A friend wrote:
Dear Sam, I am curious about Ramana Maharshi’s position on the below.
Did he ever practice the rituals that are typically followed at temples:
- Chanting of Shlokas, Mantras, Stothrams etc
- Did he perform Abhishekams/Archanas at Arunachala, where Shiva’s lingam exists?
I ask this as I’ve been conditioned, taught, some of it voluntarily, out of gratitude to God, may be fear of things not working out that results in doing it, reducing the malefic effect of the graha sthithi or to seek blessings/favorable results, or to propitiate god.
I replied:
The only thing the Maharshi is supposed to have done in the matter of Bhakti is this:
I think the only book he read (at least in spirituality) is The Lives of 63 Tamil Saivite Saints (I will find the correct title and reference).
When he read that he is supposed to have longed for such devotion in himself for God.
He himself told how he would go to a Shiva Temple and stand in front of the deity and shed tears etc., out of a longing for the divine, etc.
Here’s Claude’s account of this:
Claude about Ramana Maharshi’s Bhakti Phase
Let me separate two things your question runs together, because the actual sequence — especially at the temple — is the reverse of what’s usually assumed.
The Periya Puranam
Sometime near the close of 1895, when he was sixteen and living in his uncle’s house in Madurai, a few hundred feet from the Meenakshi Amman temple, young Venkataraman (he was not yet “Ramana”) came across a copy of the Periya Puranam at home — Sekkizhar’s account of the sixty-three Saivite saints — and it was the first religious book he had ever read. The effect was not intellectual. Reading it carried him into a wholly unfamiliar state of being, with admiration, awe, reverence, sympathy, and a longing to emulate the saints rising in him one after another.
What moved him was the saints’ extremity — men and women who had staked everything, without reservation, on God, and who were rewarded (or tested) with correspondingly extreme grace and suffering. It planted in him, for the first time, the idea that such total self-surrender was not myth but something a person could actually live.
Sequence: book, then the death-experience, then Arunachala
It was not long after this reading that the boy, now absorbed in the radiance of the Self, made his way to Arunachala — but that’s compressing a few months. In between came the event usually called his “death-experience”: lying down one day at his uncle’s house, seized by a sudden fear of death, and instead of resisting it, deliberately going through the process of dying — enacting rigor mortis, and asking “what is it that dies?” — arriving at the direct, wordless certainty that the “I” was not the body, and could not die. That happened roughly six weeks before he left Madurai for good on 29 August 1896. The Periya Puranam reading, then, sits several months before the death-experience — one of the things priming him, not the trigger itself.
Before the awakening: the temple was nothing special
Here’s the correction to your premise. By his own account, given years later to his biographer B.V. Narasimha Swami, it was the period before the death-experience when temple-going was ordinary and undramatic: he would go occasionally with friends, look at the images, put sacred ash and vermilion on his forehead, and come home more or less unmoved. No ecstasy, no tears, no special pull — just a boy going through customary motions at the family temple.
After the awakening: this is when the weeping began
Everything changed once the death-experience had happened — this is the “new life” he refers to. He started going to the Meenakshi temple almost every evening, alone, standing motionless for long stretches before the images of Siva, Meenakshi, Nataraja, and the sixty-three saints, and waves of emotion would overwhelm him there. He later explained this himself: with the body no longer held onto as “I,” something in him searched for a new anchor, and that search expressed itself as these repeated temple visits and an overflowing of the soul in profuse tears.
Other accounts of this same period add that he was consumed with wanting the same grace shown to those saints, praying to be given the same devotion they had, and weeping over it — a direct, retrospective link back to the Periya Puranam saints he’d read about months earlier. Tears flowed from his eyes profusely almost every time he stood before the images, and this new, transfigured way of being was constant enough that his elder brother started to rebuke him for behaving like a yogi instead of a schoolboy — the taunt that, not long after, precipitated his final departure for Tiruvannamalai.
So the shape of it is: casual boyhood temple visits → the Periya Puranam ignites something → the death-experience some months later dissolves his identification with the body → and only then do the temple visits become the daily, solitary, weeping vigils before Siva and the sixty-three saints. The weeping is the fruit of realization, not its prelude.
I Continue My Reply to My Friend:
Nothing wrong with praying to God.
In a way, what is to happen in our lives is ALREADY PREDETERMINED and nothing will change that, neither prayer nor anything else.
BUT, it maybe that prayer is part of what is predetermined, and God does not work magically, so your praying to Him/her and thereafter your desire getting fulfilled is God’s way of showing up as so-called cause-and-effect — prayer is the cause and desire fulfilment is the effect — but ultimately speaking, nothing is the cause of anything except God’s Will or one’s karmic unfolding, but it is almost as if God hides himself behind the law of cause and effect, otherwise how can we have even science for that matter.
I will share my write-up on Prarabdha that addresses this issue.
Prarabdha Karma and the Logic of Being Silent
According to the Karma-theory, Prarabdha is that part of our past actions which, through their cumulative force, has given birth to this body.
In Hindu and yogic philosophy, karma (action) is divided into three primary types based on the timeline of cause and effect.
Sanchita Karma (Stored/Accumulated): The vast warehouse of all your accumulated actions and experiences from your past lives. It is the cumulative karmic “debt” that remains unfulfilled and waits to ripen in future births.
Prarabdha Karma (Present/Fate): The portion of your Sanchita Karma that is “ripe” and dictates your current lifetime. It is the destiny, environment, and specific circumstances you are born into, which cannot be changed and must be experienced.
Agami or Kriyamana Karma (Current/Future): The fresh karma you are actively generating through your thoughts, words, and deeds in the present moment. These choices will shape your future and eventually get added to your Sanchita store.
“The Ordainer controls the fate of souls in accordance with their past deeds. Whatever is destined not to happen will not happen, try how hard you may. Whatever is destined to happen will happen, do what you may to stop it. This is certain. The best course, therefore, is to remain silent.” –Ramana Maharshi
Three Classes of Sādhus
(from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna)
MASTER (to Vijay and the others): ‘There are three classes of sādhus: good, mediocre, and bad. The good sādhu makes no effort to get his food. The dandis, among others, belong to the mediocre and bad classes. To get food the mediocre sādhu will knock at the door of a house and say, ‘Namo Narayana’. The bad sādhu starts a quarrel if he doesn’t get his alms.
“The good sādhu behaves like a python. He sits in one place and the food comes to him. The python doesn’t move from where it is. A young sādhu, who had been a am Brahmachari from his boyhood, went out to beg. A young girl offered him alms. The sādhu saw her breasts and thought she had abscesses. He asked about them. The elderly women of the family explained that she would someday be a mother and that God had given her breasts to give milk to her children; God had provided for all this beforehand. At these words the sādhu was struck with wonder. He said: Then I don’t need to beg. God must have provided for me too.”
Some of the devotees thought that in that case they should not take any initiative either.
MASTER: “But those who think that an effort is needed must make the effort.”
—
Now, Ramakrishna’s point that “But those who think that an effort is needed must make the effort.” is valid because if you do not understand about Prarabdha, then you will indeed feel compelled to “do”.
Not that the “doing” will not happen even in a person who “understands” prarabdha. Such a person will let the “doing” happen without being agitated about it nor wondering what the results of such “doing” will be because he “knows” the result will be according to prarabdha that anyway is predetermined, as Ramana Maharshi pointed out above.
Let us take another example. Supposing you get the urge to call a friend. Then you remember Maharshi’s quote and you tell yourself that if I am destined to talk to that friend then it will happen anyway whether I call him or not. And indeed such will be the case. You may ask, but if I call him, then he might pick up the call and I would end up doing so. But, what the Maharshi is saying is that if you are NOT destined to talk to him at that point in time, he will NOT pick up your call. And indeed if you are NOT destined to talk to him ever, he will NOT return your call. And, if it is destined that you will talk to him, he himself will call you and you will pick up the call since you are desiring to talk to him. Now, a further question can be asked, that is, what is the harm in my calling him? No harm in a manner of speaking. And, if such be the destiny that when you call he will pick up he will indeed pick up the call when you call him. That is also possible.
So, to correctly understand this prarabdha thing is that, since everything is predetermined, and if one truly understands this, then one does become “silent” as Maharshi pointed out above as the best course of action.
In such a scenario of being silent, to take up the above example again, you may get the thought of calling that friend and you may indeed do so, but that thought to call the friend does not come to you as some pressing desire but just as a suggestion for action from the universe itself for prarabdha karma to happen, and such suggestions do not create fresh agami karma, whereas the pressing desires that one harbours and acts upon create fresh agami karma, whether such desires are fulfilled or not.
Regarding the silent state where the thoughts that arise are NOT the promptings of the ego, read the below:
To describe ‘mauna’ (silence), Ramana Maharshi cites distinguished 18th century poet-saint Thayumanavar’s sole reference to it: “Mauna is said to be that state which spontaneously manifests after the end of ego.”
The original Tamil, where it is identified as ‘Payappuli’, can be translated with a bit more nuance:
The unique source [tan], fullness [purnam],
prevailed within, in my Heart
so that the ‘I’ which deemed itself an independent entity
bowed its head in shame.
Conferring matchless bliss,
consuming my whole consciousness
and granting me the state of rapture,
It nurtured in me the condition of mauna.
This being so, what more is there to be said?
It parallels Ramana’s own description:
“When the mind turns inwards seeking, ‘Who Am I?’
And merges in the heart,
Then the ‘I’ hangs down his head in shame
And the one ‘I’ appears as Itself.
Though it appears as ‘I-I’,
It is not the Ego.
It is reality, perfection,
The substance of the self.”
This subject of silence and the thought-free state came up again after Ramana Maharshi had cited, with great approval, a passage by Gandhi-ji in which the latter had given a description of his own experience of this state. Sri Ramana referred to the following passage of Gandhi-ji in the ‘Harijan’ magazine:
‘How mysterious are the ways of God!
This journey to Rajkot is a wonder even to me.
Why am I going, whither am I going? What for?
I have thought nothing about these things.
And if God guides me, what should I think, why should I think?
Even thought maybe an obstacle in the way of His guidance.
‘The fact is, it takes no effort to stop thinking.
The thoughts do not come.
Indeed, there is no vacuum – but I mean to say that there is no thought about the mission.’
Sri Ramana remarked how true the words were and emphasized each statement in the extract. Then he cited Thayumanavar in support of the state which is free from thoughts:
The state in which you are not,
That is Nishta (self-abidance).
But, even in that state,
Do you not remain?
You, whose mouth is silent,
Do not be perplexed!
Although [in that state] you are gone,
You are no longer there,
Yet you did not go.
You are eternally present.
Do not suffer in vain.
You can have bliss. Come!
(‘Udal Poyyuravu’, verse 53)
Two days after Sri Ramana had cited Thayumanavar to illustrate Gandhi’s thought-free experiences, a visitor returned to the subject.
Devotee: Is not what Gandhi describes the state in which thoughts themselves become foreign?
Ramana: Yes, it is only after the rise of the ‘I’-thought that all other thoughts arise. The world is seen after you have felt ‘I am’. The ‘I’-thought and all other thoughts had vanished for him.
Devotee: Then the body sense must be absent in that state.
Ramana: The body sense is also a thought whereas he describes the state in which ‘thoughts do not come’.
Devotee: He also says, ‘It takes no effort to stop thinking’.
Ramana: Of course no effort is necessary to stop thoughts whereas one is necessary for bringing about thoughts.
Devotee: We are trying to stop thoughts. Gandhiji also says that thought is an obstacle to God’s guidance. So it is the natural state. Though natural, yet how difficult to realise. They say that sadhanas [spiritual practices] are necessary and also that they are obstacles. We get confused.
Ramana: Sadhanas are needed so long as one has not realised it. They are for putting an end to obstacles. Finally there comes a stage when a person feels helpless notwithstanding the sadhanas. He is unable to pursue the much – cherished sadhana also. It is Then that God’s power is realised. The Self reveals itself.
Devotee: If the state is natural, why does it not overcome the unnatural phases and assert itself over the rest?
Ramana: Is there anything besides that? Does anyone see anything besides the Self? One is always aware of the Self. So it is always itself.
Know Thyself 