01Death in an upstairs room
In July 1896, alone in his uncle’s house in Madurai, the schoolboy was seized by a sudden fear of dying. He lay down, held his breath, let the body go stiff like a corpse, and asked what it was that died. The body would be burnt, yet he felt the “I” untouched. That awareness never left him. On 29 August he slipped away from home, leaving a note that he was going in search of his Father, and on 1 September 1896 he stood in the Arunachaleswara temple at Tiruvannamalai.
02Fifty-four years on the hill
For years he sat in silence, first in the temple’s underground Patala Lingam vault, then in caves on the hill; from 1899 to 1916 in Virupaksha cave, then at Skandashram, and from 1922 in the ashram at the foot of Arunachala by his mother’s samadhi. The scholar Ganapati Muni named him Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi in 1907. He answered seekers’ questions with self-enquiry: trace the thought “I” to its source. His hymns to Arunachala are sung in the ashram daily. He died there on the evening of 14 April 1950.
