Ramana Maharshi

A South Indian sage who attained spontaneous Self-realization at age 16 — a near-death experience in which fear of death led him to ask "who is it that fears?" The answer dissolved the fear and the questioner together. He left home, settled at the foot of Arunachala mountain in Tiruvannamalai, and remained there for fifty-four years until his death.

Ramana is the cleanest articulation of jnana yoga (the path of knowledge / direct inquiry) in modern Advaita. He taught almost nothing in the conventional sense — sat in silence, answered when questioned, occasionally wrote in Tamil — but the corpus of his recorded conversations is the most transmissible non-dual teaching of the twentieth century.

The single instruction is Self-inquiry: investigate the source of the "I"-thought. Not as philosophy. As actual attention turned back on itself. Ramana's claim is that this collapses the apparent separation between observer and observed, leaving what he sometimes called I-I — pure awareness recognizing itself. The 1985 Godman edition (Be As You Are) remains the cleanest English entry point, organized topically rather than chronologically and edited from the larger body of recorded talks.

Ramana acknowledged the structural parallels with Christian mysticism when shown Eckhart's sermons. The vocabulary differs; the recognition pointed at is recognizable across both languages. He never positioned Advaita as superior to other traditions — the inquiry is the inquiry, the I AM is the I AM, regardless of the path that brought a seeker there.

Read together with Meister Eckhart for the Christian-Vedantic structural parallel, and with the contemporary work of Rupert Spira for a third-generation transmission of the same recognition in a more philosophically articulated idiom.