Ramana's method has one instruction and it is the question in the title. When any thought arises, ask to whom it has arisen; the answer is to me; then ask what that I is, and hold the attention on the source from which the sense of I comes rather than on any object. He called it self-enquiry, and his claim was that the I-thought, pursued to its origin, does not find a self there and subsides, leaving what was always the case.
He was insistent that this is not an exercise in thinking about the self. It is an attention that runs the other way, back along the beam. He also taught that the highest instruction was given in silence, and much of the day at his ashram consisted of people sitting in the hall with him while he said nothing, which visitors regularly reported as the part that worked.
He founded no organisation, gave no initiations, appointed no successor and named no disciples, and an ashram assembled itself around him regardless. His mother came, stayed, and was buried at the site. Westerners arrived from the 1930s and the talks were recorded in English, which is how the teaching travelled. He died of a sarcoma of the arm in 1950, refusing amputation, and to devotees distressed that he was leaving them he replied that he was not going anywhere, and asked where he could possibly go.