Silence That Teaches

About this volume

This second volume takes up Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi's life at the point where the boy who arrived at Tiruvannamalai with three and a half rupees has already become the young sadhu of the temple precincts, and it follows him upward, quite literally, into the caves of the hill where the greater part of his young manhood was spent in a silence that asked nothing of the world and yet drew the world to it. Readers who have not read Volume One will still find their footing here, for the opening chapter pauses in Virupaksha Cave itself, in the cool stone air that the author describes settling over a visitor the way water settles once a stone has stopped disturbing it, and from that pause the whole shape of the book unfolds: not a chronicle of events so much as a patient description of a presence, and of how that presence gradually became a ministry without ever becoming a doctrine imposed.

The volume's early chapters are concerned with recognition rather than teaching in any active sense. We meet Ganapati Muni, the Sanskrit poet and scholar who gave Bhagavan the very name by which the world now knows him, and the chapter treats this naming with the seriousness it deserves, since it marks the moment when a wandering hill ascetic became, in the eyes of the learned and the devout alike, a Maharshi. Close behind this comes the long meditation on mouna, on the transmission that needed no words, which sits at the heart of everything this book is trying to convey: that Bhagavan's silence was not an absence of teaching but its most complete form, and that those who sat before him often left having received more than any sermon could have given them.

The domestic and human dimension of the story is not neglected. The chapter on his mother, who came to fetch him home and found instead another home entirely, is one of the tenderest in the volume, tracing how a mother's ordinary love was drawn, without her quite choosing it, into the current of her son's realization, until Tiruvannamalai became her home as much as his. From there the book follows the slow ripening of the years at Skandashram, higher on the hill, where a settled community began to form around him even as he remained, in essence, unchanged from the young man in Virupaksha, and then it turns to a chapter of unusual value for readers who want to know Bhagavan in his own words: the teachings that came through his own hand, the verses and prose pieces he set down himself, which the volume treats not as literary artifacts but as rare instances of the silence choosing to speak.

The book's later chapters trace the descent, so to speak, of the mountain into the plain: the founding of Sri Ramanasramam when the ashram came down the hill, and the opening of the darshan hall as a door held open to every soul that came, without distinction of caste, nation, or creed. The chapter on East and West at his feet is especially rich, describing how seekers from London, Paris, and beyond found their way to a small hall at the base of Arunachala and sat there in the same silence that had once filled a cave. Even the animals of the ashram receive their due, in the chapter on Lakshmi the cow and the creatures who knew, a reminder that this presence was felt by more than human hearts. The volume closes fittingly with girivalam, the practice of circling the hill itself, offered here as the final teaching: that Arunachala was never merely Bhagavan's dwelling place but his living guru and, through him, ours.