Ramana Maharshi: Sixteen, and Afraid of Dying

He went to Arunachala, and he never left it.

Why that place

Because he had heard the name as a small boy and it had stayed with him.

The accounts describe him hearing an older relative mention Arunachalam and being struck by it long before he had any idea what it was, and when the moment came he did not consider anywhere else.

He arrived on 1 September 1896 and remained for fifty four years.

The first years

Difficult, and the accounts are not sentimental about it.

He sat in the Patala Lingam, an underground vault in the Arunachaleswarar temple, absorbed for long periods and not attending to his body. Insects and vermin fed on him. He was found with sores. People began carrying him out and feeding him, because he was not feeding himself.

Later he moved up the hill: Gurumurtam, then the mango orchard, then Virupaksha Cave, then Skandashram.

He did not speak for years, not from a vow but because he had nothing he wanted to say.

The name

He was called Brahmana Swami at first, and in 1907 the scholar Ganapati Muni came to him, questioned him, and afterwards gave him the name by which he is known: Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi.

His mother

She came looking for him, more than once, and asked him to come home.

He refused, and the accounts of those meetings are hard: he would not speak to her, and on one occasion wrote a note instead, saying that what is to happen will happen and what is not to happen will not, and that the best thing is to be silent.

And then, years later, she came and stayed.

She lived at Skandashram, took to the discipline, cooked, and became a renunciant. She died in 1922, and he was with her at the end, and he said afterwards that she had been liberated.

Her samadhi is at the foot of the hill, and Sri Ramanasramam grew up around it because he came down to it and did not go back up.

Which is a detail worth keeping. The ashram exists because of his mother's grave.

Arunachala itself

And this is the part that surprises people who arrive expecting a pure non dualist.

Ramana was devotionally attached to a hill.

He held that Arunachala is Shiva, not a place associated with Shiva but the thing itself in the form of a hill, and he wrote about it in language that has nothing dry in it.

The Five Hymns to Arunachala are his, and the longest, the Akshara Mana Malai, the marital garland of letters, is a love poem: pleading, reproachful, jealous, embarrassing in the way real devotion is embarrassing.

So a reader who has been told that Ramana taught only self enquiry has been told half of it. He taught enquiry and surrender as two roads, said repeatedly that either would do, and personally sang to a mountain for fifty four years.

His death

A sarcoma on his left arm, diagnosed in 1948. Four operations. It recurred each time. He refused to let the treatment become elaborate and continued to see visitors until nearly the end.

When devotees begged him not to leave them, the reply that is recorded is: where would I go? I am here.

He died on the evening of 14 April 1950.

The teaching is short, and the shortness is the point, and it is usually made complicated by people explaining it.

The method

Atma vichara, self enquiry.

What you actually do

Notice a thought. Any thought.

Ask: to whom did this thought occur?

The answer will be: to me.

Then ask: who is that?

And instead of answering with a description, turn attention toward whatever the I refers to, and hold it there.

That is the whole instruction.

What it is not

It is not a mantra. You are not repeating who am I as a phrase. The question is a direction, not a sound.

It is not an intellectual exercise. You are not producing a list of what you are not. Ramana's texts do use the neti neti move, that I am not the body, not the breath, not the mind, but he treats it as a preliminary clearing rather than as the practice.

It is not answerable in words, and a verbal answer means you have gone back to thinking about the question instead of looking.

What he said happens

That the I thought, pursued, does not survive the pursuit. It arises, it is looked at, and it does not have a source that can be found where you expected one, and what is left is not a blank but the thing that was always there underneath the traffic.

The alternative he gave equal weight

Surrender.

And he was explicit that it is not a lesser road. If enquiry does not suit you, hand it over. Give the problem, the outcome and yourself to God and stop negotiating.

His formulation of why the two are the same: enquiry removes the one who has the problem, and surrender gives that one away. Either way the same thing goes.

Which means Ramana is available to a devotional reader who has no interest in advaita at all, and his own Arunachala hymns are the evidence.

What to read

• Nan Yar, Who am I, which is a few pages and contains the method
• Upadesa Saram, thirty verses
• Ulladu Narpadu, Forty Verses on Reality, which is dense
• The Five Hymns to Arunachala, for the other half of him
• Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi and Day by Day with Bhagavan, records of conversations, which is where most people actually start

A caution about intensity

Worth stating because this practice is now taught at retreats.

Sustained, intensive attention to the sense of self can be destabilising for some people. Depersonalisation, derealisation and a frightening loss of the ordinary sense of being somebody are documented outcomes of intensive contemplative practice in a minority of practitioners, and long silent retreats are the setting where they usually appear.

If you have a history of psychosis, severe dissociation, bipolar disorder or an unstable period of any kind, talk to a doctor before doing an intensive retreat, and choose a teacher who will notice and will tell you to stop.

Fifteen minutes a day is not the risk. Ten silent days without sleep and without food is a different thing, and the tradition's own instruction is that a householder should practise in the middle of an ordinary life, which is what Ramana told most of the people who asked him whether to renounce.

He almost always told them not to.

The place

Tiruvannamalai, in Tamil Nadu, about three and a half hours from Chennai, with the hill Arunachala on one side of the town and the enormous Arunachaleswarar temple at its foot.

What to see

• Sri Ramanasramam, at the foot of the hill, open daily, free, with his samadhi and his mother's, and the old hall where he sat
• Virupaksha Cave and Skandashram, up the hill from the ashram, a walk of thirty to sixty minutes depending on your legs
• Arunachaleswarar temple, one of the largest temple complexes in India and the Agni element temple among the Pancha Bhuta Sthalams
• The Patala Lingam within the temple, where he sat in the first months

Giri pradakshina

Walking around the hill, and Ramana recommended it constantly.

It is about fourteen kilometres, on a road, all the way around, with eight lingams marking the directions along the route.

When to do it: at night, and specifically on or near full moon, which is when it is traditionally done and when tens of thousands of people are doing it with you. Start after dark, finish before the heat.

Practical points

• Barefoot is traditional and optional. The road surface is hot in the day, is gritty at night, and cuts are common. If you have diabetes, do not walk barefoot at all: a foot injury you cannot feel is how people lose toes
• Carry water. Fourteen kilometres in Tamil Nadu is a real walk even at night
• On full moon the crowd is very large. Keep children physically held, agree a meeting point, and do not rely on phone signal
• Toilets and stalls exist along the route but the standard varies

Karthigai Deepam

The great festival, in November or December, when a beacon is lit on the summit of Arunachala and burns for days, visible for many kilometres.

It is one of the largest gatherings in Tamil Nadu. Accommodation must be booked long ahead, the town is completely full, and the crowd around the temple is intense.

Climbing to the summit

Possible, and take it seriously.

• Start before dawn. The hill is unshaded and Tamil Nadu is hot
• Do not go alone, and tell somebody your plan
• There are snakes. Watch where you put your hands and feet, wear shoes for the climb whatever you do on the pradakshina road
• Take more water than you think, and turn back if you are struggling
• Some of the hill is restricted at certain times, particularly around Deepam, and the restrictions exist because people have been hurt

On the ashram

Sri Ramanasramam does not charge for darshan, does not sell initiation, and feeds people.

Which is worth saying explicitly after the previous batch: this is one of the places where the ordinary cautions about payment, escalation and exclusive access do not apply, and the reason is that Ramana refused to build anything that could.

He owned nothing, took nothing, ate what everybody ate, and would not accept a separate arrangement for himself.

One honest note about the ashram in his time

Some traditional caste practices persisted in dining arrangements at the ashram during his lifetime, and Ramana did not systematically confront them, though he insisted that everybody who came was fed and treated visitors of every background alike in his own conduct.

Scholars have discussed this and it is not hidden, and a reader who wants a figure who dismantled caste will find Bhaktisiddhanta in the previous entry and Narayana Guru and others elsewhere, and will not find that here.

Ramana's method was not confrontation. It has advantages and this is its cost, and the entry records both.

A daily practice from this entry

• Arunachala Shiva, which is what people sing walking round the hill
• Once a day, on any thought that is bothering you: to whom has this come
• And Ramana's own answer to almost everybody who asked whether to give up their life and come and sit with him, which was no, stay where you are and do it there

Who: Ramana Maharshi, born Venkataraman Iyer on 30 December 1879 at Tiruchuzhi in the Madurai country of Tamil Nadu, died 14 April 1950 at Tiruvannamalai. His father Sundaram Iyer was a small town pleader and the household was ordinary. Venkataraman was an unremarkable schoolboy, not studious, good at games, with an exceptional memory he used to avoid working, and he had no practice, no teacher, no interest in philosophy and no reputation for anything. His father died when he was twelve and the family moved to an uncle's house in Madurai.

July 1896: aged sixteen, alone upstairs, he was seized by a sudden overwhelming certainty that he was about to die, with no illness and no cause. He called nobody. He lay down, held his limbs rigid, held his breath, and deliberately went through it, and asked in that state whether the death of the body meant he was dead. He concluded that the body was the thing dying and that he was not it, not as a reasoned position but as something found by looking, in a few minutes, at sixteen, with no preparation. It did not wear off. Six weeks later, on 29 August 1896, he took a little money, left a note saying he had set out in search of his father and in obedience to his command and that no one should grieve or spend money looking for him, and never went home.

On the fear: a sudden overwhelming conviction that you are about to die, arriving without cause with the body reacting as though it were true, is the standard description of a panic attack, which is extremely common, feels like a medical emergency and is not one, and is treatable. For Venkataraman it became a doorway; for almost everybody it is a panic attack, and both are true. Tele MANAS 14416, or any government hospital psychiatry department. With chest pain, unsettling breathlessness or any doubt, treat it as cardiac until a doctor says otherwise: ambulance 108.

The hill: he went to Arunachala because he had heard the name as a small boy and it had stayed with him, arrived on 1 September 1896 and stayed fifty four years. The first years were hard: he sat absorbed in the Patala Lingam vault of the Arunachaleswarar temple without attending to his body, vermin fed on him, and people carried him out and fed him. He moved to Gurumurtam, then Virupaksha Cave, then Skandashram, and did not speak for years, not from a vow but because he had nothing he wanted to say. Ganapati Muni gave him his name in 1907. His mother came looking for him more than once and he refused to go home, then years later she came and stayed, took the discipline, and died in 1922, and Sri Ramanasramam grew around her samadhi because he came down to it and did not go back up.

Arunachala: he held that the hill is Shiva, not a place associated with Shiva but the thing itself, and wrote the Five Hymns to Arunachala, the longest of which, the Akshara Mana Malai, is a love poem that is pleading, reproachful and jealous. A reader told that Ramana taught only self enquiry has been told half of it: he taught enquiry and surrender as two equally valid roads, and personally sang to a mountain for fifty four years.

The method: notice a thought, ask to whom it occurred, the answer is to me, then ask who that is, and instead of answering with a description turn attention toward whatever the I refers to and hold it there. It is not a mantra, not an intellectual exercise and not answerable in words. The alternative he gave equal weight was surrender: enquiry removes the one who has the problem and surrender gives that one away, so either way the same thing goes. Read Nan Yar, Upadesa Saram, Ulladu Narpadu, the Five Hymns, and Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi.

A caution: sustained intensive attention to the sense of self can be destabilising for a minority, with depersonalisation and derealisation documented outcomes of intensive contemplative practice, usually appearing in long silent retreats. With any history of psychosis, severe dissociation, bipolar disorder or an unstable period, talk to a doctor first and choose a teacher who will tell you to stop. Fifteen minutes a day is not the risk. Ramana himself told almost everybody who asked whether to renounce not to.

Visiting: Tiruvannamalai is about three and a half hours from Chennai. See Sri Ramanasramam, which is free and does not sell anything, Virupaksha Cave and Skandashram up the hill, and the Arunachaleswarar temple, the Agni element temple among the Pancha Bhuta Sthalams. Giri pradakshina is fourteen kilometres around the hill, traditionally at night and on full moon: barefoot is optional and should be avoided entirely by anybody with diabetes, carry water, hold children physically in the crowd. Karthigai Deepam in November or December lights a beacon on the summit and fills the town completely. If climbing, start before dawn, do not go alone, wear shoes because there are snakes, and turn back if you are struggling.