A 16-year-old's sudden fear of dying became Ramana Maharshi's lifelong question: who am I?
In July 1896 a Madurai schoolboy lay rigid, gripped by the sense that he was about to die, and asked himself what exactly would perish. Six weeks later he slipped away by train to the sacred hill of Arunachala, never left, and became the sage known as Ramana Maharshi.
Venkataraman Iyer was born on 30 December 1879 in Tiruchuzhi, Tamil Nadu, the second of four children of a court pleader. He had a remarkable memory and slept so deeply that loud noises, even blows, failed to wake him. His father wanted his sons fit for government jobs, so the boy was sent to an uncle to learn English; after his father's sudden death in 1892 he stayed with that uncle in Madurai, attending an American mission school.
In late 1895 he was stunned to learn that Arunachala, a mountain he had heard of since childhood, was a real place, and he was moved by stories of the 63 Nayanmar saints. The death experience followed. He concluded the body dies while a living current persists, and identified that current as his true self and later as the personal God. He called it sudden liberation, as opposed to the gradual kind reached by study. Telling his brother he had an extra class, he boarded a train on 29 August 1896 and reached Tiruvannamalai three days later.
His early years there were extreme. He sat in an underground vault of the Arunachaleswara temple so absorbed that he ignored insect bites; a local saint, Seshadri Swamigal, watched over him, and for a time food had to be placed in his mouth. An attendant named Palaniswami begged and cooked for him. His uncle and later his mother pleaded with him to come home; he refused. From 1899 he lived in caves on the hill, including 17 years at Virupaksha Cave.
In 1902 an official, Sivaprakasam Pillai, put fourteen questions to him; the answers became the booklet Who am I?, the core of his method of self-enquiry. In 1907 the scholar Ganapati Sastri proclaimed him Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. A British police officer, Frank Humphreys, wrote about him in 1913, and from the 1930s his teachings spread in the West. He died in 1950.
Source: Ramana Maharshi
