Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge

The author has packed into this small volume all the essential information relating to the life and teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950).

The life of Sri Ramana Maharshi fills us with wonder. As a teenager, hardly seventeen, he realised the Self through a spontaneous act of Self-enquiry without any conscious effort on his part, or any training imparted by a teacher. He left his home (at Madurai) in 1896, came to Arunachala (Tiruvannamalai) where He lived as an all-renouncing sage, in a state of continuous Self-absorption for a period of fifty-four years — until his mahanirvana in 1950.

The invaluable, timeless instructions given by Sri Ramana to his early devotees like Sivaprakasam Pillai, Frank Humphreys, Kavyakanta Ganapati Muni, Sadhu Natanananda and others, at their request, are all portrayed here by the author.

The author also describes the experiences of Paul Brunton and later devotees.

Sri Maharshi’s message is that Self-knowledge is a fait accompli and is not something to be acquired afresh. It is only becoming aware of one’s own natural state of Pure Being, through Self-enquiry.

The spirit of this simple but profound message has been captured by the author in his presentation.

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Arthur Osborne (1906-70) was an ardent devotee of Sri Ramana Maharshi and particularly well known as the founder-editor of The Mountain Path, the spiritual journal of Sri Ramanasramam. An Oxford scholar, he was on the faculty of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand, before he came to India in 1945 and had his darshan of Maharshi.

He is the Editor of The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi and author of
The Teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi in His Own Words and other works. pp.253