later he saw him like a mass of crystal. He decided to lead a life of austerity and celibacy. The author adds that the swami never spoke of any of this.

Ramana Maharshi

Kavyakanta Ganapati Sastri was born in 1878 at Kalavarai. His father, Narasimha Sastri, praying to Ganapati at Benares, had seen something like a baby or a small animal run from the god to his feet, and so named the child. He was born unable to speak and sick, and was cured at six by branding with a red-hot iron. After that he had a memory that kept whatever he read, and could attend to eight or ten things at once. At ten he made a verse in Sanskrit. At fourteen he had mastered the five great poems and the books on rhetoric and prosody. In 1900 an assembly of scholars at Nuddea gave him the title Kavya Kanta. From eighteen he travelled to holy places, repeating the five-syllable mantra of Shiva, hoping to make Mahadeva appear and grant him boons. He had repeated it ten million times and written it as often. There had been a few momentary visions. Nothing more.

He had visited the swami on the hill twice in 1903 and 1904, and then gone to teach at a school at Vellore, where he gathered pupils who would develop their power by repeating mantras. In December 1907 he gave up the school and came back to Tiruvannamalai, doubting that he had ever understood what tapas is. On the ninth day of the Kartikai festival, at about half past one in the hot afternoon, he thought of the Brahmana Swami on the hill, who would know it from his own experience. He climbed to the Virupaksha cave. The swami was sitting alone on the outer ledge. Sastri fell on his face and took his feet and said: "All that has to be read I have read. Even Vedanta Sastra, I have fully understood. I have performed japa to my heart's content. Yet I have not up to this time understood what tapas is. Hence have I sought refuge at thy feet. Pray enlighten me about the nature of tapas."

For fifteen minutes the swami looked at him in silence, and no one came to interrupt. Then he spoke, in short broken sentences in Tamil. If one watches where the thought "I" springs from, the mind is absorbed in that: that is tapas. When a mantra is repeated, if one turns the attention to where the sound of the mantra comes from, the mind is absorbed in that: that is tapas.

Sastri's heart was full. He stayed some hours and learned from Palaniswami that the swami's name was Venkatarama Ayyar. That evening he composed five stanzas in praise of him, and in them shortened the name to "Ramana". He wrote the next day to his relatives and pupils about the teaching he had received and told them to call the swami Bhagavan Maharshi, because his teaching was original and unlike anything in the books. The author says the name has been used by devotees ever since, and credits Sastri with it. The author adds a note that "Ramana" had been a pet name given to him as a small boy by an old relative at Tiruchuzhi, which was long forgotten.

For three weeks Sastri dictated a thousand stanzas in praise of the Mother, the Umasahasram. On the last night, in the mango-tree cave, he sat with four writers and dictated more than two hundred verses between eight and midnight, in the presence of the Maharshi. In the first months of 1908 the Maharshi and Sastri stayed three months at Pachaiamman Koil with a large company, who were cooked for by G. Seshayya, and the expenses were borne by Rangaswami Iyengar. When Sastri left, he asked: "Is the seeking of the source of the I thought sufficient for all my aims, or is mantra dhyana needed?" The Maharshi said the first would suffice, and told him to throw the whole burden on the Lord, who would carry it. Sastri came back often in the years that followed. He put questions on behalf of himself and his friends in December 1913 and in July and August 1917, and wrote the answers in eighteen chapters of Sanskrit verse, the Ramana Gita. The Maharshi, who had learned some Sanskrit from the Vivekachudamani with its Tamil verse translation, composed his first stanza in the language in 1915, and sometimes asked Sastri to correct his grammar.

Sastri told two visions. In 1908, at Pachaiamman Koil, something like a meteor came at dawn and touched the Maharshi's forehead six times. Later that year, observing silence for eighteen days at a Ganesha temple at Tiruvottiyur near Madras, he saw the Maharshi come in and sit by him. When Sastri tried to rise, the Maharshi pressed his head down, and it was like an electric shock. On 17 October 1929, when Sastri told this in his presence, the Maharshi said that years before he had lain down, not in samadhi, and felt his body carried higher and higher until all around him was a mass of white light. Then he came down and found himself on a road with a Ganapati temple a little distance off, and went in and spoke to someone. He woke up in the Virupaksha cave and told Palaniswami at once. He had never in his life been to Tiruvottiyur. Sastri found that the description matched the temple where he had performed his tapas. Sastri settled near Kharagpur about 1930, and died on 25 July 1936.

Seshadri Swami

People in Tiruvannamalai used to say that the town had two eyes, Seshadri Swami and Ramana Maharshi. Seshadri was born in 1870 at Vazhur and brought up by a learned great-uncle at Conjeevaram. He had mastered the Sanskrit classics by fourteen, and had sung five hundred verses to the Goddess Kamakshi as he walked round her shrine. At seventeen he was initiated into a mantra of the Goddess and kept night vigils in a burial ground by a river. He lost all interest in home and study. In about 1890 he came to Tiruvannamalai and stayed there for about thirty-nine years. People thought him slightly mad, and he was glad to put on madness when he wanted to be left alone. When the new young swami arrived, Seshadri saw at once that he was a soul of rare worth, and tried to protect him from the boys who threw stones and pots.

The two had much in common. Both were Brahmin bachelors who left home at seventeen or nineteen, both lost their fathers young, both had remarkable memories, and both had come to the Lord of the hill from far away. Seshadri used to say of the Maharshi, whom he called Ramanaswami, that his "younger brother" had a salary of ten thousand rupees and he himself one thousand. A landowner named Mudali, whose family had carried meals up the hill for thirty years, was too busy with his lawsuits to understand that he meant spiritual attainment. When Seshadri told him that by neglecting the Self he was committing the sin of killing a Brahmin, Mudali went in fear to the Maharshi. "Yes," said the Maharshi, "you can be said to commit the murder of Brahman by not knowing that you are Brahman." Seshadri would read the minds of those who came to him, and when he saw they were devotees of Ramana, he told them to hold to him to the end.

In 1908 a disciple saw the two together at the mango-tree cave. Seshadri sat looking at the Maharshi, then said it was not clear what this person was thinking. He added that if one worships God Arunachala, he will grant salvation. "Who is the person who worships and who the worshipped?" the Maharshi asked. Seshadri burst out laughing: "That is just what is not clear." The Maharshi talked for about an hour of the oneness of God, the world and the souls. Seshadri listened patiently, and when it ended got up and said: "I cannot say. All that is dark to me. I at any rate worship." He faced the hill, prostrated ten or fifteen times, and went down.

Seshadri died on 14 January 1929. Thousands came to honour his body, and the Maharshi spent an hour at the funeral. In March 1930 he told his disciples that a few days before, he had dreamed of meeting Seshadri, who was being shaved. He patted him on the back and said "Hallo", and Seshadri looked up, got to his feet, and held him in his arms for many minutes.

The Englishman's dream

F. H. Humphreys came to India in January 1911 to join the police as an Assistant Superintendent. He was ill in a Bombay hospital for two months, then went to Vellore for training and was given a Telugu teacher, S. Narasimhayya. On the second day he asked his teacher whether he knew a Mahatma. Narasimhayya, who was reticent, said no. The next morning Humphreys said he had seen his guru in a dream, sitting beside him, and that while in hospital in Bombay he had seen the teacher's face in his sleep. Shown photographs of holy men, he picked out Ganapati Sastri. Later he drew a picture of a mountain cave with a sage standing at its entrance and a stream in front, and said he had dreamed it. The teacher recognised the Virupaksha cave. In November 1911 Sastri took Humphreys to see the Maharshi, who was at Tiruvannamalai while the Theosophical Society held a conference there. Humphreys wrote in a letter that they climbed the hill at two in the afternoon and sat at his feet and said nothing for a long time. For half an hour he looked into the Maharshi's eyes, which did not change from their deep contemplation, and felt he was lifted out of himself. He felt that the body was the temple of the Holy Ghost, and that the man was not the body.

His mother

His brother Nagaswamy died in 1900, soon after returning from Tiruvannamalai. The youngest brother, Nagasundaram, came to see him about 1902 at the Sadguruswami cave, embraced him and wept aloud, while the swami smiled. He offered to stay and serve him. The swami did not agree, and he went home. Alagammal came now and then, once on her way to Benares. At the start of 1914, returning from Tirupati, she stayed at the Virupaksha cave and fell ill with a fever, perhaps typhoid. For two or three weeks she suffered greatly. The swami, who took no notice of his own illnesses, looked after her without sparing himself. When her symptoms grew alarming he wrote four Tamil stanzas to Arunachala, asking that the Lord who strikes down death cure her fever, and wrap her in his light, and make her one with him: what need then of cremation? She recovered and went back to Manamadura.

Her family circumstances had worsened. The house at Tiruchuzhi had been sold to pay debts and Nelliappier had died. About 1915 Nagasundaram's wife died, leaving a small son. In the beginning of 1916 Alagammal, old and helpless, came to Tiruvannamalai and wished to make her son's ashram her home. Some of his devotees feared that his relatives' presence would make him run away again, as in 1896. G. Seshayya told her so, and she was upset. The author notes that 1916 was not 1896. She stayed, and soon made Virupaksha and the Skandasram, to which the swami moved, her home. Nagasundaram came after her, at her wish, and in time put on the ochre robe and took the name Niranjanananda Swami. Alagammal began to cook for herself, her sons and the visitors, and since then there has always been a kitchen at the ashram. Seshadri Swami remarked, with mild humour, to a man who was going to see Ramanaswami: "Yes, go and see. There is a householder there. You will get sweet cakes there."

The swami would not answer her when she spoke to him as a mother, though he spoke to Echammal, a woman devotee who fed him and his visitors every day, and to others. When she complained, he told her that all women were mothers to him, not she alone. During her six years there, from 1916 to 1922, she took in what he said to others. She put on the ochre robe and performed the rites of hospitality at the ashram without attachment. In her last two or three years she had attacks of illness.

Her illness became serious in May 1922. The swami stayed at her bedside. On the evening of the ninth day of the dark fortnight, when the end seemed near, he put his right hand on her heaving breast and his left on her head. A group of disciples chanted the name of Rama for hours and recited parts of the Vedas. At about eight in the evening, on 19 May 1922, she left her body. During the day the swami and a few others had not eaten. When a meal was ready he had asked the others to eat, and had not gone in himself. When she died, he rose and said, in a voice free of pain: "Hereafter we can eat. Come on, there is no pollution." He ate with the others. One of his disciples, Manavasi Ramaswamy Iyer, wrote in his diary that night that the Swamiji seemed very jolly, that the brothers were singing holy songs all night, and that he felt free as a bird let out of a cage, though he added that he might be wrong.

They had already decided to bury her, since the Maharshi had said in 1917, about a woman saint, that burial was right. The disciples carried the body across the hill to Palitirtham. Large crowds gathered, though the inmates tried to avoid a fuss. A pit was dug, and holy ashes, salt, camphor and incense were thrown in with her body, and masonry was built over it with a linga on top. A temple has been consecrated on the spot, where she is worshipped every day as Matrubhuteswara, the Lord who is a mother. Later the swami left Skandasram for a hut near his mother's tomb at Palitirtham, and the ashram grew up around it.

The night of the thieves

The swami never touched money after he threw away his three and a half rupees on his first day at Tiruvannamalai. At the cave he followed one rule: share and share alike. When visitors brought fruit or sweets worth ten or twenty rupees, he picked a little off the plate and the rest was passed around, and it was gone in minutes. At Gurumurtam he would not open his eyes until noon the next day when visitors brought food in the evening, and Palaniswami told them to distribute it themselves. Money kept coming to the ashram regardless, to repair a cave, or build a cottage and a garden at Skandasram, and at Palitirtham, where he later lived. Fifty or more were fed on an ordinary day. Many people took away the impression that the ashram was rich.

Once a stout well-fed young visitor sat down before him and asked in English: "You have realised God, I hope?" The swami was silent. The man looked at the tiger-skin the swami sat on and asked: "Is it sin, Swamiji, to kill a tiger?" He wanted to draw him into a quarrel. The swami was silent. After ten or fifteen minutes the visitor left. Asked how he lived, he said that he lived on the funds of rich monasteries. His last question was whether the swami was rich.

Twice in the summer of 1924 thieves came. The first time they made a hole in the wall of his mother's shrine and took a few things. At about half past eleven on the night of 26 June, the swami lay on a dais in the long thatched hall in front of the shrine, with four disciples asleep near the windows. After midnight two of them, Kunjuswami and Mastan, heard voices outside saying that there were six people lying inside. They called out, and the thieves smashed the window panes. Kunju opened the northern door and fetched Ramakrishna, another disciple, from a nearby hut. Two ashram dogs, Karuppan and Jack, ran out and were beaten, and the sickly Karuppan howled and ran back in. Kunju and the swami told the thieves that there was very little to take and they were welcome to come in and take what they liked. The thieves kept on digging at a window. Kunju threatened to give them a good beating and started for the south door. The swami stopped him: "Let these play their role. We shall stick to ours. Let them do what they like. It is for us to bear and forbear."

The thieves threw squibs at the window to make it seem they had firearms and threatened to burn the thatched roof. Kunju slipped out across the fields to fetch help. The swami told the thieves not to burn the roof and offered to leave the hall with the others. This was what they wanted. He asked first that the sickly dog Karuppan be taken to a safe place, so Ramakrishna carried it to a shed. When the swami and the others came out of the north door, the thieves beat each of them with sticks. He was hit on the left thigh and said: "If you are not satisfied yet, you may strike the other leg also." Ramakrishna came up in time, put both hands over him, and led him north to the shed, where they sat. The thieves said that anyone who moved would have his head smashed. The swami told them: "You have the entire hall to yourself. Do what you like." One came back for a hurricane lamp, and the swami told Ramakrishna to give him a lit one. Another came for the keys of the bureau, but Kunju had taken them. The thieves broke open the cupboards and carried off a razor, strips of silver from the images, a little rice and some mangoes, in all about ten rupees' worth, and six rupees of a visitor named Thangavelu Pillai. A thief came back with his stick raised and asked where the money was kept. The swami said they were poor sadhus who lived on alms and had never had cash. The man asked again, got the same answer, and went away.

Afterwards the swami told those who had been hurt to use some balm. "But what about Swami?" Ramakrishna asked. The swami said, with humour, that he had received adequate pooja, which means worship, and meant the blows. Ramakrishna saw the weal on his master's thigh, seized an iron tool, and asked leave to go in and see what the thieves were doing. The swami told him: "We are sadhus. We should not give up our role. If you go and strike them, some may die, and the world will rightly blame us and not the thieves. These are only misguided men. Sometimes your teeth suddenly bite your own tongue. Do you knock them out in consequence?" At two in the morning the thieves left. When Kunju returned with a village officer and constables, the swami was still sitting in the shed, calm, speaking with the disciples about spiritual matters as usual. The constables asked what had happened. He said, drily, that some fools had broken in and gone away disappointed at finding nothing worth their trouble. They wrote it down and left. Munisamy, a young boy who did pooja at the ashram, ran after them and told them that the swami and the others had been beaten. The next day the inspectors came. The swami did not mention his injury. A few days later some of the stolen property was recovered, and the thieves were arrested, tried and convicted.

Companions

A visitor notices, says the author, how the swami treats the animals of the ashram. He will say, looking through the window: "Lakshmi has come. Give her rice-food at once," and a newcomer thinks some young girl is to be fed, until a cow walks in. He asks "Have the boys been given their food?" and two dogs come to his whistle and are told to take their plates. "She wants water," he says of a dog called Rose. He never calls an animal "it". The dogs came with him to the hill, and he knows their lineage as well as his own: "This Kamala is the ancient dame. Nila and Jack are her children. Rose and these little imps are her grandchildren." When Kamala lay dying, he told the pups: "You little fellows, why do you not go and see your granny? She is going to leave you soon," and afterwards he comforted Rose as he would a disciple in bereavement: "Rose, you have lost your granny Kamala."

He told the author of a black dog called Chinna Karuppan, who kept apart from company at the Virupaksha cave, so that only his head could be seen over the bushes. They left food for him. One day, when they were going up, the dog suddenly leapt across the path and put his paws on the swami, wagging his tail. After that he stayed. He greeted every visitor and got up on their laps. When an inmate of the ashram, to spare an orthodox Brahmin, raised a stick and struck him gently, he wailed and ran away, and was never seen again. The swami had warned them before that the dogs have their own principles. Once a little dog at the Virupaksha cave, scolded by Palaniswami, ran down to the Sankha tirtam tank and was found floating in it.

The dogs Segappan and Kamala guided strangers around the hill. "Kamala, take this gentleman round," was all he said, and she led the visitor to every image, tank and cave and brought him back. Jack the First once ran down the hill to the town when the swami told him that they were going on a circuit and he had better go to town. After they had gone over a mile into the forest, they saw that Jack had gone down, climbed back, and was waiting on their path. The swami said: "You had better go back to the ashram." He went.

Round the hill

Until 1926 he walked around the hill several times a year. A well-metalled road about eight miles long runs round the base, with tanks and shrines on both sides, and pilgrims walk it any day, especially on Tuesdays. When the swami set out, everyone at the ashram went with him. They might leave after supper and return at dawn, or start in the morning and take a day or two. The Arunachala Purana says one should walk as slowly as a princess in the tenth month of pregnancy. The swami went about a mile an hour, often in samadhi, and rested fifteen minutes in suitable places. On one of these circuits he composed the Aksharamanamalai, a hundred and eight stanzas on Arunachala, the verses beginning with the successive letters of the Tamil alphabet. On another he composed the Arunachala Ashtakam. Its first verse, in the author's English: "A boy, I came to Thee, not knowing what Thou wert. I came up here and saw, and found Thou wert a Hill."

A day at the ashram

On special days the ashram is very full: at Kartikai, on the swami's birthday and on the anniversary of his mother's death, more than a thousand invited guests are fed, and several thousand of the uninvited poor. There is long worship in the Matrubhuteswara temple, and sometimes a piper plays. When thousands are to be fed, he will not sit down to his own meal until the last has been served, since he fears that the nicest things will be given to the first sittings and a thin sauce to the last. If someone brings him a cup of coffee or a sweet and says it is very good, he answers: "Why should I? Am I not happy without it? If I am to take anything, all must take it," and sends it back, or gives it to the dogs. At meals he asks that the poorest be served with the rest before he begins, and since boyhood he has never thrown away anything put on his plate.

When his devotees first arranged to celebrate his birthday, he objected, and composed two verses in Tamil: those who wish to celebrate a birthday should ask where they were born, for that is one's real birth when one enters what lies beyond birth and "I". At least on a birthday one should mourn one's coming into this world. To celebrate and glorify is like decorating a corpse. The devotees insisted that it was for their good and that he might stay unconcerned, and since then the birthday has been kept every year. When some devotees wished to have a life-size bronze statue made, he did not object, though he did not care for it. He does not allow camphor to be lit before him or coconuts to be broken or water, milk and sandal paste to be poured on his head, as is done to idols, although over-zealous visitors sometimes do it anyway. He allows them to touch his feet. The author writes that this is the sacrifice he makes for the service of the world.

The last years

In June 1948 the cow Lakshmi, who had lived at the ashram for years, lay dying. As he had done for his mother, he sat beside her and held her, and those who were there said that she passed into release in his presence.

Later that year a sarcoma appeared on his arm. In the months that followed he went through several operations. Those around him saw no sign of pain or distress in him. When devotees wept, he told them: "They say I am dying, but I am not going away. Where could I go? I am here."

On the evening of 14 April 1950, devotees gathered outside the hall and sang "Arunachala Siva". At 8.47 he drew his last breath. At that moment, people at the ashram saw a bright meteor travel slowly across the sky and vanish behind the peak of Arunachala.