Ramana Mandiram, Madurai

This is an account of my visits to the Ramana Mandiram in Madurai in 2017 when I was travelling with a friend through Tamil Nadu, South India. It was in this building that Sri Ramana realised The Self in 1896. We had first stayed in the Sri Ramanasramam in Tiruvannamalai before making our way to Madurai to visit both the Ramana Mandiram there and the Ramana Maharshi Sundaram in Tiruchuzhi. The visit described below was made on the evening of the day we had gone to Tiruchuzhi. I was feeling tired from a day on the road in South India and we had just walked in to the building after an end of day thunderstorm, a common occurrence in that part of South India when the weather is hot.

First Day

At around 5 O’Clock Anita and I headed out of the Madurai Residency and onto the busy streets in the centre of a city which was dominated by the ancient Meenakshi Amman Temple, abode of the triple breasted warrior goddess Meenakshi. In fact it is not so much a temple as a complex of buildings on a site covering 6 hectares and dating back hundreds of years, being without doubt one of the top pilgrimage destinations in the whole of south India for devotees and tourists, both Indian and foreign. First of all however, before we ventured into the world of the Meenakshi Temple, we planned to go to the house where Ramana Maharshi lived whilst he had been studying in Madurai as a student in the last decade of the 19^th century. It had belonged to his uncle and it was in one of its rooms that Ramana Maharshi had attained Enlightenment of the Self. A short time after this event, he made the journey to Tiruvannamalai and the holy hill of Arunachala where once he had arrived he never left, living in the bliss of self-realization from 1896 to 1950, radiating a presence which drew seekers to him from all corners of the world. The house in Madurai was now called the Ramana Mandiram and I had got its address after a visit to the Ramanasramam offices earlier on in the week. It had been written out for me plain and simple –

Ramana Mandiram
17/21 Chockkappan Street
Madurai – 1
(opp: To Meenakshi Temple South Tower)

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Ramana Sundaram,Tiruchuzhi

This is an account of a trip I made with a friend in 2017 to Tiruchuzhi, birth place of Bhagawan Sri Ramana Maharshi in 1879. In the 1940s the Sri Ramanasramam in Tiruvannamalai bought the house in which Sri Ramana was born and where he grew up with his family. It is called the Ramana Maharshi Sundaram and is open to visitors. I was travelling with a friend of mine and we had based ourselves in the city of Madurai which was about 45 minutes away by car. In Madurai we had first visited the Ramana Mandarim on Chockkappan Street, close to the south tower of the Meenakshi Temple, the place where Sri Ramana realised The Self in 1896 before making his way a few weeks later to Tiruvannamalai, where he was to remain for the rest of his life.

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Face of the Guru

It wasn’t for a couple of years before I retrieved my Ramana Maharshi book from John, not until after he had died in fact. This was in 2011 which meant I would have lent him my copy of Talks With Ramana Maharshi in 2008 or something like that. I was in his bungalow in Clayhall, East London, clearing out his bedroom with Leigh, his son and my work colleague in the small company we ran together, first in Walthamstow and then in Ilford, going all the way back to 1989. By 2011 the company was entering its last phase of existence which on a business level meant five years of pain before we finally pulled the plug in 2016. We did this by way of going into voluntary liquidation, after which things changed overnight, seemingly rendering the previous 27 years’ work if not completely redundant then something pretty close. Anyway, all that lay in the future, so back to 2011. Continue reading “Face of the Guru” →

Shrine

The shrine of the master Ramana Maharshi was to the back of the ashram main temple whose doors opened to the faithful each and every day at six in the morning. My favourite time to go there was in the evening at around 8 pm when it was still warm, very warm more often than not. I would walk around the shrine as one of the crowd, barefoot, in silence, as an act of meditation. Sounds mainly came in the form of the rows of fans rotating high above, suspended from the temple ceiling. There were odd coughs from those dusty pilgrims who appeared each evening, seemingly out of nowhere from other parts of the ashram and further beyond and there were also the slowly encroaching sounds of the oncoming Indian night, sounds of heat, sounds of mystery. Continue reading “Shrine” →

Words on Meditation

So today, after the usual amount of time lying around in the warmth of my bed, half awake, half asleep, I went downstairs to do a light clean of the coffee table in the lounge, the glass top table where we sit to drink our morning coffee. Did a light clean of that with a spray and paper kitchen towel then also brushed the kitchen floor, yes, gave it a quick going over with the dustpan and brush. When that was done it was back upstairs for meditation, no actually, come to think of it, there was no cleaning this morning, there was just the straight walk from bedroom to shrine room in order to sit down and meditate. Shrine room is the little room we have at the end of the landing which would be a small bedroom except that for us it is not, it is our shrine room instead, the place where we go to meditate, contemplate, sitting before the shrine we have with Buddha and other religious objects placed upon it. Continue reading “Words on Meditation” →