Ramana Maharshi

In the summer of 1896, a schoolboy of sixteen sitting alone in an upstairs room of his uncle's house in Madurai was overcome without warning by a violent fear that he was about to die. He did not send for anyone. Instead he lay down, stiffened his body, held his breath, closed his lips, and set about enacting the death as thoroughly as he could in order to find out what would happen.

What he reported was that the body could be treated as a corpse, carried out and burnt, and that something remained wholly untouched by the process, and that this something was what the word I referred to. The fear did not return. He described the change as permanent and immediate, and said that from that point interest in study, in food, in company and in his own future simply fell away.

Some six weeks later he left home with a small amount of money and a note saying that he was going in search of his father and that no money need be spent looking for him. He travelled to Tiruvannamalai, at the foot of the hill Arunachala, which he had known of since childhood as a name and which he now regarded as his father. He arrived at the great temple, and he never left the town again in the remaining fifty four years of his life, spending the first years in near total silence, in the temple vaults and then in caves on the hill.

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.